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Author: Charles Capper | Anthony La Vopa | Samuel Moyn | Duncan Kelly

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14792443_8-1.qxd:1479–2443_8-1

2/28/11

7:32 PM

Page 1

vol. 8

1–2 3–29

A Note from the Editors Articles “Almost a Separate Race”: Racial Thought and the Idea of Europe in British Encyclopedias and Histories, 1771–1830 PAUL STOCK

31–59

Madame Guizot and Monsieur Guizot: Domestic Pedagogy and the Post-Revolutionary Order in France, 1807–1830 ROBIN BATES

61–90

Transcending Babel in the Cultural Translation of Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) TUSKA BENES

91–125

171–191

Environmental, Economic, and Moral Dimensions of Sustainability in the Petroleum Industry in Austrian Galicia ALISON FRANK

193–212

Maintaining (Environmental) Capital Intact EMMA ROTHSCHILD

213–225

Review Essays The Subject and the Work of Difference: Gender, Sexuality, and Intellectual History SANDRINE SANOS

227–236

German Post-Darwinian Biology Reassessed FREDERICK GREGORY

237–251

Historicizing American Travel, at Home and Abroad LESLIE BUTLER

253–263

Ayn Rand and American Conservatism in the Cold War Era PATRICK ALLITT

Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at:

journals.cambridge.org/mih

april 2011

The Invention of Sustainability PAUL WARDE

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153–170

no. 1

Forum: The Idea of Sustainability Introduction EMMA ROTHSCHILD

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april 2011

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issn 1479–2443

modern intellectual history

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147–151

Essay Beyond “Academicization”: The Postwar American University and Intellectual History RICHARD F. TEICHGRAEBER III

no. 1

vol. 8

127–146

Canonizing Dewey: Columbia Naturalism, Logical Empiricism, and the Idea of American Philosophy ANDREW JEWETT

Modern Intellectual History


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modern intellectual history Editors Charles Capper, Boston University, USA Email [email protected] Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA Email [email protected] Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, USA Email [email protected] Duncan Kelly, University of Cambridge, UK Email [email protected] Assistant Editor Andrew J. Ballou, Boston University, USA Email [email protected] Editorial Board David Armitage, Harvard University, usa C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge, uk Thomas Bender, New York University, usa Ruth Bloch, UCLA, usa Julian Bourg, Bucknell University, usa Richard Bourke, University of London, uk Paul Boyer, University of Wisconsin, Madison, usa Howard Brick, University of Michigan, usa Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, usa Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge, uk Jeffrey Collins, Queen’s University, Ontario, canada Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, uk Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore Peter Gordon, Harvard University, usa Malachi Haim Hacohen, Duke University, usa David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School, usa Thomas A. Haskell, Rice University, usa David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley, usa Daniel Walker Howe, UCLA, usa Gerald N. Izenberg, Washington University, St Louis, usa Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley, usa Mary Kelley, University of Michigan, usa Aileen Kelly, University of Cambridge, uk James T. Kloppenberg, Harvard University, usa László Kontler, Central European University, Hungary Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania, usa Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London, uk Peter Mandler, University of Cambridge, uk Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University, usa Tracie M. Matysik, University of Texas at Austin, usa Michael O’Brien, University of Cambridge, uk Lewis Perry, St Louis University, usa Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton University, usa Helena Rosenblatt, City University of New York, usa Dorothy Ross, The Johns Hopkins University, usa Emma Rothschild, Harvard University, usa/King’s College, Cambridge uk Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester, usa Andrew Sartori, New York University, usa Jerrold Seigel, New York University, usa James Turner, Notre Dame University, usa Caroline Winterer, Stanford University, usa

Modern Intellectual History publishes scholarship in intellectual and cultural history from 1650 onwards, with primary attention to Europe and the United States but also to trans-national developments that encompass the nonWest. Subscriptions Modern Intellectual History (ISSN 1479-2443) is published three times a year, in April, August and November. Three parts form a volume. The subscription price, which includes delivery by air where appropriate (but excluding VAT), of volume 8, 2011, which includes print and electronic access, is £165.00 (US $268.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico) for institutions; £26.00 (US $39.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico) for individuals, which includes print only. Students ordering direct from the publishers and certifying that the journal is for their personal use can subscribe to the print version at £19.00 (US $29.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico). The electronic-only price available to institutions is £141.00 (US $232.00). Single parts are £55.00 (US $90.00 in USA, Canada and Mexico) plus postage. EU subscribers (outside the UK) who are not registered for VAT should add VAT at their country’s rate. VAT registered members should provide their VAT registration number. Japanese prices for institutions (including ASP delivery) are available from Kinokuniya Company Ltd, P.O. Box 55, Chitose, Tokyo 156, Japan. Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. This journal issue has been printed on FSC-certified paper and cover board. FSC is an independent, non-governmental, not-for-profit organization established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests. Please see www.fsc.org for information. © Cambridge University Press 2011 ISSN 1479-2443

Instructions for contributors MIH serves as a focal point and forum for scholarship in intellectual history and related fields. Though its primary focus is on Europe and the United States, it also devotes attention to intellectual and cultural exchanges between the West, the non-West, and the Americas. It encompasses the period from 1650 to the present. MIH is concerned with this era’s intellectual discourses - with understanding the contextual origins and reception of texts, and with recovering their historical meaning. The term “texts” encompass various forms of intellectual and cultural expression, including political thought, philosophy, religion, literature, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the visual arts. 1. submissions Articles submitted for consideration should be sent to Modern Intellectual History, Boston University, Department of History, 226 Bay State Road, Boston, ma 02215, usa. Email [email protected] Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished (even in a language other than English) and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. Upon acceptance of a paper, the author will be asked to assign copyright (on certain conditions) to Cambridge University Press. Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material in which they do not hold copyright for worldwide publication in all forms and media, including electronic publication, and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their manuscript. 2. manuscript preparation Contributors must follow the layout and stylistic conventions of MIH. Detailed Instructions for contributors can be obtained from the Web at http://journals.cambridge.org/journal_ ModernIntellectualHistory. The recommended length of articles is 10,000–12,000 words including footnotes. The recommended length of review essays is 5,000 words including footnotes. Articles should normally be written in English. Spelling may follow either British or American convention but must be consistent. Contributors should submit an electronic copy in Word as an email attachment. 3. proofs Typographical or factual errors only may be changed at proof stage. The publisher reserves the right to charge authors for correction of non-typographical errors.

4. offprints No paper offprints are provided, but the corresponding author will be sent the pdf of the published article. Print offprints may be purchased at extra cost at proof stage. Orders, which must be accompanied by payment, may be sent to a bookseller, subscription agent or direct to the publisher: Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 2ru; or in the usa, Canada and Mexico: Cambridge University Press, Journals Fulfillment Department, 100 Brook Hill Drive, West Nyack, New York 10994-2133. Periodicals postage paid at New York, ny and at additional mailing offices. Copying This journal is registered with the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Organizations in the USA who are also registered with the C.C.C. may, therefore, copy material (beyond the limits permitted by sections 107 and 108 of U.S. Copyright law) subject to payment to the C.C.C of the per copy fee of $12.00. This consent does not extend to multiple copying for promotional or commercial purposes. Code 1479-2443/11. ISI Tear Sheet Service, 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, pa 19104, usa, is authorized to supply single copies of separate articles for private use only. Organizations authorized by the Copyright Licensing Agency may also copy material subject to the usual conditions. For all other use, permission should be sought from Cambridge or from the American branch of Cambridge University Press. Modern Intellectual History is included in the Cambridge Journals Online service which can be found at http://journals.cambridge.org. For further information on other Press journals access http://cambridge.org/journals.

cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ru, uk 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa Printed in the United Kingdom by the University Press, Cambridge

modern intellectual history contents pp 1–2

pp 3–29

A Note from the Editors Articles “Almost a Separate Race”: Racial Thought and the Idea of Europe in British Encyclopedias and Histories, 1771–1830 paul stock

pp 31–59

Madame Guizot and Monsieur Guizot: Domestic Pedagogy and the Post-Revolutionary Order in France, 1807–1830 robin bates

pp 61–90

Transcending Babel in the Cultural Translation of Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) tuska benes

pp 91–125

Canonizing Dewey: Columbia Naturalism, Logical Empiricism, and the Idea of American Philosophy andrew jewett

pp 127–146

pp 147–151

Essay Beyond “Academicization”: The Postwar American University and Intellectual History richard f. teichgraeber iii

Forum: The Idea of Sustainability Introduction emma rothschild

pp 153–170

The Invention of Sustainability paul warde

pp 171–191

Environmental, Economic, and Moral Dimensions of Sustainability in the Petroleum Industry in Austrian Galicia alison frank

pp 193–212

Maintaining (Environmental) Capital Intact emma rothschild

pp 213–225

Review Essays The Subject and the Work of Difference: Gender, Sexuality, and Intellectual History sandrine sanos

pp 227–236

German Post-Darwinian Biology Reassessed frederick gregory

pp 237–251

Historicizing American Travel, at Home and Abroad leslie butler

pp 253–263

Ayn Rand and American Conservatism in the Cold War Era patrick allitt

Modern Intellectual History, 8, 1 (2011), pp. 1–2 doi:10.1017/S1479244311000023

C Cambridge University Press 2011

a note from the editors

Roughly eight years ago we met in Manhattan with Nick Phillipson to plan a new journal to be launched by Cambridge University Press. Two Americans who knew each and had worked together well, and who were largely in agreement about what MIH should accomplish. We were well aware of the quality of Nick’s scholarship, of course, and had heard through the transatlantic grapevine that he was a great colleague. Still, we were more than a little apprehensive. What if Nick had a totally different idea of the journal? What if the personal chemistry didn’t work? Within an hour of our discussion we knew that we had “lucked out” on both counts. Readers familiar with Nick’s work will surely agree that he has one of the sharpest and most imaginative minds in the discipline, and that he had been combining intellectual history with social and cultural history well before historians started making such a fuss about it. Manhattan was the right place to meet. An urban gentleman (in the best of senses), Nick is a gourmet of awesome range (everything from haute cuisine to deli food) and a sparkling conversationalist and raconteur. Lunch or dinner with him is an event. No one takes more care, or pleasure, in ordering a good bottle of wine. The subject of conversation need not be history; he is a lover of art and music, and has been very active in the cultural and civic life of Edinburgh, where he was a celebrated teacher at the university from 1965 to 2004. Nick is now retiring from his editorial responsibilities. The timing is extraordinary. He is not leaving in a wake of past glories; he’s at the very peak of his career. Roughly thirty years ago, Nick burst on the scene—he has a way of bursting on the scene—as one of the leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment. His first two books left no doubt of his versatility: a now indispensable monograph on the Scottish legal profession in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and an elegant intellectual biography of David Hume as a historian. At the same time, Nick played a key role in explaining what “polite sociability” meant, both in practice and in theory; why the universities and their cities were the centers of the Enlightenment in Scotland; and how they shaped and were shaped by it. He must have known from the beginning that all this would culminate in a densely contextualized biography of Adam Smith (whose papers were burned at his death). It will be, he would tell us, “a biography without sources.” But Nick is a 1

2 a note from the editors

virtuoso at getting spare sources to yield every last bit of their historical meaning. The book—Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life—appeared with Penguin in August of 2010, and there is now an American edition by Yale University Press. It is a master contribution both to Enlightenment studies and to biography. One of the challenges in launching MIH was to make it a truly transatlantic enterprise, and that meant getting submissions and building a readership in the UK. Without Nick the journal simply would not have been able to do that. It was not only that Nick knew so many people; his wit, amiability and sheer kindness made it very hard to turn him down. Readers who have been edited by Nick know how good he is at editing. He has the patience—and the good judgment—to wait for a piece to “ripen” (one of his favorite words); he coaxes people into making their prose more lucid and more readable (jargon was banned); and he is quick to spot a kink or a void in the argument or in the presentation. We learned a great deal from him. We wish Nick all the best in the coming years. Charles Capper and Anthony La Vopa



“almost a separate race”: racial thought and the idea of europe in british encyclopedias and histories, 1771–1830 paul stock Department of International History, London School of Economics E-mail: [email protected]

This article explores the association between racial thought and the idea of Europe in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by noting the complexities surrounding the word “race” in this period, before considering whether— and on what grounds—contemporary race thinkers identify a “European race” or “races”. This reveals important ambiguities and correlations between anatomical, genealogical and cultural understandings of human difference. The essay then discusses how some of these ideas find expression in British encyclopedias, histories and geographical books. In this way, it shows how racial ideas are disseminated, not just in dedicated volumes on anatomy and biological classification, but also in general works which purport to summarize and transmit contemporary received knowledge. The article draws upon entries on “Europe” in every British encyclopedia completed between 1771 and 1830, as well as named source texts for those articles, tracing how the word “Europe” was used and what racial connotations it carried. Some entries imply that “European” is either a separate race entirely, or a subcategory of a single human race. Others, however, reject the idea of a distinctive European people to identify competing racial groups in Europe. These complexities reveal increasing interest in the delineation of European identities, an interest which emerges partly from longstanding eighteenth-century debates about the categorization and comprehension of human difference. In addition, they show the diffusion of (contending) racial ideas in non-specialist media, foreshadowing the growing prominence of racial thought in the later nineteenth century.

introduction This essay explores the association between racial thought and the idea of Europe in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by noting the complexities surrounding the word “race” in this period, before considering whether—and on what grounds—contemporary race thinkers identify a “European race” or “races”. This reveals important ambiguities and 3

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correlations between anatomical, genealogical and cultural understandings of human difference. The essay then discusses how some of these ideas find expression in British encyclopedias, histories and geographical books. In this way, it shows how racial ideas are disseminated, not just in dedicated volumes on anatomy and biological classification, but also in general works which purport to summarize and transmit contemporary received knowledge.1 The article draws upon entries on “Europe” in every British encyclopedia completed between 1771 and 1830, as well as named source texts for those articles, tracing how the word “Europe” was used and what racial connotations it carried. Some entries imply that “European” is either a separate race entirely, or a subcategory of a single human race. Others, however, reject the idea of a distinctive European people in order to identify competing racial groups in Europe. These complexities reveal increasing interest in the delineation of European identities, an interest which emerges partly from long-standing eighteenth-century debates about the categorization and comprehension of human difference. In addition, they show the diffusion of (contending) racial ideas in non-specialist media, foreshadowing the growing prominence of racial thought in the later nineteenth century.

the concept of “race” To talk of “race” in this period is itself complex and controversial, principally because the term had a number of complex meanings in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to Nicholas Hudson, it most commonly referred to “family lines, lineage, extraction . . . or breeds of animal”, and thus had both dynastic and classificatory connotations.2 “Races”—that is, lines of descent or groups of peoples—could be “identified and signified through religion, custom, language, climate aesthetics and historical time, as much as physiognomy and skin colour”. For this reason, conceptions of “race” were intertwined with ideas about politics and nation: they “occupied overlapping if not identical cultural and political terrains . . . used to distinguish groups by lineage, common descent or origin and to identify political, social and territorial particularity”.3 In other words, discussion about “race” encompassed various interrelated understandings 1

2

3

For anthologies of such specialist works from this period see H. F. Augstein, ed., Race: The Origins of an Idea (Bristol, 1996); Emanuel Chudwuki Eze, ed., Race and Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford, 1997); Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee, eds., Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, vol. 8, Theories of Race, ed. Peter Kitson (London, 1999) Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 29/3 (1996), 247. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 2003), 11–12, 55.

“almost a separate race”

of human difference: physical appearance, disposition, environmental influences, descent or origins, religion, cultural mannerisms, and political systems. For this reason, Roxann Wheeler speaks of the “fluid articulation of human variety” and the “elasticity of race” in the eighteenth century. In particular, she warns against anachronistic and essentialist understandings of “race” as a set of fixed physical characteristics.4 The word “ethnic”, for instance, originally meant “heathen, ungodly, irreligious”, which emphasizes the importance of religious belief and social practice in distinguishing and categorizing different peoples.5 Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thinkers were thus preoccupied by “the tenuous . . . opposition between nature and society, the innate and the acquired”, especially the related problems of how supposedly “natural” characteristics could change, and how acquired behaviours and qualities could come to seem innate. In this sense, the “poles of an essentialised Nature and a capricious Environment” competed and overlapped with one another: ideas about manners and society were ambiguously interconnected with “absolutist notions” of inheritance and non-acquired “essence”.6 Eighteenthcentury investigations of human difference “indicate that ideas about “culture” and “biology” do not occupy separate domains, and that they develop in relation to one another.7 Enquiries into skin colour, for instance, hinged on the relationship between inhabitants’ temperament, disposition and bodily humours, and external factors such as climate, commerce and societal development. In this way, environment, mental faculties and bodily appearance were coupled in a “symbiotic relationship”.8 Indeed, given its close relationship with notions of “lineage” and “bloodline”, the language of “race” could simultaneously connote class, dynasty and societal organization, as well as biological

4

5

6 7

8

Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000), 7, 9–10. George Stocking argues that race did not commonly designate “physical entities unchanged since the beginning of recorded time” until after the publication of Robert Knox’s The Races of Men (1850). See his Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987), 65. Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), 34, 287. Kidd draws upon the definitions of “ethnick” in the Glossographia (1656) and Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), though the word meant “pagan” as early as the 1470s. See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989), “ethnic”, sense 1. Wilson, The Island Race, 6–8. Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton, Introduction, in idem, eds., Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (New York, 2007), 8, 22–3. Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 2–5, 22–4

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“blood ties” and “common substance” or essence inherited through physical relations.9 Often these variable understandings of human difference coexist in the same text. In The Spirit of the Laws, for instance, Montesquieu uses the word “race” to make technical distinctions between social systems across different periods. The “first race” refers to those Franks who followed Salic and Roman law: Le pays qu’on appelle aujourd’hui la France, fut gouverné dans la première race par la loi Romaine, ou le code Théodosien, & par les diverses loix des barbares qui y habitoient . . . la loi Salique e´ toit e´ tablie pour les Francs, & le code Théodosien pour les Romains. the country that today one calls France was governed under the first race by Roman law, or the Theodosian code, and by the various laws of the barbarians who lived there . . . the Salic Law was established for the Franks and the Theodosian code for the Romans.

The “second race” allowed these semi-centralized legal structures to decline amidst the rise of fiefdoms: “Les loix Saliques, Bouguignonnes & Wisigothes furent donc extrêmement négligées a` la fin de la seconde race” (The Salic, Burgundian and Visigothic laws were therefore extremely neglected at the end of the second race).10 Montesquieu thus uses “race” in an administrative and legal sense, though the term also carries dynastic connotations and hence the implications of “lineage” and “(royal) blood”: the most recent English translators render “first race” as “Merovingian” and “second race” as “Carolingian” in order to foreground these undertones.11 Indeed, in distinguishing between peoples— for example, Franks and Romans—who are subject to different laws according to apparent provenance, Montesquieu identifies human groups based upon reputed “descent”. Elsewhere in The Spirit of the Laws, he classifies peoples according to physical characteristics, which in turn indicates their innate “nature”: Ceux dont il s’agit sont noirs depuis les pieds jusqu’à la tête & ils ont le nez si e´ crasé qu’il est presqu’ impossible de les plaindre . . . Il est si naturel de penser, que c’est la couleur qui constitue l’essence de l’humanité . . . Il est impossible que nous supposion que ces gens là soient des hommes. 9

10

11

Elizabeth Colwill, “Sex, Savagery and Slavery in the Shaping of the French Body Politic”, in Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, eds., From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1998), 204. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des loix, nouvelle edition, avec les dernieres corrections & illustrations de l’auteur, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1750), 2: 245, 254. The translations are mine. For similar uses of the word “race” see ibid., 1: 421; 2: 400, 433, 452, 454, 466. For further analysis see Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, DC, 1996), 187–90, 200–2. See Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold Stone (Cambridge, 1987), 537.


Those concerned are black from head to toe, and they have such a flat nose, that it is almost impossible to feel sorry for them . . . It is so natural to think that colour constitutes the essence of humanity . . . It is impossible for us to assume that these people are men.12

For Montesquieu, therefore, physical appearance can still facilitate the physical, moral and intellectual categorization of different peoples. In turn, the prospect of these classificatory practices allows the potential identification of a “European race” or “races”.

the “european” race(s) How, then, did eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thinkers identify European “race(s)”? Broadly speaking, this question encompasses two eighteenth-century debates about human origins and difference. First, it is a part of the monogenesis–polygenesis enquiry into human origins: the scholarly and religious debate about whether humanity is a single species, or whether there are many human species which were created separately.13 Second, it incorporates related disputes about the extent to which human differences are essentially fixed and unchanging, or whether other factors, such as climate, migration or social structures, can cause diverse human groups to develop and alter over time. These issues reverberate throughout attempts to categorize and distinguish humans. In his Systema naturae (first edition 1735, tenth edition 1758) Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) divides humans into four groups corresponding to continents (americanus, europaeus, asiaticus, and afer), as well as giving a fifth category, monstrosus, which includes giants and other extraordinary varieties. However, these are not straightforwardly geographical distinctions, since they can be distinguished by physical features (especially skin colour), personality, behaviour and intellect, as well as by their preferred system of government. Europeans, for example, have white skin, are “intelligent” and “inventive” and are governed by “law”, whereas the asiaticus are “melancholy”, “greedy” and ruled by “opinion” (for example by the lawless will of a despot).14 Linné’s system therefore distinguishes between people according to several criteria: geographical location, 12

13

14

Montesquieu, De l’esprit des loix, 1: 343. The translation is from Spirit of the Laws, trans. Cohler, Miller and Stone, 250. Related debates have not entirely disappeared. Recent discussions about the origins of Homo sapiens encompass the “out-of-Africa” theory, which postulates that modern humans evolved in Africa and spread from there, and the “multiregional” theory, which suggests that the species evolved simultaneously in many locations across the world. See Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1997), 323–35. For an English tabulation of Linné’s human varieties see Jonathan Marks, “Systematics in Anthropology”, in G. A. Clark and C. M. Willermet, eds., Conceptual Issues in Modern

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societal differences (e.g. in governmental system) and “natural” non-acquired characteristics. To describe someone as a “European”, therefore, is not only to specify their location and to describe their social system, it is also to make assertions about their disposition, moral conduct and intelligence. Linné’s classificatory method potentially facilitates what Nancy Stepan calls “typological thinking”, whereby individual humans are seen as belonging to “an undying essence or type”.15 This reifies the idea of static differences between homogeneous groups, variations being “fixed eternally by divine will that is also an order defined by hierarchical gradations”.16 From such a basis, it is possible to hypothesize a “European race” in which certain shared mental and physical characteristics are enduringly consistent. In 1749, Linné’s antagonist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon insisted that there is “une seule espèce d’hommes” (“only one species of man”), and that varieties have emerged “par l’influence du climat, par la différence de la nourriture, par celle de la manière de vivre, par les maladies e´ pidémiques, et aussi par le mélange varié a` l’infini des individus plus ou mois ressemblents” (“by the influence of climate, by differences of food, by manner of living, by epidemic diseases, and also by the varied mixing of infinite individuals more or less alike”). In other words, human varieties develop through a combination of environmental factors and hereditary influences. Furthermore, different groups—sometimes referred to by the word “race”—are identifiable by both physical appearance and social practice: “ils se ressemblent par la forme, par la taille, par la couleur, par les moeurs, et même par la bizarrerie des coutumes” (“they resemble each other in form, in height, in colour, in manners, and even in peculiarity of customs”).17 Using these criteria, Buffon includes “les peuples de l’Europe” among a wider category of people “qui habitent sous un climat plus tempéré” (“who live in a most temperate climate”), comprising Moguls, Persians, Armenians, Turks, Greeks and others. This might seem to challenge the idea of a uniquely European “race” by assimilating European peoples into a broader grouping defined by climatological factors. Nevertheless, he still occasionally makes undeveloped remarks about the distinctiveness of different European peoples: “il est aisé de reconnaˆıtre un Espagnol de toutes les autres nations européennes” (“it is easy to distinguish a

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Human Origins Research (New York, 1997), 46–7. Linné’s Latin terms can be seen in Systema Naturae, 13th edn, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1767), 1: 29. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London, 1982), xviii. Henry Louis Gates Jr, “Critical Remarks”, in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, 1990), 319–21. See also Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’”, 258. Buffon, Histoire naturelle (1749), in Oeuvres Complètes de Buffon, 5 vols., ed. M. Richard (Paris, 1837–8), 2: 646–7, 607. The translations are mine. For Buffon’s (inconsistent) use of the word “race” see Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’”, 253–5.


Spaniard from all the other European nations”). More significantly, Buffon asserts that the “temperate peoples” are “les plus beaux, les plus blancs et les mieux faits de toute la terre” (“the most beautiful, the most white and the most well made of all the earth”).18 This opens a significant connection between aesthetic judgement and the categorization of humans. In other words, the physical beauty or ugliness of an individual could not only reflect their own “interior moral being”, it could also reveal the generalized qualities of whole peoples. This correlation between aesthetic ideas (that is, cultural preferences) and physical difference made sense to contemporaries given the assumption that “human beauty . . .was assumed to be a biological means of creating mutual attraction leading to procreation and the continuation of the species of humanity”.19 In this way, for Buffon, the identification of a “European” is a matter of physical form, aesthetic evaluation, and spatial and environmental designation. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, “the most influential theorist of human variety in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century”,20 also identified a human category particular to Europe. In De generis humani varietate nativa (1775), he identified four “classes of inhabitants”, later adding a fifth class in the second edition (1781): The first of these and the largest, which is also the primeval one, embraces the whole of Europe, including the Lapps, whom I cannot in any way separate from the rest of the Europeans . . .; and that western part of Asia, which lies towards us, this side of the Obi, the Caspian Sea, Mount Taurus, and the Ganges; also north Africa; and lastly, in America, the Greenlanders and Esquimaux, for I see in these people a wonderful difference from the other inhabitants of America . . . All these nations, regarded as a whole, are white in colour, and, if compared with the rest, beautiful in form.21

In the third edition of this work (1795), Blumenbach labels this group “Caucasian”, a term still used in the twenty-first century to describe people with white skin.22 However, the implications of Blumenbach’s classification are multifarious. He describes white people as one variety who inhabit the whole geographical space of Europe. But this variety cannot be described in any straightforward way as

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Buffon, Oeuvres, 2: 621–4. David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2002), 12, 20. Kitson, Theories of Race, 141 J. F. Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. and ed. Thomas Bendyshe (London, 1865), 99–100. This quotation is from the second edition of De generis (1781). For Blumenbach’s five human varieties (Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay) see Anthropological Treatises, 264–6. For the continuing use of the word “Caucasian”, especially by immigration services, see Hannaford, Race, 207.

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“European”, because it encompasses people from outside the continent. Moreover, Blumenbach suggests that “the cradle of the human race lay in the Caucasus whence the species had dispersed over the globe, climactic differences bringing about human variations”.23 In other words, he argues for the unified origins of the human race by refusing to identify separate human species, while simultaneously asserting the aesthetic and historical primacy of one particular variation. In this respect, Blumenbach strives to demonstrate the original unity of all human peoples, while also legitimizing the separation of those peoples into various groups. By definition, Blumenbach’s theory could not imply the permanency of differences, since it was premised upon deviation from an original norm. Nevertheless, his categorizations downplay variety within groups in order to underscore “distinctions between groups”, an implication which could encourage a “larger effort to fix racial types”.24 Clearly, then, questions about human difference reverberated unresolved throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In his lecture “On the Causes of the Varieties of the Human Species”, William Lawrence summarizes these contemporary debates: “are distinctions coeval with the origins of the species, or as the result of subsequent variation”, and, in the latter case, are they caused by “external physical and moral causes, or [by] native or congenital variety”?25 This statement is partly a development of the monogenesis–polygenesis inquiry, but it also demonstrates burgeoning interest in the relationship between environment and congenital inheritance. In the mideighteenth century, Pierre-Louise Moreau de Maupertuis had begun to explore the problems of biological inheritance. He noted that children usually resemble their parents and concluded that some unknown biological mechanism causes characteristics to be passed on through the generations. He also realized that, in animals and birds, certain natural variations could be deliberately bred and accentuated to create creatures with slightly different characteristics. But how do such variations arise? Maupertuis speculated that environmental factors have an influence: Je n’exclus pas l’influence que le climat & les alimens peuvent y avoir. Il semble que la chaleur de la Zone torride, soit plus propre a` fomenter les parties qui rendent la peau

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H. F. Augstein, “From the Land of the Bible to the Caucasus and Beyond: The Shifting Ideas of the Geographical Origins of Humankind”, in Waltraud Erst and Bernard Harris, eds., Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960 (New York and London, 1999), 64. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, rev. edn (New Brunswick, 2004), 118–19. William Lawrence, “On the Causes of the Varieties of the Human Species”, in idem, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, 3rd edn (London, 1823), 431.


noire, que celles qui la rendent blanche. Et je ne sais pas jusqu’ou` peut aller cette influence du climat ou des alimens, après de longues suites de siécles. I do not exclude the possible influence of climate and food. It would seem that the heat of the torrid zone is more favourable to the particles that compose black skin than to those that make up white skin. And I simply do not know how far this kind of influence of climate and food may go after many centuries.26

For Maupertuis, then, environmental circumstances give rise to variations which then become hereditary: “Ce n’est que par quelque accident que le noir est devenu une couleur héréditaire aux grandes familles qui peuplent la Zone torride” (“It is only by some accident that black has become a hereditary colour in the great families which populate the torrid zone”).27 Lawrence follows a similar line of thinking: humans are of one species, but have undergone changes “by the influence of climate, food, mode of living, epidemic diseases”. Such changes are then “transmitted from generation to generation”, “by the continual action of the same causes”. Like Maupertuis, Lawrence fuses environmentalism with hereditary biology, proposing a solution based on “race”, which he uses in the sense of “congenital variety of a single species”. Thus there are three “races” in Europe: Celts, Germans and Slavs, all part of the same species, but congenitally different from one another. Races are distinct in a moral sense too: the Negro disposition is “cruel and barbarous”, though Lawrence is undecided whether this is a cause or an effect of congenital variation. For him, it is entirely legitimate to speak of a single human species and culturally and biologically distinct races.28 A related idea is evident in James Cowles Prichard’s Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813). He speaks of “Negroes” and “Europeans” as dissimilar variations of a single human species. This “obvious gradation” is identifiable “in the shape of the skull, from the European to the negro, bearing a ratio to the degree of colour”. However, such physical variation is dependent upon circumstantial influences: “in races which are experiencing the effects of civilisation, a temperate climate increases the tendency to the light variety [of skin colour]”. In other words, the development of (European) civilization directly causes physical variation. In the same way that “local causes” form new “races” from existing animal species— for example, white mice will be produced if their parents are kept in the dark—so too do new human varieties emerge from changes in social organization. For this reason, the original pair were black, and “the progress of nature has been 26

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Maupertuis, Venus physique, contenant deux dissertations, l’une sur l’origine des hommes et des animaux; et l’autre sur l’origine des noirs (La Haye, 1746), 144–5. The translation is from idem, The Earthly Venus, trans. Simone Brangier Boas, introduction by George Boas (New York, 1966), 80. Maupertuis, Venus, 149. Lawrence, “On the Causes”, 434–7.

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the gradual transmutation from the Negro to the European . . . whenever we see any progress towards civilization, there we also find deviation towards a lighter colour”. Humans change according to environmental and societal circumstances, but then settle into hereditary (and thus near permanent) differences of intellect, cultural refinement and physical appearance. Those consolidated differences, in turn, facilitate further distinctive change: “the influence of moral causes in modifying the efficacy of natural causes is . . . very considerable”.29 Prichard’s ideas act as a bridge between social and biological theories of difference: culture and climate initiate change, but also legitimize the distinction and description of various congenital “races”.30 In this way, Prichard makes it possible to identify essential differences from observation of social practice. For Prichard, as well as the other thinkers I have examined so far, the primary intellectual challenge is to maintain an orthodox monogenetic perspective while still adequately explaining human difference. Polygenesis offers a different solution, though it still encompasses similar questions about climate and human adaptability. In 1778 Lord Kames, for instance, had used “race” in the sense of “species”: there are many distinct human races, he says, each “fitted for different climates” and with different “tempers and dispositions”. These “races” are permanently hereditary and do not change according to social or spatial factors: a European can “for years expose himself to the sun in a hot climate, till he be quite brown, [but] his children will nevertheless have the same complexion with those in Europe”. In this way, Kames reconfigures climatological arguments: human forms and behaviours are not shaped by climates; instead humans are created with different appearances and qualities in order to fit particular environments better. Unlike Prichard, Kames separates human categories absolutely: there is no possibility of change and a limited capacity for interaction between races. Horses, he suggests, can breed together, because they are of “one kind”. But “men are not all of one kind; for if a White mix with a Black” the result will be “a mongrel breed differing from both parents”.31 Kames’s theories make “European” into a distinctive biological category, identified principally by skin colour and other physical features. Polygenesis, of course, remained a relatively unorthodox theory, not least because it contradicted the Genesis creation story.32 It still

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James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man (London, 1813), 231–3, 206–9, 236, 209. See Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 295–6. For more on the importance of aesthetics in Prichard’s ideas see Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 133–4. Henry Home, Lord Kames, “Preliminary Discourse, Concerning the Origin of Men and of Languages”, in idem, Sketches of the History of Man, 2nd edn. 4 vols. (London, 1778), 1: 3–26, 72–9. Kitson, Theories of Race, xiii.


held appeal, however, for thinkers looking to justify imperialism by reference to supposed differences between humans. In his History of Jamaica (1774), for example, Edward Long edges towards polygenesis when he suggests, When we reflect on the nature of [black people], and their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must we not concluded that they are a different species of the same genus? . . . Every member of the creation is wisely fitted and adapted to their certain uses, and confined within their certain bounds.

Long insists on permanent and innate differences in physical appearance, and social and intellectual capacity: black people, he says, are “void of genius, and seem incapable of making any progress in civility or science”, an assumption which legitimizes their exploitation by purportedly superior Europeans.33 Most racial thinkers, however, step back from the unconventional doctrinal implications of polygenesis. John Bigland, writing in 1816, suggests that “race”— in the sense of “bodily and mental faculties . . . perpetuated in hereditary descent”, such as “strength, courage, genius and other gifts of nature’—is a more accurate way of dividing peoples than social custom, since “we are sometimes unable to discover any difference in government, laws or religion”. Accordingly, he decides that “Europeans . . . are a visible distinction of race” in comparison to Asiatics, Africans and Americans, although, in a nod to orthodoxy, it is “not improbable” that all are descended from Noah. However, he immediately admits that “among the European nations . . . all distinctions of race, which might once have existed, are long since confounded”—Greeks and Romans are a mixture of Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Celts; Franks and Saxons a blend of Gauls, Celts, Britons and Normans.34 Bigland proposes an overarching European identity, but then instantly collapses this into competing factions. Despite his own principle not to divide by social custom, he also uses civilizations (“Greek”, “Roman”) as the foundation for racial groupings, a strategy which shows how, for Bigland and other racial thinkers, societal and essential differences between peoples are interdependent and mutually illuminating. In summary, then, discussion of human difference—and the identification of “European” people—is related to several recurring and interlocking debates about human “nature”, hereditary qualities, climatic influence, and aesthetic judgements. The key question, however, concerns the extent to which these 33

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Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 2: 356, 374–5, 353. Long’s terminology is occasionally indistinct: sometimes he uses “race” in the sense of “classes of human creatures”, which might imply varieties of a single group; at other moments he talks about orang-utans as a “race of beings”, which would suggest a meaning closer to the modern “species”. See ibid., 2: 371, 375–6. John Bigland, An Historical Display of the Effects of Physical and Moral Causes on the Character and Circumstances of Nations (London, 1816), 75–80, 90–6.

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debates extend more widely outside familiar specialist works on anatomical, biological and social classification. There is evidence that such disputes were part of wider public discourses about human categorization. For example, Charles White’s Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799) reports that there “subsists a characteristic difference in the bony system betwixt the European and the African”, that “there are material differences in the corporal organisation of various classes of mankind” and that the European stands “at the head, as being the farthest removed from the brute creation”.35 A reviewer in the Monthly Review censures this conclusion the following year, attacking White for falsely assuming that Europeans embody a more advanced “gradation” of humankind.36 This review is significant because it shows that the questions under dispute during this period—particularly whether there are specifically European forms of behaviour and physical appearance—were not restricted to specialist works but also received serious attention in review magazines and other books targeted at a general readership. There are several potential places to examine the dispersal of racial thinking in this period, periodicals, travel narratives and imperial documents perhaps being the most obvious.37 Here, however, I wish to show how uncertainties about the European race(s) recur throughout encyclopedias and their source texts.

encyclopedias and the “european race” Encyclopedias are a useful way to assess a period’s culture and assumptions: they purport to summarize received knowledge and can thus reveal much about contemporary “intellectual, political, economic and social life”, particularly the “extent of the reception and diffusion” of certain key ideas.38 That said, one must be careful not to assume a direct correlation between encyclopedic content and the zeitgeist. As Frank Kafker observes, some encyclopedias presented information in an idiosyncratic manner: the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768– 71), for example, avoided discussion of biography and “mechanical arts”, while

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Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Difference Animals and Vegetables; and from the Former to the Latter (London, 1799), 55, 83. For more details about White see Bindman, Ape to Apollo, 214–19. Anonymous review, “An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man and in different Animals and Vegetables, and from the former to the latter. By Charles White, 1799”, Monthly Review 33 (new series) (1800), 360–64. For discussions of empire and race see Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 10–14; Colwill, “Sex, Savagery and Slavery”, esp. 207; Wilson, The Island Race, esp. 90–91, 151. Frank Kafter, ed., introduction to Notable Encyclopaedias of the Late Eighteenth Century: Eleven Successors of the Encyclopédie, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 315 (Oxford, 1994), 1–2.


focusing intensely on Scottish legal history. By contrast, others could be unadventurous and conventional in seeking to uphold “dominant religious, political and social institutions”.39 Nevertheless, according to Richard Yeo, encyclopedias were a key means by which important ideas were transmitted to a wider audience: Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), for instance, was central in the dissemination of Lockean and Newtonian ideas “to a readership that extended beyond elite scholars”. In this sense, encyclopedias were key components in the expanding “public character of information” since they were pitched at “the majority of educated, but not necessarily university-educated, readers . . . rather than only specialists”.40 It is, of course, difficult to determine the precise audience of encyclopedias. They were expensive: the first edition of Britannica appeared in a hundred weekly instalments costing between sixpence and eightpence each, and the whole set cost between £2 10s and £3 7s (fifty to sixty-seven shillings) depending on paper quality. A labourer in this period would be fortunate to earn ten shillings per week, meaning that the encyclopedia would cost about five to seven weeks’ income. Even for a gentleman with an income of five pounds (a hundred shillings) per week, an encyclopedia was a significant purchase.41 Despite this, Britannica reached print runs of five thousand—ten thousand by the late eighteenth century—and, as reference books, encyclopedias probably had many more readers than purchasers: Britannica especially became “virtually a compulsory acquisition for any self-respecting multi-disciplinary institution”.42 In what follows, I have consulted entries on “Europe” in every British encyclopedia completed between 1771 and 1830 (as well as named source texts for those entries) in order to show how certain racial ideas about “Europe” and “Europeans” were disseminated in general reference texts.43 39

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Kafker, “William Smellie’s Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica” and idem, “The influence of the Encyclopédie on the Eighteenth-Century Encyclopaedic Tradition”, both in Notable Encyclopaedias, 155–7, 395. Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2001), 158–9, 163–6, xiii, 51. Kafter, “William Smellie’s Edition”, 148; William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), 193–6. There were twenty shillings in a pound, and twelve pence in a shilling. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 51; David Allan, A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (London, 2008), 194 For more on reading societies and lending libraries, see also St Clair, The Reading Nation, 235–67. Identifying encyclopedic source material is extremely difficult because articles rarely employ references. I have, however, investigated every occasion when an article on “Europe” mentions a work or an authority by name. These materials often name other influences not acknowledged directly by encyclopedias. The Encyclopaedia Londinesis (1810–24), for example, cites John Pinkerton’s Modern Geography (1802), which in turn draws upon the anonymous Complete System of Geography (1747), Fenning and Collyer’s

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In their articles on “Europe”, some encyclopedias argue that Europeans can be considered collectively as a distinctive human variety. The second edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1777–84) declares that European “inhabitants are all white; and incomparably more handsome than the Africans, and even most of the Asians”, echoing the aesthetic arguments of Buffon and others.44 The English Encyclopaedia (1802) proclaims that Europeans “are much better made than the Africans, or even the Asiatics” (emphasis added), which implies a distinctiveness and superiority from the moment of creation rather than acquired advantages.45 Due to vagaries of vocabulary, it is not always clear whether these texts are arguing, in the polygenist manner, for a separate European race or for a distinctive subdivision of the whole human race. The latter is perhaps more likely in most cases: Silvia Sebastiani suggests that eighteenth-century encyclopedias are usually monogenist in order to be doctrinally orthodox.46 Either way, the articles identify unique physical features particular to Europeans (skin colour, physical beauty). Crucially, however, this identification often accompanies an assertion of social superiority. The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1808–30) suggests that European “progress in knowledge and arts raised them above the inhabitants of other divisions, that they seem almost a separate race”.47 The key word here is “almost”, for shortly afterwards the writer reiterates the monogenist theory that the human race emerged from Asia and that all peoples are traceable to the same genesis. In this respect, he is working firmly within established traditions which lent Asia Minor and the Caucasus considerable ideological resonance. Not only was it the apocryphal location of the Garden of Eden, Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece and Prometheus’ punishment by Zeus, it was also the reputed place where the Ark came to rest, and was hence the wellspring for the repopulation of the world by Noah’s sons.48 Yet the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia does not believe that all these descendents have the same innate capabilities: Europeans excel in “activity

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New System of Geography (1765–6) and Middleton’s New and Complete System of Geography (1777). See Encyclopaedia Londinensis, 24 vols. (London, 1810–24), 7: 83; John Pinkerton, Modern Geography, 2 vols. (London, 1802), 2: 782. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2nd edn, 10 vols. (Edinburgh, 1777–84), 4: 2860. For the importance of aesthetics in Prichard’s and Lawrence’s racial ideas see Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 133–4. The English Encyclopaedia, 10 vols. (London, 1802), 3: 351. Silvia Sebastiani, “Race as a Construction of the Other: ‘Native Americans’ and ‘Negroes’ in the Eighteenth-Century Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica”, in Bo Str˚ath, ed., Europe and the Other, Europe as the Other (Brussels, 2000), 224. The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, 18 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1808–30), 9: 238. Augstein, “From the Land of the Bible”, 66; Daniel Drioxhe, La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600–1800) (Geneva, 1978), 86–7; Maurice Olender, “Europe, or How to Escape Babel”, History and Theory 33/4 (1994), 17.


of mind”, and this has enabled them to attain the “most perfect form”.49 For this encyclopedia, therefore, Europeans’ mental and moral advantages facilitate their social advances, which in turn leads to further “progress in knowledge”. The Modern Encyclopaedia (1816–20?) repeats the Britannica’s suggestion that Europeans are “incomparably . . . handsome”. Additionally, “Europeans surpass [Africans and Asians] in arts and sciences . . . in trade, navigation, and in military and civil affairs, being, at the same time, more prudent, more valiant, more generous, more polite and more sociable than they”.50 Similarly, the Encyclopaedia Edinensis (1816–27) declares that, in Europe, “the state of civilisation, of science, literature, arts, military tactics, and commercial enterprise, is more perfect, and on a more extensive scale . . . and the moral character more dignified and pure than any other quarter of the globe”.51 Moral qualities (valour, generosity) are associated with the advantages of an allegedly superior civil system. In this respect, “European” does not just denote a kind of society or behavioural code, it also signifies a type of person: these texts fuse together developmental progress with the concept of an unchanging European nature: Europeans have distinguished themselves through their “inborn faculties” or “natural abilities” and the sociological application of those talents. The roots of this fusion are evident in eighteenth-century geographical works. The 1747 Complete System of Geography claims that Europeans have asserted themselves through social triumphs (military conquests, “Scholastic Sciences”, “the Invention and Improvement of many useful and ingenious Arts”) and their innate “Genius”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the eighteenth century the word “genius” meant, amongst other things, “natural ability or capacity”, “natural aptitude” and “characteristic disposition” of a person or people.52 Europeans, in other words, have distinguished themselves in both “Genius and Industry”— through their “inborn faculties” or “natural abilities” and the application of those talents.53 These two factors are intimately connected: pre-eminent civic structures reveal the capabilities of “Genius” and those same social forms enable the demonstration of further innate brilliance. As with the racial thinkers I examined above, these accounts reveal an attempt to integrate “innate” and “acquired” qualities in identifying “Europeans”. Britannica’s fourth edition (1800–9) proclaims that the “benevolent Parent of the universe” granted Europeans “greater bodily vigour and intellectual strength”. This implies that Europeans have always been more intelligent, vigorous and 49 50 51 52 53

The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, 9: 238, 235. The Modern Encyclopaedia, 10 vols. (London, [1816–20?]), 5: 77. Encyclopaedia Edinensis, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1816–27), 3: 433. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, “genius”, senses 3 and 4. Complete System of Geography, 2 vols. (London, 1747), 1: 1.

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advanced, because they were created that way. However, it also describes the long European drive towards progress in “diffusion of knowledge, the extension of industry and the civilisation of manners”.54 “Europe” is thus understood partly as a developmental process of ideas, conventions, discussions and discoveries, and partly as a static entity, granted certain benefits by God. Europeans are both dynamic participants in a superior social network, the agents and subjects of “progress”, and unchanging created beings, made with specific characteristics or advantages which are never lost. As well as revealing divergent ideas about “Europeans”, this tension also reflects broader eighteenth-century debates about how to understand human difference in terms of societal participation, developmental progress, and unchanging “natural” qualities. As part of this wider debate, other works explore how “racial” notions of Europe interact with ideas about space and migration. In his System of Geography (1777), Charles Middleton suggested that “when the Asiatics and African regions became the seats of tyranny and despotism”, more “liberally-disposed” Asian and African peoples migrated “northwards and sought for that liberty in less prolific climates”. For this reason, “Europe, the less extensive and wealthy, became more polished and powerful than the other two parts of the world”.55 The theory is dependent upon essential difference: early Europeans were distinguished from ordinary Asians by their “liberal” disposition and were thus distinct even before they moved into European space. When Middleton says that Europeans are “better made” or that in Europe “the human mind has made the greatest progress”, he means that their innate abilities have inclined them towards particular social systems: Europeans were identifiable long before “Europe” became a social or spatial term.56 The Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1806–7) also identifies dispositional differences between Asians and Europeans. Having concluded that no obvious spatial boundary between Asia and Europe exists, the distinction is instead “ethical, as the manners of the Asiatic subjects of Russia, and even Turkey, differ considerably from those of the European inhabitants of those islands”.57 This might seem to suggest contrasting forms of customary behaviour, but in fact the implication is more complex. According to the author, Asian and European peoples in the same community or locale still behave differently, which suggests that Asian and European “manners” are partly related to dispositional and not

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Encyclopaedia Britannica, 4th edn, 20 vols. (Edinburgh, 1801–9), 8: 350–1. Charles Middleton, A New and Complete System of Geography, 2 vols. (London, 1777), 1: ii. According to Roberto Dainotto, the “Arabist theory” (the idea that “European” civilization originated in Asia) became more prevalent from the 1770s onwards. See Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (London, 2007), 6, 130–2. Middleton, System of Geography, 2: 3. A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vols. (London, 1806–7), 1: 349.


just circumstantial factors. In this sense, the words “Asian” and “European” signal capabilities and behaviours not fully explicable by social or geographical context—an implicit rejection of environmental theories of difference. Some texts, however, express doubts about this alleged Europe-wide racial unity. Like some of the texts above, the 1824 Supplement to Britannica suggests that European denotes mental capacity: It is only in Europe . . . that the powers of the human mind . . . have developed that principle of progressive improvement . . . It is only in Europe that knowledge and the arts seem to be indigenous. Though they have appeared at times among some of the nations of Asia, they have either stopped short after advancing a few steps, or they have speedily retrograded and perished, like something foreign to the genius of the people.58

These sentences postulate that European social achievements depend upon inherent capabilities not possessed by other peoples. Moreover, they imply that “European” is a single “racial” category: Europeans can be identified as a collective because they all have broadly similar “indigenous” talents. In this sense, therefore, “European” alludes to a person’s “nature”, and not just their circumstances or acquired skills. Later, however, it talks of the “different races of inhabitants” of Europe, distinguishing them by “language, manners or physical constitution”. South-western Europeans are, for instance, naturally “more inventive and less persevering”.59 This establishes a Europe in which a variety of distinct tribal groups compete with one another, weakening the racial totality formerly implied. The Supplement thus presents contending understandings of Europe’s people: are they “by nature” alike, or driven to competition because they are essentially distinct? The next section explores some of these challenges to European racial wholeness presented in other contemporary historical and geographical books.

encyclopedias and the europe of many races Many encyclopedia articles reject the idea of a single European people in order to identify competing ethnic groups in “Europe”. These works use the word “European” to refer collectively to all these groups, not to mark out a single European “race”. This usage invests the idea of Europe with spatial connotations: dissimilar groups are connected only because they share the same space. Several works argue that there are three “ancient peoples of Europe”: Celts, Finns and Laplanders. Subsequently, these tribes were pushed westwards by migrating

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Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1824), 4: 181. Ibid., 4: 187.

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Asians, specifically Goths and “Sclavonics” (Slavs).60 The encyclopedias seek to build divergent European identities on these movements and confrontations: “European” alludes both to a complex ethnographic mixture caused by millennia of such interactions and to distinct groupings identifiable throughout history and in the modern period. These analyses bear significant resemblance to the racial ideas of John Pinkerton, the historian, poet and geographer.61 The encyclopedias employ the theory, expressed in Pinkerton’s Modern Geography (1802), that most modern Europeans are descended from Asian Goths (also known as Scythians).62 This was not in itself a unique hypothesis: the idea that the human race originated in Asia, and that Noah’s son Japhet fathered peoples who migrated westwards, was derived from ancient sources and became relatively conventional in the early eighteenth century.63 Pinkerton, however, disconnects this premise from its monogenist, theological connotations. His thesis is outlined most fully in A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, the primary purpose of which is to trace the movements of the Goths, who, Pinkerton contends, are the founders of nearly all European societies (including Greece and Rome). However, it also identifies four “Grand Races of Men” in ancient Europe: Celts (“who were to the other races of men what the savages of America are to the Europeans”), Iberi (“who had past from Africa”), Sarmatae or Sclavonics (who occupied Russia and Poland) and Goths–Scythians.64 These reflections place heavy emphasis on migration since only one people, the Celts, are indigenous to European space. He also speaks explicitly about biological categories, not social groups: the Scythians were neither Celts, Sarmartians, nor Tartars, no more than a horse is an elephant, a lion or a tiger . . . A Tartar, a Negro, an American, &c., &c, differ as much from a German, as a bull-dog, or lap-dog, shepherd’s cur, from a pointer. The differences are radical; and such as no climate or chance would produce.

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This theory appears in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 4th edn; The Cyclopaedia; or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, 39 vols. (London, 1802–19); Encyclopaedia Londinensis, 24 vols. (London, 1810–24). For details of Pinkerton’s life see Sarah Couper, “Pinkerton, John (pseuds. Robert Heron, H. Bennet) (1758–1826)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), available at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22301, accessed 21 February 2009. Pinkerton, Modern Geography, 1: 8. Versions of his argument appear in the Encyclopaedia Britannica , 4th edn; Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary; Encyclopaedia Londinensis; and The Oxford Encyclopaedia, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1828–31). Droixhe, La linguistique, 86–88. See also Kidd, British Identities, 9–11. Pinkerton, A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, Being an Introduction to the Ancient and Modern History of Europe (London, 1787), 17–18.


These theories edge towards polygenism: “the author of nature . . . gave various races of men as inhabitants of several countries”—in other words, each human variety was created separately to suit particular circumstances.65 Pinkerton himself confirmed that these unorthodox views derived indirectly from “ancient accounts”.66 The Scythians were a familiar presence in classical texts: brief allusions in Homer and Hesiod identify them as nomadic horsemen, and later accounts by Herodotus, Strabo and Juvenal comment on their hardy frugality, as well as their uncivilized cruelty. In attempting to reconcile classical and Jewish history, early church chronologers integrated the Scythian tradition with biblical genealogy: in the first century AD, Josephus argued that the Scythians descended from Japhet’s son Magog. Furthermore, because their traditional homeland in the Caucasus was the reputed place where the waters of the Flood receded, the Scythians were necessarily one of the most ancient peoples on earth from whom others derived.67 Importantly, too, Tacitus’ Germania had legitimized a connection between German peoples and the ancient Scythians and Sarmatians of central Asia: his account of German society and behaviour closely matches Posidonius’ and Herodotus’ much earlier descriptions of the Scythians.68 Later, in the sixth century, Jordanes and Isidore of Seville amplified this relationship, arguing that Scythians and German Goths shared a common ancestry and that they had populated all Europe following widespread migrations. “From this time onwards”, says James Johnson, “the Scythian enjoyed new glory as the parent of virtually every nation in Europe”. He goes on to suggest that, by the eighteenth century, the Scythian–Gothic theory had fallen into “obscurity”, although Pinkerton’s use of a related idea, as well as its presence in other contemporary books, instead suggests its ongoing resonance.69 It would be misleading, of course, to ascribe artificial uniformity to these various retellings of Scythian–Gothic ancestry. Jordanes, for example, argued that the Scythians derived from Scandinavia and moved from there to central

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Pinkerton, Dissertation, vii, 33–4. Pinkerton, Dissertation, iii. Pinkerton specifically mentions Tacitus, Isidore of Seville, Jordanes and Bede. James William Johnson, “The Scythian: His Rise and Fall”, Journal of the History of Ideas 20/2 (1959), 250–55. Johnson, “The Scythian”, 255; Martin Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes (London, 1995), 218–20. Thom draws upon Eduard Norden’s Die Germanische Urgeschichte in Tacitus Germania (1920) to suggest that these resemblances were perhaps the consequence of generic conventions in classical ethnographic writing, rather than an attempt to posit direct descent from the Scythians to the Germans. Olender, “Europe, or How to Escape Babel”, 12; Droixhe, La linguistique, 87; Johnson, “The Scythian”, 256–7.

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Asia.70 Furthermore, there was significant controversy regarding the relationship of the Scythians to other ancient groups. Scythians and Celts were often conflated, creating what Colin Kidd calls “a recipe for ethnological confusion”. In his Germania antiqua (1616) Philip Cluverius grouped Scythians and Celts together, but, unlike Tacitus, distinguished them sharply from the Sarmatians or Slavs. By contrast, Leibniz separated Celtic–Germans from Scythian–Slavs, since the two groups were apparently descended from different branches of Japhet’s family.71 Despite these bewildering complexities, caused partly by vague and shifting terminologies, the Scythian–Gothic theory has one particularly significant implication. By assuming that most peoples in Europe are traceable to a common (biblical) ancestry, the theory presumes that Europeans are closely interrelated. In the eighteenth century, it was therefore possible to speak about “Europe’s shared Gothic origins”: “historians agreed that most of the political nations of Europe shared common ethnic origins. The people of Europe, they argued, were largely the descendents of libertarian Gothic peoples”.72 Furthermore, the Scythians’ migrations even posited connections between European and Asian peoples: eighteenth-century travellers and geographers even associated the Chinese with the “ancient Scythians”.73 These implications make Pinkerton’s use of the Scythian–Gothic theory all the more startling. His identification of Europe’s Gothic heritage is motivated not by a straightforward conception of European racial unity, but by a virulent distaste for Celts and an urge to account for the separate derivation of European peoples. In contrast with earlier thinkers, he firmly separates Scythians–Goths from Celts, arguing that the former, in the guise of Picts and Saxons, displaced the barbaric Celts in England and lowland Scotland.74 This has an Anglophile purpose in that Pinkerton tries to “blur the differences between Scots Lowlanders and the English nation, and to sharpen differences between Highlanders and Lowlanders within the Scottish nation”.75 However, by railing against authors who have mistakenly

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Johnson, “The Scythian”, 256. Kidd, British Identities, 187–191; Droixhe, La linguistique, 133; idem, De l’origine du language aux langues du monde (Tübingen, 1987), 73–4. Kidd, British Identities, 227–31; idem, “Ethnicity on the British Atlantic World, 1688–1830”, in Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004), 275. Kitson, Romanticism, Race and Colonial Encounter (New York, 2007), 153. Kitson cites Cornelius de Pauw’s Philosophical Dissertations on the Egyptians and Chinese (1795) and John Barrow’s Travels in China (1804). [Pinkerton], “An Essay on the Origin of Scottish Poetry”, in Ancient Scottish Poems, Never Before in Print, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1786), 1: xxii–xxxvii. Kidd, “Race, Theology and Revival: Scots Philology and Its Contexts in the Age of Pinkerton and Jamieson”, Scottish Studies Review 3/2 (2002), 22.


confounded Scythian–Goths with Celts, Sarmartian–Slavs and Tartars, Pinkerton also asserts the intractable racial diversity of peoples in Europe.76 This leads him into still more unorthodox territory. Pinkerton proclaims himself dissatisfied with biblical genealogy: he argues that Jewish traditions and holy books are superseded by Christianity and are therefore “not binding on our faith”. Indeed, understandings of ancient chronology have been “ruined” by desperate attempts to “force it to Scripture”: “if we have recourse to Scripture for accounts of the origins of men, or of nations, we shall be shockingly deceived”. Liberated from the orthodox presumption of a common origin for all peoples, Pinkerton instead embraces polygenesis. “Nature”, he argues, not only produces different classes of animals, but also great varieties in each class, not only dogs, but forty or fifty kinds of dogs, which no mixture, elevation, decline, or any other cause, will ever fabricate; for no clime, art, or chance can give the size of the mastiff to the lap dog.

Assuming that such variations are fixed, he goes on to speculate that “so far from all nations being descended of one man, there are many races of men of quite different form and attribute”. “To suppose all races of men descended from one parent”, he concludes, “is as absurd as to suppose that an ass may become a horse, or an ouran-outan”.77 Several scholars have shown how Pinkerton’s writings reflect wider contemporary interest in articulating and constructing national identities.78 However, what makes him remarkable is that he takes the Scythian–Gothic idea, with its implications of common origins, and combines it with explicit polygenesis to argue for absolute and unchanging biological distinctions between different peoples in Europe. This unorthodox perspective makes it all the more intriguing that versions of this basic thesis—the displacement of Celts by migrating Goths—should be reproduced in mainstream reference encyclopedias well into the nineteenth century. Of course, the encyclopedias are not so openly heterodox, but the theory’s dissemination through Pinkerton’s Modern Geography lends an underlying ambiguity as to whether, in identifying different groups, the encyclopedias are arguing for variations of a single European race or for distinctive and separate groups.

76 77 78

Pinkerton, Dissertation, vi–vii. Pinkerton, “Essay”, xxiv–xxvi; idem, Dissertation, 186, 33. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830, rev. edn (London, 1997), 115; Robert Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650–1850 (New York, 2000), 188–9; idem, “British Geography’s Republic of Letters: Mapping an Imagined Community, 1600–1800, Journal of the History of Ideas 65/2 (2004), 261–73.

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The problem is heightened because Pinkerton’s ideas both confirm and unsettle the principle of European racial totality. He argues that one race has shaped Europe above all others: the Goths are “the real foundation of almost all European nations”, because the previous Celtic inhabitants were savage. But he also shows how migration and social interaction complicate this apparent wholeness. The Dissertation opens with a map entitled “State of the Nations at the Christian Æra”, which roughly depicts the spread of socio-racial groups across Europe, Asia and north Africa.79 No borders are shown—the names merely stretch across regions and over each other—providing a complex and imprecise picture of Europe’s “racial” identities. The Scythians spread from France to the Crimea, and Celts are confined to western France, Switzerland and Ireland. There are also a large number of Iberian and German peoples, but only one Italian group; and there are no Europeans further east than the Urals or the Black Sea. It is unclear how this map impacts upon Pinkerton’s wider purpose: does he intend to group these peoples as Europeans, resolving disparate factions into one composite European identity, or does he privilege the competitive drive that allowed one group to overwhelm others in an ancient struggle for the heart of Europe? Perhaps these intentions are not in conflict: in Modern Geography, Pinkerton constructs a common identity from difference, arguing that shared “nature” connects all Germans and all Italians—despite political fragmentation, these peoples are united by intrinsic similarity.80 By arguing that Europeans possess a Gothic–Scythian heritage Pinkerton may be continuing this same strategy, arguing that Europe can be considered as a whole precisely because one particular race has rendered it distinct—its unity predicated on the existence of “others”, notably Celts and Slavs. However, Pinkerton continually complicates his own insistence on the centrality of Goths. The Dissertation describes “the most prodigious and important [conflict] ever joined in Europe”, when Attila’s Huns, joined by Ostrogoths, fought Romans, Visigoths, Saxons and other groups. “Had Attila conquered”, Pinkerton speculates, “all Europe would now have been Hunnish or Turkish, instead of Scythic or Gothic”.81 Despite attempting to polarize European racial history into a face-off between Huns and Turks, and Goths–Scythians, Pinkerton confuses this division, first by describing so many groups interacting in Europe, and second by having Gothic peoples fight on both sides. Goths are both invaders and defenders of Europe against alien Huns. This “Gothic” Europe is its own “other”, defined by generations of Gothic–Scythian “nations” competing with each other, as well as outsiders and different “Europeans” (for instance, Celts). The emphasis on 79 80 81

Pinkerton, Dissertation, frontispiece. Pinkerton, Modern Geography, 1: 591–2, 625. Pinkerton, Dissertation, 196.


migration also causes conceptual problems. If, as Modern Geography asserts, Slavs and Scythians originated in Asia, then the racial, social and linguistic identities of Europe are consequently the result of migrating Asians. Clearly, this complicates any racial definition of Europe, suggesting that spatial movement and inhabitancy, rather than intrinsic abilities, make one European.82 Pinkerton’s formulation is not the only vision of a divided Europe. Fenning and Collyer’s New System of Geography (1765–6) investigates how different nations behave according to “Manners and Disposition”, a phrase which suggests the interdependency of dispositional and socially acquired differences. For this reason, when they discuss “Saxons, Picts and Britons” in ancient England, the distinctions are simultaneously innate (dispositional) and social (related to cultural mannerisms).83 The 1747 Complete System also identifies differences between and within states—Frenchmen, for example, are “brisk, gay and airy”. The work constructs innate explanations for social differences: it says that the British are naturally brave, as if Britishness is an ancient trait, extant before the state existed and thus not entirely traceable to social development. Importantly, this assertion connects racial identity with political states, suggesting that inhabitants of different state systems are essentially distinct from one another. The System devotes considerable space to formulating complex racial histories, making differentiations based on complexion and mythological origins (for example, descent from Noah, which might imply the unity of humankind). Paradoxically, however, the work also stresses the multiplicity of “ethnic” groups within one country: modern Britain, for example, contains Celts, Britons, Saxons, Danes, Picts, Irishmen, and Welshmen. Faced with this vast array of different peoples, the work makes no categorical distinction between Asians and Europeans: there are so many “racial” groups that it is a hopeless generalization to speak of dichotomous Asian or European ethnicities.84

european languages, european races Thus far this article has demonstrated the complexities of “Europe” as a homogenizing (racial) category in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This concluding section will reflect on how the identification of multiple European “races” in the period closely matches the philological categorization of language families. In some respects this is not surprising, given that investigation into the origins and derivation of peoples and languages grew 82 83

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Pinkerton, Modern Geography, 1: 10. D. Fenning and J. Collyer, A New System of Geography; or, A General Description of the World, 2 vols. (London, 1765–6), 2: 495. Complete System (1747), 1: 2, 596; 2: 68.

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from both theological study and the interpretation of biblical history (especially the stories of the Flood and the Tower of Babel). Indeed, even today theories about early language development are closely related to those concerning human physical evolution, cognitive development, genetic relationships and ancient migratory patterns. The terminology even overlaps: the linguist Steven Roger Fischer speaks of certain languages as being “genetically related”.85 According to Ivan Hannaford, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century inquiries into the origins and classification of humans developed in two directions: comparative anatomy and physical anthropology on the one hand, and a search for the “fundamentals” of speech and language on the other. William Jones’s linguistic studies cast these related enquiries into a more secular disciplinary framework: he suggested that “the methods and classification systems developed in physical anthropology could be applied to the scientific study of language”.86 In this way, some thinkers—Pinkerton among them—sought to establish connections between language (or philological groups) and “communal racial origins”.87 Discussing the development of nineteenth-century philology, H. F. Augstein notes how linguistic theories were employed to justify rivalries between ancient races: Franks and Gauls in France, Anglo-Saxons and Celts in Britain.88 In the early 1830s, J. G. Lockhart uses Ernst Jäkel’s The Germanic Origin of the Latin Language and the Roman Peoples (1831) to identify five “races” or “nations of Christendom” in Europe based on language: Celts, Teutons, Sclavonics, Laplanders/Finns, Greeks/Romans. Celts, for example, can be distinguished by their language and dialect: they call themselves “Erse”, which signifies not only their language, but also their racial identity.89 Encyclopedias of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also employ philological theory to identify and classify Europeans. The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia says that “the resemblance of languages” indicates the unity of European peoples and that they should cooperate through political agreement.90 More commonly, however, works identify linguistic divisions in Europe. Mid-eighteenth-century works favour a sixfold partition: the Complete System, Middleton and William Guthrie’s New System of Modern Geography all list Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Celtic, Slavonic and Gothic as the 85 86

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Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Language (London, 1999), 35, 53–4, 60. Hannaford, Race, 241–2. See also Sir William Jones, “On the Origins and Families of Nations, delivered to the Asiatick Society, 23 February 1792”, in idem, Discourses, 2 vols. (London, 1821), 2: 1–35. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, 115–16. See also Wilson, The Island Race, 3. H. F. Augstein, James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1999), 170–73. [J. G. Lockhart], “The Germanic Origin of the Latin Language and the Roman People by Ernst Jäkel”, Quarterly Review 46 (1831–2), 336–9. Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, 9: 239.


principal language groups.91 Early nineteenth-century encyclopedias, however, generally prefer three such “language families”: Latin, Teutonic and Slavonic.92 What I wish to emphasize is that classification of languages closely follows the terms used to differentiate “races”. The same terminology is therefore used to identify intrinsically distinct human groups and developmental social characteristics like language. To put it differently, acquired characteristics and essentialist ideas about “nature” are seen in terms of one another. The Encyclopaedia Londinensis, for example, defines “European” as both “an inhabitant” and “a native” of Europe, suggesting that “Europeanness” is both hereditary and socially acquired, both permanent and transitory.93 From a twenty-first-century perspective, this equation of the acquired and the innate is troubling, since it risks confusing social practice with alleged ethnic essentialisms. As this essay has shown, however, such apparent conceptual tension is partly a reflection of an eighteenth-century intellectual environment in which Maupertuis, Lawrence and others saw social causation and inherited “essence” as inseparably, though mysteriously, interdependent. This relationship has its roots in theological enquiry, where scriptural exegeses of “racial, national and linguistic division” were considered to be interrelated and mutually illuminating branches of theology and sacred history. Kidd suggests that, as the eighteenth century developed, racial discourse gradually became more secularized, but, crucially, it continued to combine “biological, climatic and stadialist interpretations of racial and cultural difference”.94 In other words, it was possible for environmental or societal factors to indicate (or even cause) “essential” hereditary characteristics, and for innate disposition to define social development. This background explains why it made sense in this period to connect discussions of “race” with analysis of language. For Prichard, ethnological theories of human variety could be supplemented and refined by linguistic study: “the history of languages was the key to the history of the human species”.95 Pinkerton’s methodology in the Dissertation is also very revealing, since he distinguishes and delineates racial groups (especially Goths from Celts and Slavs) according to “identity of language”, “familiar manners” and “the testimony of ancient authors”. Later he claims that “language is a most permanent matter, not even total revolution in nations can change it . . . When

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Complete System (1747), 1: 1; Middleton, New and Complete System, 2: 5; William Guthrie, A New System of Modern Geography, 5th edn (London, 1792), 60. The English Encyclopaedia, 3: 351; The Modern Encyclopaedia, 5: 77; The London Encyclopaedia, 22 vols. (London, 1826–9), 8: 677. Encyclopaedia Londinensis, 7: 85. Kidd, British Identities, 22–4. Augstein, Prichard’s Anthropology, xv.

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a speech changes, it is in many centuries; and it only changes clothes, not body and soul”.96 This is significant because it highlights how eighteenth-century racial thought is dependent upon textual study and classical authority as much as upon biological classification. But it also demonstrates that human societal developments and essential qualities are, to some extent, defined by one another, and that “race” can be extrapolated from language. In this way, Pinkerton’s formulations, despite their unorthodox content, reflect long-standing eighteenth-century problems regarding the understanding and categorization of physical and social differences between humans. However, by closely associating “essential” characteristics with language and other societal developments, early racial ideas also potentially legitimize later nineteenthcentury nationalist discourses about the unbridgeable divides between speakers of different languages. Maurice Olender notes that by the mid-eighteenth-century “it had become impossible to speak of nations or national histories without discussing the instrument with which they maintained their identity over time and conveyed ancestral values from generation to generation: namely language”.97 Condillac, for instance, identified language with the “genius” of a people and asserted that languages express the character of those who speak them: “Le caractère des Peuples influe sur celui des Langues”; “Par cette Histoire des progrès du langage, chacun peut s’appercevoir que les Langues . . . seroient une peinture du caractère & du génie de chaque peuple” (“the character of peoples influences that of languages”; “from this history of the development of language, everyone can perceive that languages are like a painting of the character and genius of each people”).98 By the later nineteenth century, Olender continues, “comparative philology frequently neglected history”; it regarded linguistic systems as “rigid structures that could not be eroded by time” and through which one could “stereotype” civilizations and behaviour. The connection between language and permanent human difference culminated in the idea of the “linguistic race”, where biological categories were identified by language, “intellectual aptitude” and “moral instinct”, rather than by physical features. Ideas about the IndoEuropean language family, for example, would eventually mutate into theories about the “white race”. In particular, the search for the non-Hebrew origins of European languages would become closely related to anti-Semitic theories about

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Pinkerton, Dissertation, xxi, 109. Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the NineteenthCentury, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 5. [Etienne Bonnet de Condillac], Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1746), 2: 197, 221. My translation.


the “Aryan” racial purity of certain European peoples.99 Martin Thom uses the terms “word-nation” and “tribe-nation” to indicate that, in the nineteenth century, “culture, language and race” were often assumed to be “isomorphic” or homologous concepts. In other words, (national) language and culture could identify “racial” types—that is, unchanging forms of behaviour and appearance guaranteed “by the continuity of a lineage”.100 While racial thought in this period thus remains indebted to eighteenthcentury parameters—for example the influence of biblical and classical study—it eventually leads to later nineteenth-century associations of language, nation and biology. This is not an inevitable or straightforward process; after all, the Scythian–Goth theory could easily legitimize transnational understandings of European commonality. However, the texts examined here contain multiple implications: sometimes they argue for a unified European race, and sometimes they detail competing racial groups coexisting in Europe. This unresolved debate broadens the scope for theorizing racial identity in the nineteenth century. It can facilitate a “white-man’s-burden” perspective, in which all white-skinned Europeans share a common superiority and purpose. But it can also justify European racial rivalry in which particular groups—Teutons, Aryans, Goths— dominate inferior European peoples as well as non-Europeans. In this way, early disputes about the “European race” sustain several ideological trajectories. But more widely, they show how eighteenth-century racial inquiry, which combines complex and diverse ideas about anatomical classification, climate, societal analysis, philology and ancient tradition, can, under certain circumstances, crystallize into the most reductive categorizations.

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Olender, The Languages of Paradise, 15–16, 57–63; idem, “Europe, or How to Escape Babel”, 5–9, 22–4. Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes, 224–7, 266.

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madame guizot and monsieur guizot: domestic pedagogy and the post-revolutionary order in france, 1807–1830∗ robin bates Department of History, University of Chicago E-mail: [email protected]

When the husband-and-wife team of Fran¸cois and Pauline Guizot looked at early nineteenth-century France, they saw an institutional wasteland where the Revolution had annihilated settled habits, mentalities, and structures. Beginning with collaborative work on pedagogy, they envisioned a new order adequate to the postRevolutionary era. In their imaginative universe, moral suasion ultimately trumps direct physical coercion. Resistance and manipulation subvert the imperious imposition of an iron will, while an abiding spiritual form of power comes from renouncing forceful commands in favor of sentimental ascendancy. They advanced this as an all-embracing social truth applicable to many different domains from domesticity to government. Their wide-ranging theory of human relations blossomed into the gouvernement des esprits (“government of minds”) which intellectually underwrote Fran¸cois’s Doctrinaire liberalism when he entered politics. Meanwhile, Pauline pursued her reflections on post-Revolutionary society in deceptively simple children’s stories which instantiate their philosophy in concrete human relationships.

François Guizot met Pauline de Meulan in 1807 through an act of intellectual chivalry. Daughter of a noble family ruined by the Revolution, she wrote brilliantly ∗

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Chicago to the Social Theory Workshop and to the Modern France Workshop, each of whose participants are thanked for their tough questions and sound advice. Paul Cheney, Barbara Duffin-Bates, Anthony La Vopa, Harold Mah, Gregory Malandrucco, Vicki Mistacco, Samuel Moyn, Alexandra Parfitt, Bill Sewell, and the journal’s three anonymous readers made this a much better paper by offering me fresh perspective, warm encouragement, and sober second thought. Finally, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Jan Goldstein, who has guided this project since its inception and who first introduced me to the intellectual terrain of post-Revolutionary France. My research was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant number 725-2004-9143. Translations from the French are mine, unless otherwise attributed.

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and anonymously to support her young sister and widowed mother. Her devotion touched Guizot—a young law student, fourteen years her junior, who yearned to join the world of letters. And she needed his help. Sapped by overwork and domestic cares, she had fallen so very ill she could not complete an important commission for the literary journal Le Publiciste. Guizot—never short of energy— decided to secretly supply the needful articles himself, on her behalf, and in secret. Moved by the generosity of her anonymous benefactor, she set about discovering who it had been. Soon they were collaborators, cofounding the periodical Annales de l’éducation in 1811. Partway through its run, they married. François and Pauline Guizot forged a remarkable intellectual partnership which they exalted into a sentimental communion until they became “always united, always one career, always one life.”1 Together they engaged with the predicaments facing a France still recovering from the profound shock of the Revolution of 1789. Their creed proceeded from their initial pedagogical work. It is all too easy to deprecate it as moralizing pap, notable only as a prologue to the subsequent political career of François Guizot, the grey eminence of the July Monarchy (1830–48). Sympathetic biographer Gabriel de Broglie skips lightly over the whole subject by mentioning offhand that Napoleonic censorship constrained Annales de l’éducation to treat its subject “without ever risking an allusion to politics.”2 As its last issue regretted, we have not always, however, been able to give our principles the full development to which they were susceptible. The virtues that we wished to inspire, the liberal ideas that we would have wanted to make prevail, often were too much in contradiction with the order of things established in the time when we wrote.3

Yet even this statement alludes to the significance of pedagogical reflection in formulating “liberal ideas.” Their educational writing provided a seedbed for a wide-ranging philosophy of human relations that would blossom into the gouvernement des esprits (a suggestive term that loses something by translation into “government of minds”4 ) and which would

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Guizot in H. De Witt, Monsieur Guizot dans sa famille et avec ses amis (1787–1871) (Paris, 1884), 68. G. de Broglie, Guizot (Paris, 1990), 36. Annales de l’éducation, III, XII (1813), 412–24. This phrase—perhaps coined by Victor Cousin but certainly adopted by François Guizot as his own—mobilizes the full semantic resources of the words gouvernement and esprit. Government connotes a state apparatus in French and English. In French, though, governance can carry subtler connotations of wisely directing something—as with the steering of a boat (gouverner le bateau) or the controlling of one’s emotions (gouverner le coeur). Thus the gouvernement des esprits can apply to domains beyond government as such. By the same token, esprit would translate as “mind,” but the English version has

madame guizot and monsieur guizot

intellectually underwrite a Doctrinaire liberal political project well into the 1840s. The gouvernement des esprits announced a theory of power: the imperious imposition of an iron will undercuts itself by provoking resistance in those it would command. Meanwhile, indirect moral ascendancy secures the lasting inward adherence that overwhelming force cannot. Suasion trumps coercion. The Guizots advanced this as an all-embracing social truth applicable to many different domains from domesticity to government. During the Restoration of 1814–30, François Guizot pursued it in explicitly political and historical writing, while Pauline Guizot forsook literary journalism in order to write the tales (contes) for children that won prizes from the French Academy in 1821 and 1828. Her ´ stories—along with a remarkable later tale by her niece Elisa Dillon—extend political arguments into concrete depictions of people who learn to change their lives and communities. The gouvernement des esprits enunciated a protean ethos of versatile application to any situation involving the wise exercise of authority, but domesticity assumed special prominence in its early theorization. Some of the keenest analyses of its dynamics occur in children’s literature, ingeniously capitalizing on resources unique to that genre. In some sense, the government of minds worked on this smaller stage in a way that it could not quite do on the larger one of public life. The reasons for this apparent paradox will take us to the very heart of the social form of post-Revolutionary France.

the post-revolutionary landscape The post-Revolutionary generation faced stiff intellectual challenges. Once, corporatist and seigneurial structures directly cemented pre-Revolutionary French civil society. Mediating between the sovereign and his subjects, they provided specific explanations for why social relations stood as they did. The end of seigneurial privilege on the night of 4 August 1789 and the obliteration of corporatism by the 1791 Le Chapelier Law disarticulated civil society from the state. France became a society of individuals, a proposition that seemed to verge on anarchy. Pierre Rosanvallon explains how “individuals could, then, no longer be implicitly considered as silent pawns, mechanically obedient to the injunctions more restricted application to the intellectual faculties alone. To be spirituel does not mean that one excels at ratiocination and cogitation so much as that one is understanding and insightful. Esprit also carries meanings proper to its English cognate “spirit,” as in a vital principle or animating character. Esprit de corps means the morale of a group and to have beaucoup d’esprit means that one is lively. The gouvernement des esprits, then, can signify an appeal not only to reason but also to moral principles like duty and affective states like love. Given the polyvalence of gouvernement and esprit, we begin to see how reflections on domesticity could apply so readily to high politics.

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of a mechanical administration,” since the Revolutionaries had disassembled that Old Regime governmental machinery and putative Revolutionary replacements had malfunctioned. The post-Revolutionary era marked a watershed in how the French thought about social relations. They needed a new sort of “interior” or “spiritual” power which did not emanate from a state “overhanging” civil society, but was coextensive with it.5 Meantime, disorder threatened. François Guizot charged the French government with a solemn duty to “deliver society from its daily fear of perishing,” in a country where all feared imminent chaos.6 It is a truism to say people fear disorder, but Rosanvallon suggests that such fears ran especially high in France because the Revolution had left institutional forms thin on the ground. France’s Revolutionaries eradicated particularizing powers—guilds, monasteries, parlements, estates, seigneuries, a whole network of structures that concretized social practice—to leave only state and citizen. Speaking to the Chamber of Deputies in 1819, Guizot proclaimed, The Revolution has bequeathed us, gentlemen, not only a new government, but a completely new society that in no way resembles that which preceded it, nor perhaps any other society past or present . . . [I]n France today there is no longer anything but the government and citizens or individuals . . . There scarcely remain any of those intermediate or local powers which are created elsewhere either by aristocratic patronage, or corporative ties, or private privileges.7

In contrast, as he often noted, across the Channel the English government set itself to the protection of such individual particularities and local autonomies which continued to regulate daily life.8 To highlight this point, let me compare two moralizing tracts: an English one by Hannah More and a French one by Madame Guizot.9 Both describe, from the vantage of someone high in the pecking order,

5 6

7 8

9

P. Rosanvallon, L’état en France, de 1789 a` nos jours (Paris, 1990), 114. ´ F. Guizot, Washington. Fondation de la république des Etats-Unis d’Amérique, vol. 1 (Paris, 1851), 4. F. Guizot, Histoire parlementaire de la France, vol. 1 (Paris, 1863), 8. Rosanvallon explains that “in the English case, democracy took hold only very slowly and gradually, and for a long time representative government served merely to guarantee certain liberties and privileges. That is why the old corporate bodies persisted there.” P. Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 73. Like most Frenchwomen of her generation, Pauline Guizot wrote under her husband’s name to retain respectability when speaking in public. This poses certain problems for posterity. Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York, 1991), 2–3, worries, “the ideological baggage transmitted along with ‘Madame de’ and ‘Mademoiselle de’ is far from negligible. In all Western traditions, great writers are known by a family name alone; dominant usage in French suggests that women writers are ladies first.” We may have trouble taking writers such as “Madame Guizot” seriously if


a hierarchical society in search of social peace. More’s characters do not live in a country which had just passed through a quarter-century of revolutionary upheaval. Law and public institutions seem solidly inescapable for them. But neither quite becomes real for Guizot’s. These contemporaries imagine the basic facts of social existence in a very different way. More told the story of respectable Mrs Jones, who starts a Sunday school for the good of the poor.10 When she assembles the poor women of the locality to warn them that they should send their children to the school or be held responsible for their eternal damnation, they immediately acquiesce. This done, she goes to rich Mr Hoskins to secure funding for her school. At first he frets that if his laborers became “scholars” they might “fly in my face.” She calms his fears: “Do you think either man, woman, or child ever did his duty the worse, only because he knew it the better?” Her school would bolster his authority, just as he in return should bolster it: “you must exert yourself besides in insisting that your workmen send their children, and often look into the school to see if they are there, and reward or discourage them accordingly.” Convinced, he gave a guinea to the good cause.11 Here is a robust social form, well able to handle challenges. Going home, Mrs Jones ran across an itinerant woman selling indecent song sheets to the local girls. Luckily, upstanding Mr Simpson happened along just then to halt this traffic in smut: “I am a magistrate as well as a minister, and if I know it, I will no more allow a wicked book to be sold in my parish than a dose of poison.” The humiliated vendor slunk away never to return. As for her farm girl customers, who witnessed the whole exchange, they thanked the minister–magistrate, threw away the insalubrious music, and “begged Mrs. Jones would take them into her school after they had done their milking in the evenings, that they might learn to read only what was proper.”12

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12

we call them by such names. Yet, historically, in this era women writers really were often considered “ladies first.” Furthermore, as we shall see, “Madame Guizot” designates a persona that is not necessarily coextensive with the personage of Pauline de Meulan. Beginning in the 1780s, Sunday schools swept England. Their massive enrollment of working-class children reached approximately 200,000 by 1800, topping 2,100,000 by 1851. France could boast nothing comparable. Nor can we well imagine an educational institution founded before the Revolution enjoying uninterrupted growth down to the 1850s. Each regime change would have imperiled its basic legitimacy. T. W. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven, 1976), xi. H. More, The Sunday School (London, 1796), 7–8, 12. This tract—its hectoring prose suffused by genre conventions—figures here as a contemporary representation of English society, rather than as documentary evidence of how genteel reformers selflessly saved the poor from themselves. Ibid., 13, 15.

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More’s uncomplicated celebration of social institutions has no real counterpart in Mme Guizot’s Jules ou le jeune précepteur. Jules de Villiers’s family has a country house. When they summer there, the ten-year-old walks down to the river during breaks in his educational routine, escorted by Maillard the gardener. Jules sees ragged children lolling on the riverbank, “as though it were all the same to them whether they amused themselves or were bored.” As in England, the poor have no morals. The young moralist gets into trouble when he tries to stop an older boy from stealing a nut from a little girl. Maillard drags Jules away, insisting that he should mind his own business. Jules feels confused. Hadn’t he done the right thing? He asks his father. Monsieur de Villiers explains that while Jules will always have the gentlemanly leisure to do good deeds, he must never again do them by trying to impose his will on others, despite his “good sentiments” and “useful knowledge”: no one ever respects anyone with whom they have had an altercation.13 Heeding his father, Jules takes his dinner down to the river in a basket, as a fund of potential rewards for children who do right. But he still works too mechanically and obviously. One boy has stolen a baton from another. Jules trades a pâté to the thief in exchange for the toy, which he restores to its rightful owner—who, on the whole, would rather have had the pâté. A fight ensues. Jules goes home defeated. The next day, though, he hits upon the right plan. Enlisting the help of Thibaut, who may be poor but “had a more intelligent air than the others, spoke a bit less badly and with less crude a tone,” Jules institutes games like running and boxing among the idle children. Playing these rule-governed games, they learn about justice. Soon they can regulate themselves in relative peace. But they remain a rough lot, so it seems wrong to leave faithful Thibaut with them. After determining that the boy is an orphan, M de Villiers takes him in—as Jules’s servant. Thibaut is ideally suited for his new life, “active, intelligent, and surprisingly compliant in learning all the new habits that one would want to give him.” Recognizing his master’s superiority, the little servant’s only idea is “to do as M. Jules does or to do what M. Jules wants.” Once they have grown up, Thibaut becomes the concierge of Jules’s property and they live together in perfect harmony “because esteem and mutual services had given each of them obligations to the other that they held equally dear.”14 Reading Guizot after More, you wonder where Mr Simpson is. Where is the avatar of the law who will stamp out immorality wherever it appears? There is only a naive little boy. And where is Mrs Jones? Where is the doughty institution-builder creating a durable framework to raise the poor up from ignorant licentiousness to consciousness of their duty? No one comes to the door 13 14

Mme Guizot, Jules ou le jeune précepteur (Paris, 1840), 19–20. Ibid., 8, 57, 119.


telling M de Villiers he ought to contribute a louis toward a Sunday school that will gather up the neglected children by the river in order to make them solid citizens and good Christians. De Villiers knows all about the river children—but uses them only as a pedagogical device for his son, who learns how to be a gentleman by interacting with them. Never could he follow Mrs Jones in unselfconsciously confronting the children’s parents with the plain fact that their sons and daughters are on the road to hell. The only decisive move he makes is adopting Thibaut, an action which itself discloses a larger incapacity to act on a social scale. It is as though a gentleman could do nothing for poor children, short of incorporating them into his household. This is where he can be effective. Elsewhere, matters are very uncertain. M de Villiers and son can certainly never just lay down the law, the way Mr Simpson and Mrs Jones do. To insist on their authority undermines it. Drawing attention to power invites resistance and manipulation. It is better to devise situations that draw the benighted into consciousness of their place in the world and its prevailing standards, without trying to overpower them. Authority worked best when it seemed to be just natural, no one’s project, with no determinate locus. It worked better in the milieu of domesticity than in civil society. It worked by persuasion, love, and good examples—not by confrontation, rules, and commands. Hannah More believed otherwise and, accordingly, Pauline Guizot pointedly criticized her.15 François Guizot spoke of this new post-Revolutionary social world when, critiquing the conduct of the French government during the Restoration, he insisted that although “direct and visible instruments” like prefects, tax collectors, and soldiers might seem like the expressions of power, they were not “the real means of government.” Perhaps this had once been true in an earlier age when the government could stand outside the nation to act upon it, but that time had passed. It now had to be admitted that “human society is not a field that a master will exploit; it lives by another life than the movement of matter; it possesses and produces its own surer means of government; it lends them freely to those who know how to handle them.” A good government ought to grasp these forces within society, not bear down upon the nation with mechanical instruments of its own device. In short, “it is vain to pretend to rule it [society] by forces external to its forces, by machines built on its surface but without roots in its depths and which do not take their principle of movement therefrom.”16 Monsieur Guizot has written a concise history of power in his times. Madame Guizot’s story of Jules

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She wrote about More several times, but addressed the Englishwoman’s idea that women should go around lecturing people about their Christian duty in Annales de l’éducation, II, XI (1811), 276–80. F. Guizot, Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition dans l’état actuel de la France (Paris, 1821), 128–30.

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registers the same transformations and announces the same objectives, though in a different way and a different theatre. Their view of power grasps a distinction of real import. Franco Moretti has said that the passage to modernity involved superseding mechanisms of power whereby “the spokesmen for the social . . . must be always physically there, ready to reiterate over and over again the dominant values, or else things fall apart.”17 Perhaps because the venerable structures of English life survived the eighteenth century intact, Hannah More envisions spokespeople for social morality marching hither and thither to reiterate such “dominant values.” Luckily, Simpson and Jones caught the song peddler red-handed. Had they not happened along, though, her activity would have demoralized the community. Things would have fallen apart. Meanwhile, the French historical experience had eviscerated the corps of social spokesmen along with the corps sociaux— but that very fact of sociopolitical upheaval pushed forward social theory. To put it Guizot’s way, the direct and visible instruments of power could never be everywhere at once and they worked but crudely. Government did not consist of “magistrates placed here and there like machines, to intervene only at fixed times and dates, in rare and regulated cases!”18 No, it was a spiritual principle overarching and determining the social order itself, whose extent must perforce exceed any specifiable personnel assigned to implement policies and enforce laws. Rosanvallon aptly remarks that post-Revolutionary liberals posited “the entropy of classic political technologies.”19 What terms, though, could convey such an epochal change? Denise Z. Davidson has discovered that, especially during the Restoration, the French struggled to identify “social markers” that could render post-Revolutionary society “legible” to people whose basic analytic categories derived from a disappeared Old Regime.20 Her study traces this problem through the development of new urban cultural practices, but it also extends into literature and political thought. To communicate the changed nature of power in his lifetime, for instance, François Guizot could not use any wellestablished explanatory sociology—but he could nonetheless allude to processes which he perceived, yet did not fully understand, as he spun lyrical and allusive metaphors about “another life than the movement of matter.” Jules ou le jeune précepteur, though of a different genre, communicates its message in a similar way by offering a parable about the “entropy of classic political technologies.”

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18 19 20

F. Moretti, “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History—3,” New Left Review 28 (July–August 2004), 43–63, original emphasis. F. Guizot, Moyens, 172. P. Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1985), 37. D. Z. Davidson, France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 2.


The deceptively simple story shows how the boy fails to the extent that he makes his personal intervention the necessary condition of instituting justice. The truly successful methods instill dispositions that do their work long after he has left the scene. The story’s charge comes from the sense that these methods require a deeper understanding of human nature than Jules initially has. To maximize the effect of his actions he must minimize the extent to which the other children perceive him as acting at all. The story’s setting also determines the meaning of its method by contextualizing it. As with so many of her stories, Pauline Guizot has Jules living in a tranquil provincial town—a milieu of which this lifelong Parisian knew very little before her marriage to François, a méridional from Nˆımes. In fact, her impression of a French countryside emptied of social forms and devoid of politics tallies with her husband’s reflections on the condition of the post-Revolutionary provinces. During a rare visit home in 1821, he sent a reflective letter to his confidant Prosper de Barante back in Paris. Guizot saw almost no identifiable public life in Gard. While he enjoyed the easy sociability of the gentlemen in his pays, he despaired that “in the present state of the administration and the social order, the departments are condemned to a state of political uncertainty [une politique expectante]; the smallest political activity is absolutely impossible for them.” Not only did this circumstance render the country ungovernable, it constituted a moral debacle. He described himself surrounded by useless good sense, by forces without ends, by conversations without purpose; I am astonished that there is still so much activity among people who do nothing and who have nothing to do; all of the men whose thoughts extend a little further than their domestic interests chew on an empty mouthful [mâchent a` vide], walk on the air, lose their time in guessing, in prophesying. There is something inconceivably false and supremely unpleasant in this obligatory nullity of all real influences, in this universal deprivation of all life forces.

This situation obviously had to change, but it had to do so in just the right way. There was no question of imposing a standardized public life from the outside. Waxing philosophical, he explained that “reason cannot come but from on high, that much is sure; however, life cannot come but from below; it is in the roots of the society as it is in those of a tree.” Below the surface of provincial life, a vital principle waited to flower forth. Its nature was of its own kind, its time would be its own, and none could impose a different stamp upon it, “for everywhere there is a government in embryo: one must accept it and regulate it.” It followed that one must never allow a central body in Paris to legislate its social vision on the departments—this had only ever preempted the true sources of national revitalization. Throughout the Restoration,

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he devoted considerable thought to where those true sources might be found.21

those slow and general causes After the fall of Napoleon brought forth the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, Guizot unexpectedly found himself in a position to advise the new monarch, as the deputy to the abbé de Montesquiou at the Ministry of the Interior. Louis XVIII (younger brother of the last pre-Revolutionary king, the guillotined Louis XVI) had passed a quarter-century in exile, so Montesquiou bid Guizot prepare a series of memoranda apprising Louis of the state of his realm. Guizot confided to his sovereign that France was an institutional wasteland. The social orders of the Old Regime had deliquesced, while no structures adequate to the new reality had yet crystallized: “our morals, broken and destroyed by so many successive reversals, no longer offer that ensemble of penchants and habits which alone can give force and consistency to institutions. Nothing has replaced these habits, these supports of morality.” The chaos prevalent in the disordered country had prevented any new moral sense from taking hold. Public life no longer conduced to the development of this moral sense, even though the new regime ultimately ought to take the reestablishment of public life as its proper goal. In fact, a suitable atmosphere still persisted only in one place, as isolated from society at large: if, after these fateful periods in our history, honorable sentiments have conserved their energy and their empire in France, we doubtless owe it to domestic exempla which our troubles have not had the time to erase, rather than to public doctrines which have tended only to denature and destroy pure and generous sentiments.22

To revitalize the country, the monarchy needed to tap the reservoir of moral potentials in the domestic sphere to repopulate the evacuated public sphere. Guizot feared that the king might overreach his grasp by mobilizing the full power of the centralized state to enforce his will. This mistake, he thought, had brought the downfall of the Empire. Napoleon’s obsession with strength had, paradoxically, made him weak. According to the Napoleonic style of rule, “authority was concentrated into a single point, and one applied oneself to increasing the number of its agents and extending their influence, without concerning oneself with winning the affection or exciting the zeal of its subjects.”23 The Empire governed this way because its basic nature precluded access to the

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Guizot in H. De Witt, Lettres de M. Guizot a` sa famille et a` ses amis, recueillies par Mme De Witt, née Guizot, 2nd edn (Paris, 1884), 10–11. F. Guizot, “Instruction publique,” Jan. 1815. Archives Nationales 42 ap 28. F. Guizot, “Instruction publique.”


“roots of the society.” Along with the mainstream of educated opinion during the Restoration (ranging from liberals such as Benjamin Constant to conservatives such as vicomte Chateaubriand), Guizot thought the Empire had originated in the illicit seizure of state power by a usurper without organic connections to the life of the country. He pinpointed the cause of these political problems in an elementary mistake of perspective. The state lacks the power to somehow remake society because it exists within it, rather than standing above it. Accordingly, government should translate existing social relations into institutional forms. Rosanvallon explains that in his eyes “the State is nothing but a product of the society,” so that “it is from [society] that it takes its form and its substance.” Law and policy should merely codify “the implicit rules that emanate from society and result from its natural functioning.”24 Guizot castigated the Empire for diverging from this principle. It tried to reshape France in its image, multiplying its agents and institutions to create a force sufficient for the purpose. The Empire sensed its basic illegitimacy, thus “felt the weakness and instability of its power: guided by this sentiment, it tried to invade everything, out of fear that whatever did not belong to it would be turned against it; the smallest germ of independence became for it the principle of its destruction.”25 The Empire exhausted itself overawing its subjects: Buonaparte was ceaselessly occupied with obligating all the French to concur with his wishes; his power was ceaselessly at war against the wishes and the interests of the nation, which he had to subdue to make obey him—he had to make us do by force that which we did not want to do.26

Against the unbridled license of the Revolution, Napoleon counterposed the principle of unchecked force. He utterly failed to establish a durable public authority this way, as he relied exclusively on “direct and visible instruments of power” with no spiritual reach. By telling this cautionary tale, Guizot meant to convince his king to adopt a very different mode of rule. Guizot’s contention that the state should look to “domestic exempla” in order to access “the roots of society” expresses more than a piety about family values. States wield immense powers to allocate resources, confer legitimacy and compel obedience—but, as social structures go, they tend toward instability. When he wrote his initial memorandum in 1815, France had seen eight regimes in his lifetime. Two more would follow that year. Politics are proverbially contentious: Bill Sewell suggests that “states and political structures are consciously established,

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Rosanvallon, Moment, 44–5. F. Guizot, “Instruction publique.” F. Guizot, “Note sur les difficultés du gouvernement et la situation du ministère,” 1816. Archives Nationales 42 ap 28.

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maintained, fought over, and argued about rather than taken for granted as if they were unchangeable features of the world.” Some structures, he explains, are powerful—able to directly mobilize social resources. Other structures are deep—seeming like aspects of humanity itself rather than historically specific constructions. Despite their power, states are not very deep. Just as Guizot implied of the Empire, whose overweening governmental apparatus and formidable army made it more powerful but less stable, the shallowness of the state follows from the nature of its power: “state structures are relatively mutable precisely because their massiveness (power) and the obviousness (lack of depth) of their resource effects make them natural targets for open struggles.”27 Writing in a post-Revolutionary context when the new regime had even less depth than usual, Guizot felt painfully aware of this paradox of the state making itself less durable as it sought to enhance its power. His metaphors about surface and depth, redolent of the literary salons he frequented, grasp a social-scientific postulate. In light of that truth, he and his wife tried to rethink the exercise of power. The gouvernement des esprits as a program sought to integrate the state with deeper social structures like the family and (as we shall shortly see) property, weaving it more tightly into the warp and weft of everyday life. The Guizots wanted the state to run according to a different dynamic. Perceiving a particular logic of human relations in the sentimentalist pedagogy which sought to regulate domestic life, they creatively applied it to a different domain. In effect, they transposed the relational schema governing one social structure to a range of others. This explains the elective affinity they saw connecting their pedagogy to “liberal ideas” which the Empire suppressed. Actually, in their hands “the Empire” becomes a component within a complex analytic device. “It can be argued,” says Melvin Richter, “that every western political vocabulary contains a regime type that designates total domination.”28 The Guizots thus said “Buonaparte” to designate a certain approach to the exercise of power: the acme of direct physical coercion as a means to induce consent. This, they felt, all too accurately described a certain self-undercutting potential of the state. They urgently needed to discover a new, “liberal,” structuring logic that could stabilize the state—could deepen its foundations—while retaining its power to govern. If he initially hoped that the restored monarchy could succeed where the Empire had failed, François Guizot soon grew disillusioned. The regime and especially the king’s influential brother the comte d’Artois (the future King Charles X) grew much more intransigently reactionary after Napoleon’s alarming 27

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W. H. Sewell Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 148. M. Richter, “Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy: Bonapartist Dictatorship and Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Theory 10/1 (May 1982), 185–214.


return to power during the Hundred Days. Guizot found himself gradually marginalized, then cast out of government entirely (even losing his history professorship at the Sorbonne). He lamented that the Restoration had fallen irretrievably into the same mistakes Napoleon had made: Buonaparte, in leaving France, did not take his government with him; he left a rich arsenal of laws, of instruments, of means of authority. What a temptation to men for whom every progressive system is forbidden, who do not know how and cannot go forward! the imperial machine lends itself to precisely this situation; it was destined for it.29

Faced with political instability resulting from the structural shallowness of a powerful state, the ministry tried to stabilize itself by wielding that power more forcefully—exacerbating the initial problem rather than solving it. Guizot looked on, horrified. Government had made itself so counterproductive that “everything is now up to the action of those slow and general causes which escape the hands of men, and quite often their awareness.”30 The reconsolidation of French civil life would not be happening thanks to the policies of the state, whose clumsily ham-fisted authoritarianism bitterly disappointed him. One later Madame Guizot story gives a tantalizing glimpse of what such a reconsolidation of French civil life would look like if it grew entirely out of the above-mentioned “domestic exempla,” which would act as one of those “slow and general causes” whose operation no ministry had foreseen. We owe this story not to Pauline de Meulan but to a second Madame Guizot, her niece Elisa Dillon. In an arrangement which Pauline apparently blessed shortly before dying of consumption in 1827, Elisa married François—sixteen years her senior—in 1828.31 Though not quite her aunt’s double, she was on some level meant to take her place (François even remarked, “Elisa, she was Pauline when young”32 ). Elisa now took up the role of her husband’s literary counterpart—a role which, as a member of the Guizot household since her teens, she had observed her aunt playing and assisted so far as she could. The only work she published before her own untimely death in 1833, following complications from a difficult childbirth, was Caroline, ou l’Effet d’un Malheur, extraordinarily similar to the work of her late aunt in its subject matter and moral. The story follows the Manzay family, especially the eponymous girl Caroline, from childish self-obsession into civic-minded maturity. As in her 29 30 31

32

Guizot, Moyens, 23. Guizot in Lettres de M. Guizot, 47, 51. Pauline Guizot had long since realized that she would predecease her husband. Accepting the reality of her situation, she charged her friend Albertine de Broglie with a “positive commission” to ensure that he would remarry after her death. She further confided that she hoped he would choose Elisa. Broglie in E. P. Brush, Guizot in the Early Years of the Orleanist Monarchy (Urbana, 1929), 57. Guizot in De Witt, Monsieur Guizot dans sa famille, 96.

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aunt’s Jules story, we find ourselves in the midst of a French community that has been hollowed out. This time, however, the scope for successful intervention seems exponentially greater than anything open to Jules de Villiers. Elisa Guizot came to intellectual maturity in her mid-twenties, perhaps not coincidentally just as her new husband triumphantly reentered public life under the moderate Martignac ministry of 1828. She brought to the conte a robust sense of the possibilities for social reform outside the confines of domesticity, but always on the basis of a sentimentalist ethos formed therein. She believed that this mission particularly suited the predispositions of women, for “they have affection, sympathy, an imagination easy to kindle [émouvoir], tears quick to flow, tender and penetrating words, all that which makes human creatures mutually understand and accept each other, almost to love each other, even if they never see each other except in passing.”33 These sentimental affections, formed in familial experience, would bind together a stable post-Revolutionary community whose creation had hitherto eluded politics. Her story of Caroline de Manzay supplies us with the example of a young woman who succeeds at doing just this, in just this way. The progressive, well-educated Monsieur de Manzay made his money in Paris. Years ago, however, he moved his family to a country chateau once owned by the ancient Solanges family. The Solanges, landlords of the old school, had benevolently overseen all the affairs of the little people in the village of Montfort. But they never managed to understand the changes modernizing the French economy. They lost everything. Before the story proper even begins, they have sold their estate to the Manzays and moved away. Though more up-to-date and enlightened than their predecessors, the Manzays never take the same lively interest in the daily round of peasant life. They attend to their own domestic bliss, caring for their children and cultivating their minds, without a thought for the wider world. As a result, “people thought they were indifferent, because they were exclusive; proud, because they were self-absorbed, and every day they regretted the departure of Monsieur and Madame de Solanges.”34 The story begins, then, in the post-Revolutionary France becoming a society of individuals as the vestiges of the old order crumbled away. The Manzays incarnate this problem of social atomism, but they will remedy it by the end of their tale. They will do it, moreover, not by abandoning domesticity but by acting on its basis.

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E. Guizot, “De la charité et de sa place dans la vie des femmes,” in F. Guizot, Mémoires pour servir a` l’histoire de mon temps, vol. 2 (Paris, 1859), 457–76. This 1828 essay only appeared in print as an appendix to the second volume of Guizot’s memoirs. Mme Guizot, Caroline, ou l’Effet d’un malheur, suivi de Aglaé, ou Les Tracasseries. Contes dédiés a` la Jeunesse (Paris, 1840), 94.


We find our heroine Caroline de Manzay, the cosseted daughter of Monsieur and Madame de Manzay, consumed with egoism and spoiled by parents who lavish all the more care on her since they have lost seven previous children to illness. They indulge all her whims lest the smallest hardship should undermine her frail health. She has outgrown her youthful frailty by the time we meet her at the age of fifteen, “but Caroline had long since been habituated to getting her own way [à faire sa volonté], and the effect had outlived the cause. She knew no other rule but her own caprice.”35 She has many good qualities—but, unused to constraint, explodes with rage if contradicted. Here is the titular “effect of an illness” (effet d’un malheur). Caroline’s childhood has left her with an egoism that, in a way, mirrors the situation of her insular family within their community. The central drama of the story concerns Caroline overcoming her own egoism. The process begins when her twenty-year-old cousin Robert de Puivaux calls her a spoiled child. She resents the insult. We, however, see her petty selfishness when she interacts with her young cousin Denis and her ten-year-old brother Etienne— as does Caroline’s invalid mother, who pointedly refrains from defending her daughter. Robert, a brilliant student at the Ecole polytechnique who is visiting his uncle M de Manzay in the country, decides that his cousin has been spoiled rotten and he takes it upon himself to upbraid Caroline for her tantrums. However, as so often happens in the Guizot universe, direct confrontation only makes things worse. Watching his misbegotten interventions, we perceive a defect in Robert. He means well, but lacks empathy: “naturally serious, and disposed to regulate his conduct according to what he saw as reason and duty, he could not understand Caroline’s fickleness.” Seeking to make up for the indulgent laxity of Caroline’s parents, he seized every occasion to show her “his disapproval and disdain; and in keeping with the unfavorable sentiment which she inspired in him, he did not recognize the good qualities that hid themselves behind this inauspicious appearance, and which the future would unveil.”36 It should go without saying that by the end of the story Robert and Caroline will wed. In the meantime, however, each must overcome an equal and opposite character flaw. Caroline must first outgrow her selfishness to realize the duties she owes her family. These duties are brought home to her by her mother’s death after years of illness. Overcome by grief, her father withdraws into himself. The old servant Pierre sees that the Manzays are in trouble, so he gently suggests to Caroline that she must do something. Suddenly, she has an epiphany. As she thinks about her attentive father, who now seems so lost and alone, she realizes all that he must have given up for her. He had devoted himself to her education, which he personally directed, giving up all of his previous interests and diversions. He had 35 36

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 20.

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given her everything and asked nothing in return. “And her, what had she done for so much affection?” Deep emotions well up within her, teaching her the lessons that her cousin’s reprimands could not. In a tearful scene, she goes to her father and pledges that she will take her mother’s place (“Embrace me, my father, I want to correct all my faults, and be like Mama”)—even summoning her little brother Etienne to solicit his approval to become his mother from that moment forward.37 The power of sentimental bonds between family members has dispelled her selfconfessed egoism. Ensconced in a motherly role ratified by sentiment, if not exactly kinship, sixteen-year-old Caroline ably knits her family back together. Familial duty inexorably leads Caroline to civic duty. Her rebellious younger cousin Denis, who has lived with them since the death of his parents, seems well-nigh impossible to teach. No tutor can control him. Caroline’s distant and abstracted father offers no help. He halfheartedly suggests sending the boy away to a collège for some discipline, but Caroline knows that harshness will only entrench his defiance. This is a low point. She and Denis engage in a stalemated war of position, their wills clashing without any real resolution ever emerging. Whether or not she gained the upper hand at any particular moment, “she was agitated, chagrined, and felt astonished every day to find life so laborious, duty so difficult.”38 Having exhausted her domestic resources to deal with the situation, she turns to the wider world. She stumbles upon a newspaper article extolling an innovative school in the distant village of L. . . ., which teaches by “mutual instruction.”39 It occurs to her that Montfort could use such a school, that it might help Denis, and that she could open it. As an unexpected bonus, her newfound zeal rouses her father from his torpor. Until then, he had usually shut himself away with his own thoughts and his own private studies, becoming a man who wasted his life “in generous but useless emotions, in beautiful but sterile conceptions, who had never tried to communicate his ideas to others.” Inspired by his daughter’s example, however, he begins to consider a reality beyond the walls of his study and throws off his “insouciant languor.”40 By reaching outside the family, prompted by the sentiments it had engendered in her, Caroline can finally solve two problems whose solution required forces it could not furnish. For present purposes, leave aside the details of the innovative method Caroline champions. Suffice it to say it is innovative and she is its champion. As wise M de Manzay knows, innovation arouses suspicion. He advises her to have a chat

37 38 39

40

Ibid., 27, 34. Ibid., 66. “L. . . .” probably alludes to Joseph Lancaster, the English educationist whose Lancastrian System of mutual instruction seems like the model for the pedagogy that Caroline will practice. Guizot, Caroline, 102.


with the priest before she actually takes the step of opening the school. It does not go well. The priest reacts with resentful frustration at this presumptuous girl from a family that has so shamefully neglected so needy a community for so long. After curtly rebuffing her repeated entreaties, he contemptuously dismisses her, saying “Go away, Mademoiselle Caroline, play piano, embroider, enjoy yourself, but don’t pretend to teach others; we can do without you for that.”41 He reduces her to tears. She cannot understand what happened. Indeed, the priest’s response seems wholly disproportionate. This is because it actually expresses the deepest divisions in French society rather than any considered appraisal of a girl he scarcely knows. To open her school, she must first heal those old wounds. She gets help from an unexpected quarter: the priest. Filled with remorse, he apologetically explains himself upon a chance meeting with Caroline a few days later. He admits to holding a long-standing grudge against her father, because he once heard him praise the Revolution as a “glorious event”: “From that moment everything was finished between us; he seemed to me like a Jacobin ready to set fire to our church and once again force us to say Mass in the woods.” When he heard about the school, he thought it must be M de Manzay’s scheme to shoulder him aside and wrest control of the village. It had given him pause, however, to see the deeply sincere Caroline in tears. He reflected and it came to him that he was being irrational and his fears had been misplaced all along. He has done a disservice to the whole parish: “Monsieur votre père has the best of intentions; he is full of compassion [plein de coeur] for the poor, and nevertheless, I asked nothing of him, and did not profit from such a good neighbor.”42 Now, perhaps, they can make up for lost time. With the priest onside, the school opens and he steers the villagers in its direction. Meanwhile, M de Manzay spearheads agricultural improvement and other good causes. Instead of jealous factionalism, charitable fraternity reigns supreme. Finally, to cap it all off, Robert the disapproving cousin returns from the Polytechnique. Having inherited the family estates, he resolves to rejuvenate them with his newfound technical expertise by establishing useful manufactures there. These estates being near Montfort, he inevitably meets Caroline and is impressed by how she has changed. She awakens in him tender sentiments he never knew he had. Under her influence, he loses his judgmental inflexibility. Though vicissitudes predictably intervene, it soon becomes obvious that they were made for each other: all of their affections were in common; Robert had no family but Caroline’s; their interests were similar; neighbors in the country, they had to work for the good of the same people;

41 42

Ibid., 78. Ibid., 88.

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Robert’s workmen were the sons, the brothers, the husbands of Caroline’s protégés; their opinions accorded, their tastes were parallel; finally, everything in them attracted them one to another.

The story ends with their marriage, under the approving gaze of M de Manzay. Indeed, the newlyweds will continue the projects initiated by the bride and her father: “The two chateaux belonged to the same commune, to the same parish, had the same interests, and the good that M. and Mme. de Puivaux did would be the continuation of what M. and Mlle. de Manzay had done.”43 The community’s future was assured. Once desolate, it thrummed with useful activity. Once factionalized, it overflowed with comity. It was all thanks to one teenage girl. More than that, it was thanks to the effusions of sentiment which motivated her and to the form which the family had given those sentiments. The story illustrates Suzanne Desan’s thesis that following the Revolutionary assault on “Old Regime sources of social cohesion,” an ideological turn to the conjugal family positioned it as “a ‘natural’ force for social unity.”44 But what sort of family could restore social unity? The Manzays differ markedly from the ruined Solanges family which for generations had presided over village life. The Manzays do, however, resemble the heroes of all the contes written by both the Mesdames Guizot. These fictional families seem gentlemanly, with chateaux and servants. Displaying as they do the nobiliary particle, their very names bespeak gentility: de Villiers and de Manzay and de Puivaux. Yet they do not appear aristocratic. They eschew titles, have no ties to the court, and do not stress their lineages. One might almost call them bourgeois, except they seem to lack the requisite involvement with industry, finance, or commerce. Robert de Puivaux wants to improve manufacturing and M de Manzay wants to improve agriculture, but their pursuits seem more like avocations than occupations. They may just as likely live from rents. Their precise social position remains indeterminate. Despite their wealth, these families occupy no definite place in their communities—even though they have much to offer them, at least potentially. Doctrinaire liberals believed that the natural elite of post-Revolutionary France existed as a pregnant principle which had not yet taken shape because the quixotic ultra-royalist denial of the present had precluded its assuming sociological contours: “it is impossible that the veritable, the natural aristocracy of the new order should already be formed and properly distributed across the surface of the country.”45 Since no one could quite predict the eventual form of this new meritocracy, no one really knew what social logic government should express. 43 44

45

Ibid., 147, 152–3. S. Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004), 46. Guizot, Moyens, 161.


Consequently, public reason never appeared as a unitary principle amenable to embodiment in a single agency—whether an absolute monarch or a sovereign people—which could act straightforwardly on its behalf. “On the contrary,” Vincent Starzinger tells us, “reason was elusive, multifarious, and fragmentized throughout all the various interests of society,” awaiting some force which could aggregate and assemble its disarticulated components.46 Given time, the process of representative government would draw together reason from the far reaches of the country where its fractions latently awaited recombination into a coherent whole. In this manner, says Rosanvallon, “the Doctrinaires resolved in a sociological mode the problem posed by the combined presence and absence of reason.”47 During the July Monarchy which succeeded the Restoration in 1830, this political theory upheld a juste milieu based on the sovereignty of reason—as opposed to either reactionary divine right or revolutionary popular sovereignty— where the collective spirit of this natural elite represented reason acting in the world. If elitist liberalism held that “in every society there is a sum of just ideas and legitimate wills that are unequally dispersed among individuals,” then these fragments of reason coincided with the local notability—respectable men whose wealth rooted them in the social order, ensuring that they would make decisions with the whole of society and its long-term interests in mind.48 This doctrine made a virtue of necessity. The tortuousness of overland travel and the narrowness of the civil service constrained government to rely upon this notability for the everyday maintenance of order. Such abject dependence upon the notables “put the State at the mercy of preponderant local interests.”49 Representative government activated these notables not as freestanding individuals but as local expressions of an underlying social logic. Lucien Jaume explains that the Doctrinaires wished “to bypass the individual qua atom of citizenship . . . to valorize this individual as the bearer of an influence or the vector of a social clientele; but it is no longer the individual qua abstract subject of a liberal politics, it is the situated and enrooted notable.”50 In 1816, Guizot put the matter baldly by supporting high property qualifications on voting. “In society,” he proclaimed, “there are natural, legitimate electors, readymade electors, whose existence precedes the thought of 46

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V. E. Starzinger, Middlingness: Juste Milieu Political Theory in France and England, 1815–48 (Charlottesville, VA, 1965), 35. P. Rosanvallon, “François Guizot and the Sovereignty of Reason”, in S. Moyn, trans. and ed., Democracy Past and Future, (New York, 2006), 125. A. Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, 2003), 219. A.-J. Tudesq, Les grands notables en France (1840–1849): Etude historique d’une psychologie sociale, vol. 1 (Paris, 1964), 113. L. Jaume, L’individu effacé, ou le paradoxe du libéralisme fran¸cais (Paris, 1997), 136.

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the legislator and whom he must simply set about discovering.”51 Manzay the enlightened landowner would probably be this kind of person (whereas one gets the impression that Pierre the servant will not qualify). He partook of the rising, vital forces in social life. The projects of such as him would, it was hoped, create a stable society safe from revolutions. Guizot imagined government as an immanent spiritual force working through such situated local actors. Introducing his signature elementary-schools law in 1833, he would not envision a centralized institutional administration controlled from Paris but rather an ensemble of local projects administered by the natural elite of each commune and arrondissement—men, “by their position, strangers to the pettiness of the local spirit, and possessed of the fortune, the enlightenment and the leisure which their duties demand.”52 Government policy would not subsume them, but pervade them with a moral influence to activate them as part of a national order. They, in turn, would transmit this moral influence to the common people with whom they came in contact. A spiritual mode of governance would arise—never limited to a determinate locus which could be identified and resisted, all the more effective and profoundly implanted for being incorporeal. He told the Chamber of Deputies, Power . . . does not only consist in positive acts and the materials by which they manifest themselves; it does not always issue in ordinances and circulars. Authority over minds, moral ascendancy, that ascendancy so in keeping with free countries, for it determines the will without commanding it, is an important part of power, and perhaps the most effective. It is also, to be sure, that whose reestablishment is the most necessary for our homeland today. We have known very active, very strong powers capable of great and difficult things; but . . . they have almost always missed moral ascendancy, that easy, regular, unseen empire.53

This pronouncement reiterates the obsolescence of “direct and visible instruments of power,” the superiority of moral to physical power, and the futility of direct commands when compared to pervasive influence. A renovated post-Revolutionary social order would emerge as a moral principle uniting one mind to another to form a veritable gouvernement des esprits. Elisa Guizot’s characters make Montfort into a unit of such a stable postRevolutionary order. While she did not remember the Revolution, she shared the endemic fear that a new insurrection might begin at any moment unless social relations were put on a sounder footing. The vector for this new upbuilding of 51

52

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Guizot in E. Waresquiel and B. Yvert, Histoire de la Restauration, 1814–1830: Naissance de la France moderne (Paris, 2002), 209. F. Guizot in L’Instituteur, Journal des écoles primaires. 1er année.—janvier et février 1833. Nos. 1 et 2 (Paris, 1833), 252. M Guizot, Mémoires pour servir a` l’histoire de mon temps, vol. 1 (Paris, 1858), 361.


the social would be preeminently sentimental, endowing the ties between people and classes with an affective charge. She worried, The word equality resounds ceaselessly all around us: what terrible passions, what mad hopes it awakens! . . . Let us nevertheless take care not to oppose them only with force . . . There must be charity—amicable, sympathetic charity, ardent not only to comfort the poor, but to touch their soul, to banish envy and anger from it, to reestablish, to maintain between the different classes those easy and gentle relations that are the veritable peace of society.54

The phrase “those easy and gentle relations” seems like “that easy, regular unseen empire,” repositioned to a sentimental rather than political context. Or perhaps she merely uses sentiment to describe social relations at a level of concrete immediacy that political theory seldom examines. Her sentimentalism holds great interest. After the brief but spectacular hegemony during the early 1790s of a public idiom of politicized sentiment as a compulsory vocabulary of citizenship, the chastened French retreated from this political style so fatally identified with the Terror. There followed a “process of relocation by which feeling was gradually relegated to a secondary role, to a better past or a utopian future, or to a safe haven in the feminine space of the home.”55 Sentiment now pertained to the intimate sphere, not the public (which ran according to reason, virtue, and honor). Yet the separation of public from private did not preclude continuous interchange between them. As with the enlightened Scotswomen rediscovered by Jane Rendall (one of whom, the philosophical pedagogue Elizabeth Hamilton, Pauline de Meulan found especially inspiring) reading the Mesdames Guizot “requires the transcendence of sharp distinctions between public and private worlds and an understanding of the different possibilities of familial, social, civic and patriotic identities.”56 If the Revolution featured sustained attempts at “building politics out of intimacy”—as Desan believes after reviewing republican idealizations of marriage, motherhood and love—we have recovered a nineteenth-century attempt at so doing, only now with an emphatically anti-Revolutionary purpose.57 Domesticity, as shown in the stories of Jules and Caroline, offered a wellspring of pure values to remedy the spiritual deficit of a public realm eerily devoid of interpersonal bonds. 54 55

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Guizot, “De la charité,” 475. W. M. Reddy, “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 72 (March 2000), 109–52. J. Rendall, “‘Women That Would Plague Me with Rational Conversation’: Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs, c.1790–1830,” in S. Knott and B. Taylor, eds., Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Houndmills, 2005), 342. S. Desan, “The Politics of Intimacy: Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution,” in Knott and Taylor, Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 644.

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When he imagined a stable social order, François Guizot thought that “the spirit of family, the empire of domestic sentiments and morals, will play a principal role here. The family is, now more than ever, the first element and the last defense of society.” The mobility, egoism, and atomism of modern France would plunge it into disjunctive chaos “unless the domestic life which is distributed throughout the territory—its calm activity, its permanent interests, its immutable ties—puts up solid barriers against this peril.” The domestic family offered a “tutelary asylum” wherein “private morality, the base of public morality, maintains itself most surely. It is also there, and today almost uniquely there, where that affective part of our nature . . . develops itself.” “Affections” engendered herein could “diffuse themselves elsewhere, to the honor and the profit of society.”58 These sentiments originate in a separate sphere that can be projected into public life as the affective basis of a post-Revolutionary social settlement. Indeed, the perceived distance of its domestic origin from politics gives sentiment a political utility as something more primarily and elementally human. Since pure feeling definitively excluded political calculation, its sincere expression ruled out contentiousness. Caroline and her tears of uncomprehending innocence ultimately reconcile her liberal father with his erstwhile foe the reactionary priest, surmounting the traumatic revolutionary experience. Behind all these stories, with all their earnest morals, lurked a baleful specter of revolution. François and Pauline Guizot both lost their fathers in the Revolution. His was guillotined. Hers, stripped of his office and fortune, died of illness and despair. Neither of their mothers remarried. The fact of their loss was forever present before them. Their experience of the Revolution, more than anything else, mandated their creation of a spiritual form of power that would never provoke resistance. Their friend Charles de Rémusat said of Pauline that “what she hated about the Revolution was force.”59 Force meant the Terror and resistance meant the Revolution. Her children’s tales teach these lessons to young people who lack political consciousness but understand simple personal relationships. More profoundly, they use these personal relationships to suggest the political implications of everyday life. Sometimes she spelled out these implications. One tale has M de Bonnel reasoning with his son Auguste. Auguste is bullying Georget, son of the servant Antoine, and Bonnel knows he must put a stop to such a great abuse. Auguste— unmoved by paternal exhortations to make nice—feels he has only exercised his rightful prerogatives to treat Georget as he likes, since Georget is destined to be 58 59

M Guizot, De la démocratie en France (Leipzig, 1849), 66–8. C. de Rémusat, “Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Mme Guizot,” in Mme Guizot, Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur l’homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes, l’éducation, etc., vol. 1 (Paris, 1828), xix.


his servant someday. His father advises otherwise. Masters can expect to have their orders followed, but not to mistreat their servants with impunity. He warns his son, “If you wish to constrain him by force to do something that he doesn’t want to do, then he will lose respect, he will resist you so far as he is able, and he will have the right.”60 Auguste objects. Even then masters can force servants to obey by virtue of membership in a master class. Masters can, for instance, throw servants out onto the street without any certificate of recommendation and thereby make it impossible for them to get another job. No servant would risk this fate. His father admits that this may be true. However, following his son’s move to what is effectively a social-class level of analysis, Bonnel tries again. If all masters did as Auguste advises, all servants would revolt. Then no one would give anyone any orders anymore. Auguste meets the challenge, cleverly positing the statistical unlikelihood of all masters being nasty simultaneously. One unjust master would hardly disrupt the commanding position of all masters as a grand fraternity. Confronted by this precocious formulation of the free-rider problem, his father tries another tack. The course Auguste wants to pursue would violate a social compact: Masters and servants, having need of one another, have felt that it was to their advantage, for the one [class] to be good, for the other [class] to be submissive and respectful: it is therefore because there are many good masters that it is advantageous for them to serve, that servants respectfully serve even the bad [masters]. Thus he who abuses this respect is a coward who profits from that which others do well to do evil with impunity, while hiding himself behind them [the do-gooders].61

Why should Auguste be good? The continuance of the status quo depends upon it. Again and again in the contes, problems spiral up and up through successive domains of social life. Here we start with a spat between two children, which impinges upon the peace of the household, which in turn would threaten a class war, which leads us to consider the most fundamental agreements which bind society. These tales impart a sense that the deepest potentials and problems of human society are present within everyday life.

between two worlds Children’s literature as a genre supplied a perhaps surprisingly apt vehicle for certain kinds of intellectual work in the early nineteenth century. François Guizot’s biographer Douglas Johnson distinguishes between treating education

60

61

Mme Guizot, “Le devoir difficile. Troisième dialogue,” in Jules ou le jeune précepteur, 186–95, 192. Ibid., 195.

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as a philosophical problem and as an administrative one. In fact, he goes on to say, this is also the difference between Guizot during the Restoration and Guizot during the July Monarchy.62 It may seem odd to those who know him best for the Guizot law on elementary schooling to see how very skeptical and guarded he felt during the Restoration about what role the state should play in social reform. Social progress seemed foreclosed through political channels. In this context, education took on heavy conceptual and emotional freight because in practice a stable national order seemed so difficult to establish. Education offered commentators a virtual “theatre of society” (as the governess–authoress Félicité de Genlis put it) wherein they could play out issues of authority, human relations and social order.63 Their writings could summon up and suggest a renovated and revitalized society by tapping into the sentimental interpersonal bonds and the natural forces coursing through vital human bodies. In doing so, they placed an uncertain venture in a context both wholesome and familiar (i.e. domesticity and childhood). Stories offer special resources for people who want to convince, but never to confront. Narratives, says Priscilla Murolo, “whatever the aims of their writers, suggest answers to questions concerning human agency: How can people affect the world around them? What can they expect to achieve? Why do they succeed or fail?”64 Literature shapes opinion in a way suitable for people wary of overtly imposing agendas upon others. Moretti opines that, since literature presents itself as imaginary, it can “act unobserved, eluding the conscious control of its user”—inculcating principles and opinions without actively engaging the critical faculties as an avowedly factual argument would.65 Thinking back to the story of Jules, we can see that its main character and his author both worked this way. Pauline Guizot envisions how power should operate and perhaps she is all the more persuasive because she does not set forth her views as an argument—instead couching them in a narrative that seems to replicate the structure of real life but to have no authorial agenda to push. In this literature, the text was supposed to approximate nature because sentiment guided its production. At the same time, sentiment looked natural because it was elaborated in an aesthetic medium given to persuasively simulating 62 63

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D. Johnson, Guizot: Aspects of French History, 1787–1874 (London and Toronto, 1963), 102–3. Mme de Genlis, Théaˆ tre de société (Paris, 1811). The term théaˆ tre de société generically referred to closet dramas suitable for private performance among family and friends, but Genlis is clearly playing upon this term in her book. P. Murolo, “History in the Fast Lane: Howard Fast and the Historical Novel,” in S. P. Benson, S. Brier and R. Rosenzweig, eds., Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia, 1986), 63. F. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. S. Fischer, D. Fischer and D. Miller (London, 1988), 32.


reality, “entwining itself with the stuff of spontaneous experience and the roots of language and gesture. Precisely on this account, it is able to naturalise itself, to proffer itself as ideologically innocent.”66 Literature could create an environment of pervasive suggestion wherein a certain vision of human nature was modeled for, and recommended to, the young (and their parents). It could suggest all the more compellingly because it did not call attention to the fact that any suggestion was meant. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, this educational literature will inculcate a habitus rather than exhort readers to comply with a law-like code of conduct. Instead, these works insinuate something more like principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them.67

The long readings of stories in this essay mean to show a process of reflection concretized in them, to relate that process to a wider sociopolitical context in post-Revolutionary France, and to reflect on how these works might interact with that context. Why would Pauline and Elisa Guizot favor fiction, which François avoided?68 Without stooping to reductionism, gender probably played a part. Fiction opened a welcome avenue to woman intellectuals barred from the higher education requisite for the academy or liberal professions. If they wrote stories, rather than treatises, no one would quibble over their scanty credentials. Furthermore, writing a conventional argument might expose women to misogynistic ridicule or paternalistic condescension. Genlis said in 1811 that fiction allowed women “that practiced subtlety of making understood what they dare not explain . . . without making statements that one could cite as a positive avowal.”69 Writing about social problems in a story for children made such reflection acceptable in a woman by assimilating intellection to motherhood. In his posthumous appreciation of Pauline Guizot, Charles de Rémusat praised her for exemplifying how motherhood defined womanhood. Her career reconfirmed the fact that

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67 68

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T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London, 1976), 20. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, 1977), 72. The only conte he published was “Un premier jour de collège, conte” in Annales de l’éducation, II, VII. Mme de Genlis, De l’influence des femmes sur la littérature fran¸caise, vol. 1 (Paris, 1826), xxii. I was drawn to this citation by C. Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, 2001).

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even when imperious circumstances or a no less powerful vocation have forced [women] to extend the circle of their activity and their influence . . . the ties and the sentiments of the family, the cares and tasks of the interior life, still absorb the greatest portion of their time and their energies, and compose the better part of their happiness.70

Everything she wrote communicated her motherly role and womanly being. It was organic to the conte’s aesthetic that its readers could discern edifying traces of both in its pages; authorship by “Madame Guizot” was constitutive of its meaning. She knew this—disclaiming all pretentions to analysis, by reason of her unsystematic feminine education, and instead vaunting her personal insight into lived experience. While composing her first tales for children, she told her future husband, “I might be good for nothing to compose a moral treatise; but when it comes to habitual practice, I’m sure that I am never mistaken . . . I have acquired principles founded on experience and on a meticulous observation of myself, the thing which I know best in the world, perhaps the only one which I know well.”71 We need not consider her contes a poor substitute for something else that she felt herself constrained from writing. It is only that her exposition relies upon modeling reality rather than elucidating it, using concrete instantiation rather than abstract extrapolation. She obliquely defended this approach. Every issue of Annales de l’éducation carried an entry from a fictional journal in which a mother recorded the education of her two daughters so that her absent husband could track their progress. She tells him that, while she studies pedagogical manuals, “when I leave my book to return to my daughters, the first thing I do, without wanting to, is to put aside all the ideas that had just been occupying me, to take up others that have no relation to them.” Books cannot apply to her situation, for “these are two absolutely different worlds, both real, but whose relationship we have yet to determine . . . it is impossible for me to apply what is prescribed to me in the one to what happens in the other.”72 Pauline Guizot delivers this speech through a mouthpiece, but it seems almost like a brief in favor of mimesis—a practice which lets us reconcile “two absolutely different worlds” by having the one incarnate the other. In this passage, Guizot deftly engages an ambiguity within culture itself. Culture, as Clifford Geertz famously proposed, doubles as “a model of ‘reality’” and “a model for ‘reality.’”73 A story like Jules portrays the nature of postRevolutionary France (a model of reality) through a plot which offers a template for how to act effectively there (a model for reality). The story expresses the logic of a social context in a way that supplies a script for mastering it, a dual 70 71 72 73

Rémusat, “Notice sur la vie,” i. Quoted in C.-H. Pouthas, La jeunesse de Guizot (1787–1814) (Paris, 1936), 260. Annales de l’éducation, II, X (1811), 208–17. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 93.


relationship heightened by its expressly pedagogical ambitions. Yet, surmises Sewell, a “disjunction” inevitably separates the two sides of this equation: After all, every attempt to apply a template takes place in a situation not quite the same as those in which the template was initially constructed. Hence, even if we assume that people always try to reproduce conscientiously that which they have known, what they actually produce is bound to vary—sometimes significantly—from what is intended . . . Because the world so frequently resists our attempts to shape it, cultural symbols that model the world (in both senses) are . . . susceptible to change.74

Guizot illustrated this “disjunction” when she had her alter ego remark on how she found herself “between two worlds” when she tried to enact the template offered by a pedagogical manual. Insofar as she intended the conte to make these two worlds coincide, she aims to resolve a dilemma bedeviling all social action. Here we must remark upon the crucial role which sentiment plays as an immanent force which could ensure the successful transposition of a template from one domain to another. It remains consubstantial through every context from the family, to fiction, to government, and to Pauline Guizot herself. As the portal of transmission from one world to another, her persona as Madame Guizot would bridge the gap between prescription and description. Sainte-Beuve loved her work for just these reasons. She was an exemplary moralist because her lessons came directly from her lived experience. The literary tastemaker acclaimed her work as the only statement about education to matter since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile in 1761. Her oeuvre stood in relation to Emile as Tocqueville’s Democracy in America did to Rousseau’s Social Contract. He declared her excellence to proceed directly from her experience as a wife and mother. Mlle Meulan’s style entirely changed when she became Mme Guizot. Once “lively,” “paradoxical” and “insouciant,” now “sentiment” guided everything. This sentiment came from her family life. “She had become a mother,” he says in so many words. Her son François, all the more precious because she bore him late in life, was everything to her. She wrote out of “maternal devotion,” as “an act of love.”75 The critic elided certain facts. The shift in Pauline de Meulan’s literary interests significantly pre-dated the birth of her son. Furthermore, early in the boy’s life she wrote almost nothing. When she did resume her career in 1820, it was partly for financial reasons after her husband lost his posts. Her literary persona as Madame Guizot did not eventuate from concrete alterations in her bioethical constitution. Nor was it entirely synonymous with her person, even though that

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Sewell, Logics of History, 191. C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, Galerie de femmes célèbres. Tirée des Causeries du Lundi (Paris, 1869), 352, 347.

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persona implicitly dramatized it. Indeed, under certain conditions it might be transferrable. Although Caroline was published as the work of “Madame Guizot,” her niece Elisa wrote it. No one reading it would realize the difference. Elisa practiced the same genre of the pedagogically attuned children’s tale doubling as social commentary. Furthermore, as published, Caroline shares space with Pauline’s Aglaé, ou les Tracasseries. The title page credits both to a unitary “Mme Guizot,” assimilating both women to a single authorial entity. This authorial entity deserves attention. Noting a pronounced turn to fiction among post-Revolutionary women intellectuals, Carla Hesse situates it as a response to the gendering of public life. It became harder for women to speak on their own account outside the family. Fiction helped them evade straitening “biological essentialism” since this mode “made it possible to represent the self as constructed rather than given. It gave them the cultural means to produce a public, second self—one existing in an indeterminate relation to their biological being—that they could control.”76 Pauline de Meulan, though, used popular perceptions of genre to create “a public, second self,” Madame Guizot, which, far from flouting “biological essentialism,” seemed to express it. She—and her niece after her—became an intellectual not by escaping maternal essentialism, but in the manner whereby she transposed it onto herself. As such, she takes her place alongside a whole cohort of Enlightenment women who, says Anthony La Vopa, “negotiated their way through gender binaries, or blurred them in ways that opened new possibilities for female agency, or manipulated them in the very process of seeming to honor gendered constraints.”77 Commentators lauded her authorial persona for its perfect identity with her “biological being,” so that she never overstepped the bounds of womanhood. Yet it nonetheless did exist in an “indeterminate relation” to that biological substratum, pre- and postdating its alleged antecedents and proving to be a guise which another woman could assume. Sainte-Beuve has overstressed biology at the expense of self-invention. On the other hand, that self-invention was always tied to the occupation of a specific position and the espousal of a particular credo. Despite his misstatements, Sainte-Beuve intuited how Pauline Guizot meant to make authorship an expression of maternity as “an act of love.” By replicating the forms that foster the precious sentiments of love, she conjures them forth. In 1822, François Guizot wrote her that love is the best thing about humanity. Love permits the soul to reconcile the subjective with the objective, for “in love alone do obligation and liberty merge; it is not, like virtue, an act of choice; once it exists, it believes, it affirms, that it cannot not be. Even so, every fatalistic idea, 76 77

Hesse, The Other Enlightenment, 130, 142. A. J. La Vopa, “Women, Gender, and the Enlightenment: A Historical Turn,” Journal of Modern History 80/2 (June 2008), 332–57.


every sentiment of servitude, is foreign to it.”78 Here is the foundation of real power. It can dispense with anything mechanical, or coercive, or violent. All of the important relationships in the stories we have read are regulated by this force, which the stories themselves are meant to summon up. They seem to announce a project to renovate French society on its basis. Proceeding from “slow and general causes,” this new kind of power would slowly coalesce into a post-Revolutionary order that would rest not on ordinances, acts, and circulars but on a “moral ascendancy” which shapes the will without commanding it. Exiting the vicious circle of force provoking the resistance that leads to its own downfall, this true gouvernement des esprits would establish the easy and peaceable dominion of an “unseen empire.”

78

Quoted in Lettres de M. Guizot, 44.

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transcending babel in the cultural translation of ¨ friedrich ruckert (1788–1866) tuska benes Lyon G. Tyler Department of History, The College of William and Mary E-mail: [email protected]

A tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism characterizes the career of the poet–philologist Friedrich Rückert. The German orientalist and mentor to Paul de Lagarde translated remarkable quantities of Sanskrit, Farsi, and Arabic verse, while earning popular acclaim for his Biedermeier celebrations of the German Heimat. The contradiction in these scholarly pursuits can be reconciled by examining the intersection of the local, national, and global in Rückert’s conception of language. In the German Pietist tradition, national tongues embodied both the divine word of God and the particular historical circumstances of speakers. Through feats of translation Rückert expected to transform German into a universal language of spiritual reconciliation, thereby transcending Babel and distinguishing the German nation as a chosen people. This article investigates the process of cultural translation through which Rückert made “world poetry” intelligible to a German audience, arguing that cosmopolitanism underlay a German claim to cultural dominance in post-Napoleonic Europe.

The biblical scholar and orientalist Paul de Lagarde (1827–91) once wrote of his mentor Friedrich Rückert, “it is inexplicable how he ever could have considered himself German for he was the most consequent cosmopolitan one could imagine.”1 The contradiction Lagarde perceived in the poet–philologist reflects an unusual career. If at all, Friedrich Rückert is known within two seemingly unrelated circles. As a lyric poet and liberal nationalist, Rückert enjoyed cult-like status among educated middle-class Germans in the late nineteenth century. His Biedermeier paeans to young love, the joys of family, and the beauties of the German countryside display a dizzying facility with language and end rhyme. Gustav Mahler, Franz Schubert, and Johannes Brahms set passages from his celebrated Liebesfrühling and the delicate Kindertodtenlieder to music. Rückert’s legacy as an orientalist and a pioneering and gifted translator has fared slightly 1

P. de Lagarde, “Erinnerungen an Friedrich Rückert,” in idem, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. P. Fischer (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1934), 48.

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better.2 His poetic talents captured in German the difficult meters of Sanskrit, Farsi, and Arabic literature, while creatively replicating foreign forms and styles. Lagarde reported that Rückert could spontaneously translate previously unseen Farsi and Arabic poetry into beautiful German verse.3 Orientalist translation was an important mode of cultural exchange in the nineteenth century, and recent scholars have explored the complex negotiation of global power and national self-definition that transpired in the pages of translated texts as they circulated across continents and empires. In the 1950s, British social anthropologists used the term “cultural translation” to refer to an interpretive ideal that successfully mediated cultural difference by establishing linguistic equivalences. Translation, in this view, enabled the ethnographer to relay unfamiliar social practices to uninitiated audiences.4 Talal Asad and other critics rightly insist that the assumption of having achieved equivalence in translation masks vast networks of competing ideologies, power relations, and historical interests. The weaker languages of developing countries, Asad notes, are more likely “to submit to forcible transformation in the translation process.”5 An effacement of power in the act of translation accompanied European imperial conquest. The illusion that languages were mutually compatible concealed how effectively translation has served as a strategy of containment and a technology of domination.6 According to Bernard S. Cohn, for example, translation enabled the conquest of knowledge that helped secure British rule in India. A fiction of transparency permitted the British to reorder Indian forms of knowledge and transform local traditions and modes of thought. At the same time, translated texts availed colonizers of the knowledge necessary to impose

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Critics fault a tendency towards overproduction and uneven results in Rückert’s poetic oeuvre. See A. F. J. Remy, The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany (New York: Ams Press, 1966, 56). By contrast, according to Dorothy Figueira, Rückert’s Sakuntala translation (1867) was exceptional in the nineteenth century in its fidelity to content and form and still holds significance to the present day. D. Figueira, Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 196. ¨ K. Macke, “Friedrich Rückert als Ubersetzer,” in W. Fischer, ed., Friedrich Rückert im Spiegel seiner Zeitgenossen und der Nachwelt: Aufsätze aus der Zeit zwischen 1827 und 1986 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), 234–5. See T. Assad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Asad, “Concept of Cultural Translation,” 157–8. T. Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 21.

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order and classify groups in Indian society.7 European translators similarly detached Native American terms from their proper cultural meanings; Indian ideas of place were twisted into European-style property relations, dispossessing Native Americans of land and an arsenal of alternative concepts.8 Translation offered European imperialists a mechanism for “purifying” foreign cultures and speaking on their behalf.9 Postcolonial critics, such as Homi Bhabha, have identified sites of resistance that emerge in the process of cultural translation. In the Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha argues that translation ruptures the ties between language and cultural space. New historical subjects, fragmented and decentered, take form in the disjuncture that arises when the local encounters the global. The act of cultural translation opens up a hybrid, in-between space for Bhabha; it dramatizes the untranslatability of culture and foregrounds resistance to forceful processes of transformation.10 For this reason, he embraces the early nineteenth-century project of world literature, a genre whose very existence relied on translation. As conceived by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Bhabha asserts, world literature was an “emergent, prefigurative category” with the potential to articulate “cultural dissensus and alternity.” The terrain of world literature, in his view, need not be restricted to the transmission of intact national canons; rather it can accommodate the transnational histories of migrants, refugees, and borderlands.11 While acknowledging the transformative effect of orientalist translation, this essay suggests that the local demands of the world translator set limits on the introduction of newness into a language. Rückert bowed to a host of national and cultural imperatives that steered his hybrid texts in particular directions. The lack of a centralized state and a German empire before 1871 raises the question what constituency, kinds of knowledge, or process of self-definition stood to gain from German translation. The frequent claim German concepts of the nation made to universality rendered translation particularly attractive to liberal nationalists such as Rückert. A tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism characterized many German authors in the late eighteenth century.12 Even into the early twentieth century, Friedrich Meinecke considered universalism to be a particularly German predicament. In Cosmopolitanism and 7

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B. S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16, 21, 56. E. Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 43, 58. Niranjana, Siting Translation, 13. H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 223–9. Ibid., 12. See A. Albrecht, Kosmopolitismus: Weltbürgerdiskurse in Literatur, Philosophie und Publizistik um 1800 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); and S. Thielking, Weltbürgertum:

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the National State (1908), he argued that an influx of universalism enabled the German idea of the nation to transcend local principalities in the early nineteenth century; German nationalists then had to vanquish cosmopolitanism in order for nationalism to be useful to the state under Otto von Bismarck.13 Translation offered nineteenth-century nationalists a mechanism for mediating between the local and the global. Yet German orientalism was never simply about Germany. The self-proclaimed German affinity for translation bestowed on the nation a unique cultural status within Europe. The cultural hierarchies and civilizational orders that emerged as German intellectuals placed world cultures in relation to each other likewise had global implications. Translation was Rückert’s preferred mechanism for elevating German national culture to universal significance. A tradition of reconciling the universalizing claims of Christianity with love for the nation provided a model for imagining Germany’s place in world culture, especially among Protestant Germans. In Rückert’s view, Germans were a people chosen by God to transform their mother tongue into a new version of the language spoken in paradise and thus to open a new chapter in the history of salvation. The German language could transcend Babel, he believed, by systematically incorporating foreign texts into the national literary canon. For Rückert, German cultural dominance in post-Napoleonic Europe depended on a controlled form of what one might term globalization. He created hybrid texts that brought Middle Eastern and South Asian literature into the parlors of the German cultural elite, while silencing or Germanizing passages that threatened to unsettle middle-class readers. Articulations of female desire, for example, required Rückert to tread an especially fine line between bourgeois notions of domesticity and his love for the foreign. Studies of orientalist translation often seek to identify prejudicial structures or distortions that shaped the production of knowledge on a particular area of the world.14 This essay investigates the type of cultural authority Rückert claimed as an orientalist translator in early nineteenth-century Germany and the strategies he employed to position the German critic advantageously in relation to foreign authors and texts. Rückert’s “favorite student,”15 Paul Lagarde, shared the poet’s vision of how philological exegesis of ancient oriental texts could bestow a unique spiritual mission on Germany. During the winter semester of 1844–5, Rückert taught the

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Kosmopolitische Ideen in literature und politischer Publizistik seit dem achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2000). F. Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, trans. Robert B. Kimber (Princeton University Press, 1970), 44. See B. Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 39, 255. Lagarde, “Erinnerungen an Friedrich Rückert,” 49.

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seventeen-year-old Lagarde Farsi in his small Berlin apartment. He exerted the “decisive influence”16 on the young Lagarde’s decision to interpret Scripture, especially the Septuagint, based on knowledge of Arabic, Coptic, and Syriac. Remaining close friends and colleagues, the pair shared an interest in how God interacted with particular human communities. Yet the relative importance each placed on cosmopolitanism within the national idea varied. Rückert imagined the German nation emerging as the universal bearer of Christian truth. Lagarde, by contrast, envisioned a national form of Christianity purged of its Semitic elements.17 Like Rückert, however, he assumed that nations were the vessels through which God revealed himself and that German critics could transcend the limitations of their particular historical position and grasp the divine in its totality.18

i. language, religion, and “german” universality An esoteric, Protestant understanding of language shaped Rückert’s ambitions as an orientalist translator. His programmatic Philological–Philosophical Dissertation on the Idea of Philology (1811) envisioned German attaining the status of an “ideal” or “universal language”19 which both expressed the character of the nation and promised union with the divine. Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806 had renewed among German Protestants the problem of how to reconcile nationalism with Christian universality. For Christian patriots, such as Friedrich Carl Moser, the German Volk had been a divine community whose preservation was an ethical requirement for Christians.20 The legacy of the Reformation suggested to theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) that the very forms of religion were nationally specific. God had entrusted Martin Luther with proclaiming the eternal truths contained in the Bible; the allied victory over Napoleon at Leipzig proved God stood with Germans against the French.21 The belief that Germans were the chosen people of a new covenant with 16

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F. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 7. Ibid., 90–92. V. Viaene, “Paul de Lagarde: A Nineteenth-Century ‘Radical’ Conservative—and Precursor of National Socialism?”, European History Quarterly 26/4 (1996), 538. F. Rückert, “Dissertatio Philologico-Philosophica de Idea Philologiae,” trans. V. Suchy, in an appendix to V. Suchy, “Friedrich Rückert’s “Idee der Philologie” im Lichte der romantischen Sprachphilosophie. Grundlagen zu Rückert’s Sprachanschauung” (unpublished dissertation, University of Vienna, 1945), 2. K. Pinson, Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 183. See also A. Hoover, The Gospel of Nationalism: German Patriotic Preaching from Napoleon to Versailles (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986), 59. H. Lehmann, ‘God Our Old Ally’: The Chosen People Theme in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century German Nationalism,” in W. Hutchison and H. Lehmann, eds.,

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God held particular appeal for Pietists within the evangelical wing of German Protestantism. Their nationalization of Old Testament themes bestowed upon Germans the expectation of bearing a universal mission.22 Among German Christian mystics, language provided a powerful metaphor for how the nation received and engaged divine revelation. Since the sixteenth century, mystical thinkers had argued that national languages synthesized in dynamic fashion national feeling and the universal truths of Christianity. Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), for example, proposed in opposition to a rationalist appreciation of language that human tongues had been formed in the image of God’s word. The same living force through which God created earth and the heavens inspired the profane tongues of humankind. At the same time, Böhme asserted that national tongues reflected the character of the community that spoke them.23 Authors influenced by Pietism in the late eighteenth century embraced a similar understanding of language as God’s living word conditioned by historical circumstance to oppose rational biblical criticism. Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, both assailed the theologian Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) for assuming language to be a perfectible instrument under man’s rational control. These friends in Königberg reconceived the relationship between language, nationality, and divine truth in response to his Dissertation on the Influence of Opinions on Language, and of Language on Opinions (1759).24 In their view, Michaelis erred in assuming that the truths of divine revelation could be purged from the historical and social context in which scripture was written; the nationally specific aspects of biblical tongues did not merely obscure universal principles of the faith. Fallen tongues ensured that God’s word directly inspired historical communities. Hamann and Herder shaped the concept of language Rückert encountered as a university student. Reacting against the perceived dominance of French culture under Frederick the Great, these two authors ascribed to the German language the power to unify political communities and to shape the collective thought patterns of speakers. Hamann, for example, declared language to be the “mother

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Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 88–91. Hoover, Gospel of Nationalism, 80, and H. Lehmann, “The Germans as a Chosen People: Old Testament Themes in German Nationalism,” German Studies Review 14 (1991), 271. G. Kaiser, Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Säkularisation (Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag, 1973), 183 ff. See J. G. Hamann, “Aesthetica in Nuca: Eine Rhapsodie in kabbalistischer Prose,” in idem, Sämtliche Werke, ed. J. Nadler, 6 vols. (Wuppertal: R. Brockhaus, 1999), 2; and J. G. Herder, “Ueber die neuere Deutsche Literatur. Erste Sammlung von Fragmenten, 2. Ausgabe” in idem, Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1967).

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of reason and revelation.”25 In his view, God had brought to life the world and its creatures through an act of speech. Historical tongues retained a living spark from this creative force so that all thought was “impregnated” by the “seed of the divine word.”26 Hamann learned Arabic, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Aramaic in an effort to reanimate the mystical power of the divine spirit found in ancient, Eastern texts. Language was likewise an artifact embodying and partly determining the history of the nation that spoke it. National tongues, for Hamann, offered the philologist “a sea of observations” on “the history of particular peoples, societies, sects, ¨ die neuere deutsche and individuals.”27 This claim, as Herder affirmed in Uber Literatur (1767–8) enabled philologists to place language studies at the core of research into the formation of cultures and communities.28 Born the son of a Protestant magistrate in Lower Franconia, Bavaria, Rückert displayed an early talent for languages, learning Greek and Latin from his pastor. After finishing the gymnasium in Schweinfurt, he entered the University of Würzburg in 1805 intending to pursue a law degree. The young student abandoned his father’s career track to study classical philology and mythology with the philosopher Johann Jakob Wagner (1775–1841). Himself a student of F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), Wagner introduced Rückert to a speculative form of philology currently in vogue with the Jena Romantics. In his lectures on the philosophy of art, held in 1802–3, Schelling argued that historical tongues originated in the “absolute idea of language” which was of divine origin. The “speaking word of God, the logos,” represented, in his view, the “eternal and absolute act of self-affirmation . . . the divine act of creation.”29 Inner necessity drove the idea of language to seek fulfillment in material form. Historical tongues had thus degenerated from a state of perfection, but retained a spontaneous, creative vitality just like any self-determining idealist subject.30 In 1808–9, Rückert attended Freidrich Creuzer’s controversial lectures in Heidelberg deriving classical Greek symbols and myths from Egyptian origins, an inspiration for his own orientalism.31 Creuzer likely confronted the young

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J. G. Hamann, Johann Georg Hamann’s, des Magus in Norden, Leben und Schriften, ed. K. Hermann Gildemeister, vol. 5 (Gotha, F. A. Perthes, 1868), 122. J. G. Hamann, “Tagebuch eines Christens,” in idem, Sämtliche Werke, 1: 52. J. G. Hamann, “Versuch u¨ ber eine akademische Frage,” in idem, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 122. Herder, “Ueber die neuere Deutsche Literatur,” 13–14. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, trans. D. W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 157. L. Formigari, “Idealism and Idealistic Trends in Linguistics and in the Philosophy of Language,” in P. Schmitter, ed., Sprachtheorien der Neuzeit I: Der epistemologische Kontext neuzeitlicher Sprach- und Grammatiktheorien (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1999), 242. H. Rückert, “Friedrich Rückert als Gelehrter,” Die Grenzboten: Zeitschrift für Politik, Literatur und Kunst 25/4 (1866), 135.

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Rückert with a tradition of Neoplatonist or Hermetic thought that for centuries had sought to reconcile Christianity with ancient Asian religious and philosophical ideas.32 In his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (1810–12), the classical philologist proposed that Egyptian hieroglyphics constituted mystical symbols which embodied a primordial form of religious experience. Creuzer suspected that ancient Indian priests held secret religious knowledge, but that this wisdom had first taken symbolic form in hieroglyphics. Work on the Eleusian mysteries convinced him that the Greeks had adopted from Egypt certain universal symbols of knowledge, in particular religious pictograms.33 Rückert concurred that the ancient Hellenes had “learned from others,” having “taken away for themselves a certain portion of the Orient’s endless treasures” and reworked them in their own image.34 He petitioned the Grand Duke of Würzburg to finance an apprenticeship to Creuzer’s friend, the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer. Rückert was rejected as too old for the post, but kept the fellow Freemason and arabist in his sights.35 According to his son Heinrich, however, Rückert remained “free of all the fantastical confusion in which Creuzer and his followers lost themselves.”36 Liberal Protestants tended to reject Creuzer as politically dangerous and gravitating too sharply towards conservative Christian mysticism.37 Romantic Neoplatonism shaped Rückert’s religious sensibilities, especially his search for an elusive language of paradise. His short epic “Bau der Welt” (1812), for example, depicts primordial pagan cults presaging Protestant Christianity. The text traces the afterlife of an original divine revelation as it meanders through major historical cultures, including those of Egypt, India, the ancient Germanic tribes, and Greece, before the divine word takes true form among Hebrews and Christians. Rückert argued that each nation “cultivated” a nugget of the lost “art and wisdom” present in paradise. Although “submersed in a night of their own creation,” Egyptian priests, for example, possessed the “power of secret knowledge”; according to Rückert, “a beam of light still penetrated the darkness.” In 1819, Rückert learned Coptic, the language of early Christians, grammatically akin to Late Egyptian, which was written in hieroglyphics. The same divine

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S. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4. E. Kocziszky, “Das Konzept und die Rolle des Orients in Creuzers Werk im Vergleich zu Görres,” in Karin Tebben and Friedrich Strack, eds., 200 Jahre Heidelberger Romantik (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2008), 306. Rückert, “Dissertatio,” 29. A.-H. Mahmoud, Rückert und der Orient (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 18. Rückert, “Friedrich Rückert als Gelehrter,” 135. Marchand, German Orientalism, 70.

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ray had pierced Indic temples and the runic culture of northern Europe.38 As Rückert wrote to Lagarde in 1860, the “highest goal of our oriental philology” is to prove that the “pure (theistic) kernel of Christianity” was already present in the Upanishads.”39 Even after indology repudiated its romantic roots in favor of a more disciplined, historically exacting, philology, Rückert remained a mystical enthusiast. The events of the Napoleonic occupation bound Rückert’s language study to the politics of liberal nationalism. During Austria’s brief war against Napoleon in 1809 Rückert rushed to the aid of Archduke Charles but only managed to reach Dresden by the time Vienna surrendered.40 His reputation as a poet of the Wars of Liberation stems from a collection of thirty Geharnischte Sonette (1814). “Only one sole bond has endured,” Rückert cautioned his defeated countrymen, “The language you otherwise scorn / Now you must love her as your last.”41 Like J. G. Fichte, Rückert believed that language united the German people despite a lack of shared political institutions. The Congress of Vienna silenced any lingering expectation that a German national state might emerge in 1815; “Miss Germanity,” he lamented, lost both her crown and her virtue dancing to French reels.42 Rückert briefly studied Old German lyrics and literature after 1815 hoping that resurrecting a glorious past would usher in “a new springtime” for Germany.43 His political poetry figuratively awakened the slumbering Emperor Barbarossa to restore the magnificence of the medieval German Reich.44 In the early years of the Restoration, Rückert’s romantic nationalism drew accusations of political demagoguery. He demonstratively wore patriotic “old German” dress: a long back overcoat with white collar and long hair parted down the middle. In 1816 the Württemberg minister of police cautioned Rückert’s publisher that the poet must either leave the state or drop all expressions of political opposition. Karl-August Wangenheim, the future minister of culture

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F. Rückert, “Bau der Welt,” in Gesammelte Gedichte von Friedrich Rückert, vol. 2, (Erlangen: Carl Heyder, 1839), 335–6. F. Rückert, Briefe, ed. Rüdiger Rückert, 2 vols. (Schweinfurt: Rückert-Gesellschaft, 1977), 2: 1310. H. Prang, Friedrich Rückert: Geist und Form der Sprache (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1963), 22. F. Rückert, “Geharnischte Sonette,” in Friedrich Rückerts gesammelte poetische Werke in zwölf Bänden, 12 vols. (Frankfurt: J. D. Sauerländer, 1882), 1: 5. F. Rückert, “Herr Kongress,” in Werke, 1: 236–37. F. Rückert, “Babarossa,” in Werke, 1: 108. See D. Peschel-Rentsch, “Freimund Reimer—ein Krytogermanist” in H. Bobzin, ed., Friedrich Rückert an der Universität Erlangen, 1826–41 (Erlangen: Universitätsbibliothek, 1988), 197–237. Rückert, “Barbarossa,” 108.

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under King Wilhelm I, successfully intervened on Rückert’s behalf.45 Rückert subsequently gravitated more towards liberal nationalism. Württemberg had dissolved its old constitution in 1806 after acquiring new territory under Napoleon. During controversies over designing a new constitution, Rückert supported Wangenheim’s vision of liberal reform and publically confronted the popular Swabian poet Ludwig Uhland in 1816 and 1817. Rückert favored the crown’s vision of constitutional monarchy against Uhland’s defense of the old constitution and the traditional rights of the estates. Politically, Rückert embraced a benevolent vision of constitutional monarchy. As Edgar Groß notes, he drew a “mirror for princes” depicting love as the binding force uniting a monarch and his people in his didactic poem Weisheit des Brahmanen (1836).46 When revolution erupted in 1848, Rückert disavowed both the radical opposition and the reactionary Prussian response. On linguistic grounds he favored a grossdeutch solution to German unification, but under Prussian, not Hapsburg, leadership. In Alsace, Switzerland, Austria, and Denmark, he argued, “you have written and sung in German tongues”; “here, not there, is your language.”47 For this reason, Rückert again wielded his pen in defense of the fatherland during the war over Schleswig-Holstein in 1863. The speculative view of language Rückert cultivated and his enthusiasm for the East led the classicist Franz Passow to declare his dissertation “the product of a fool.”48 Written in elegant Latin, but barely passing its defense at the University of Jena, Rückert’s dissertation proclaimed philology’s lofty goal to be “knowledge of humanity through the word.” This required reconstructing what he variously termed “the totality of language,” “the idea of language itself,” or “absolute language.”49 The philologist’s task was to scrutinize the various national tongues for evidence of what each embodied of the “original idea of humanity.” Religion, in Rückert’s view, was the “true center” of national life. Each nation thus “expressed in language all manifestations of its life,” especially its “relationship to the divine.” For Rückert, religious differences could be traced back to the original languages spoken by the first communities of the faithful. He recommended interpreting the “myths and dogmas of individual peoples”50 based on linguistic forms, a project later undertaken by the comparative mythologist Friedrich Max Müller, whose father Rückert saved from drowning in Italy. Max Müller attended

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E. Groß, “Friedrich Rückerts politisches Glaubensbekenntnis,” in Fischer, Rückert im Spiegel seiner Zeitgenossen, 171. Ibid., 172. F. Rückert, Politisches Notizbuch (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1911), 56, 24, 41. Rückert, “Friedrich Rückert als Gelehrter,” 134 and Prang, Rückert, 25. Rückert, “Dissertatio,” 2, 17. Ibid., 25, 26.

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the same Farsi colloquium as Lagarde before departing for London to study the Rig Veda. The indologist later argued, as did Ernest Renan, that the affinity for monotheism resulted from primordial grammatical forms, famously attributing the errors of mythology to the “disease of language.” The German language represented, for Rückert, the most viable medium for re-creating the primordial unity of poetry and philosophy in ideal form. At the end of history, one Volk would appear, in his view, that united the scattered parts of the original divine idea in a new “world harmony.” Germans were “a universal people” and their mother tongue was “equally universal” because “it incorporated its own idea and all the other ideas of the remaining languages.” Rückert concluded, moreover, that translation was the best method for reassembling “the fragments of foreign languages” in German, and thus rebuilding Babel. German’s recent “desultory roaming about in imitation of foreign languages,” especially French, spoke to its receptivity. To become an ideal language, Rückert theorized, his mother tongue had to “weave into one wreath” the masterpieces of “poetry from all epochs and peoples.”51 This ambition sealed Rückert’s defection from classical philology to oriental studies. The “ideal life,” he concluded, could only be found “overflowing in the springs of the Orient.” Germany should cease being the “eternal schoolgirl of Greece,” in his view, and return to the location Friedrich Schlegel had three years earlier identified as both the primordial German homeland and the cradle of humanity and revelation. The “German genius,” Rückert recalled, had “already blazed a path to the highest font of humanity, to the Ganges, the sacred river of the Indians where it increasingly recognizes its own language flowing in the purest of currents.”52 The close ties he then suspected between German, Farsi, and Sanskrit implied that German speakers had a particular talent for restoring the lost traces of an original revelation found in the East. According to Schlegel, German shared with Sanskrit similarly “organic” patterns of verb inflection distinct from the ¨ die Sprache und Weisheit der “mechanical” language of Hebrew or Arabic.53 Uber Indier (1808) had had an immediate impact on Schelling and other Jena Romantics who may have shifted Rückert’s sights to India. Rückert likewise assumed, as did Fichte, that contemporary German preserved exceptionally strong ties to its primordial origins while experiencing a period of rebirth that would reunite poetry and philosophy.54

51 52 53

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Ibid., 20, 27, 31, 28. Ibid., “Dissertatio,” 30, 29. ¨ F. Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Ein Beitrag zur Begründung der Alterthumskunde (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1808), 41. Rückert, “Dissertatio,” 27–8.

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After a year of teaching, Rückert surrendered a lectureship in classical philology to write poetry, while serving as an editor to Johann Friedrich Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände. The opportunity to study non-European languages came in Vienna in 1818 on a return trip from Italy. For four months Rückert studied Farsi, and some Arabic and Turkish, with Joseph von Hammer, while residing with Schlegel, then imperial court secretary to Archduke Charles. The Swedish poet Per Daniel Atterbom, a follower of Schelling whom Rückert met in Rome, arranged their meeting. The unexpected death of a brother brought Rückert home to Schweinfurt. Having borrowed books from Hammer, however, he dedicated the next months to learning Farsi, hand-copying Ferdowsi’s Epic of Kings. Rückert’s first translations appeared shortly thereafter: in 1819 an edition of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi’s ghazals, a poetic form often dedicated to the theme of love and separation consisting of five or more rhyming couplets and a refrain; and in ¨ 1821 the Ostliche Rosen, adapted from the ghazals of the mystic poet Hafiz. In 1827, Rückert caught Sanskrit fever, learning the language well enough to read “Nal and Damayanti” from the Mahabharata within three months.55 According to his son, Rückert only needed a six- to eight-week period of immersion to become versed in a new language.56 He mastered an astounding forty-four distinct tongues in his lifetime.57 Lack of theological training made an academic appointment difficult for Rückert. Marriage to Luise Wiethaus-Fischer in 1821 and the birth of the first of their ten children compelled him to solicit Hammer’s assistance. Bavarian King Ludwig I overcame the University of Erlangen’s initial reluctance “to give salaries to aesthetes and linguistic dilettantes (luxuries, as it were) along with useful professors.”58 In 1826, Rückert replaced the hebraicist Arnold Kanne in the theological faculty, promising to teach Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac, as well as biblical exegesis. His courses included interpretation of the psalms, Arabic, and Farsi. Work on Scripture and biblical texts however, never captured Rückert’s imagination in the same way as pagan monuments to a universal divine spirit of love.

ii. world poetry as a german cultural ideal The move to Erlangen coincided for Rückert with greater sensitivity to the emerging discipline of comparative-historical philology. After 1825, for

55 56 57

58

Prang, Rückert, 129. H. Rückert, “Friedrich Rückert als Gelehrter,” 149. J. Erdmann, ed., 200 Jahre Friedrich Rückert, 1788–1866: Dichter und Gelehrte. Katalog der Ausstellung (Coburg: Druckhaus Neue Presse Coburg, 1988), 22. Erdmann, 200 Jahre Friedrich Rückert, 265.

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example, Hammer’s inattention to grammar, word choice, and meter increasingly perturbed the poet.59 Comparative philology’s claims to historical precision and greater scientific certitude did little, however, to discourage Rückert’s youthful fantasies. Instead, the promise of exactitude seemed to bring closer his romantic dream of transcending Babel. Rückert declared in his dissertation that the ideal language “has not yet been created; it must be created.”60 In the decade and half of his Erlangen period Rückert probed the efficacy with which translation and philologically inspired poetry could produce his desired world harmony. The parties of religious orthodoxy and radical Pietism ultimately left Rückert disaffected in Erlangen,61 and in 1841 he moved to the theologically more tolerant atmosphere of Berlin.62 Weltpoesie, or “world poetry,” was the cultural ideal that Rückert expected to emerge as various national literatures interacted in German translation. His reflections on the topic often reference the local circumstances from which German readers encountered the foreign, as in the poem “Weltpoesie” (1833) published among some “New Songs” otherwise devoted to the “little village where I live.” Rückert explained that he had “learned to decipher” the “sacred handwriting” found on a drifting palm leaf. “Rustlings millennia old / In the crowns of Indian palms,” he mused, “Now overheard by you / Under roofs thatched with northern straw.” The villagers who “loudly rule the marketplace” would not notice his efforts, but Rückert expected a “quiet reward.” Educated Germans would learn to transcend the cultural limitations of their particular location and forge global understanding. “That humanity understands itself / Beyond the limits of its cultivation,” he wrote, “This every primeval tone serves, / Which, in Germanizing, I tame [bänd’ge].”63 Rückert concluded the opening to his adaptation of the Schi King (1833) in a similar spirit: “World poetry / Alone is world reconciliation.”64 Taming a foreign language allowed the philologist to unlock “once unfamiliar ways of experiencing the world,” according to Rückert. “With every new language you learn,” he explained in the Weisheit des Brahmanen; “you liberate a new soul 59 60 61 62

63

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Prang, Rückert, 112. Rückert, “Dissertatio,” 6. H. Rückert, “Erinnerungen,” 79–80. “Nachrichten von Friedrich Rückerts Leben,” in Werke, 12: 443; and H. Rückert, “Erinnerungen,” 11, 80. F. Rückert, “Neue Lieder” in Deutscher Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1833, ed. A. von Chamisso and G. Schwab (Leipzig: Wiemannsche Buchhandlung, 1833), 14, 39–40. Rückert occasionally used the term Weltliteratur, for example in the opening to his Erlanger Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1838 (Erlangen: Ferdinand Enke, 1838), 2. F. Rückert, Schi-King: Chinesisches Liederbuch (Altona: J. F. Hammerich), 1833, 6. In the only edition of Rückert’s Erlanger Musenalmanach (1838), he used the term Weltliteratur.

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inside yourself.” The architect of world poetry, he reckoned, was a master of all languages, uniting in his person “the souls of all humanity.”65 Language’s perceived ability to shape thought encouraged Rückert to equate language learning with acquiring a new worldview. “Pure virgin, ever beautiful,” language was the “spiritual mother of her sons,” a constructive force that guided men as they built communities, solved riddles, and experienced the world.66 An active subject in her own right, language loomed large as a “mistress” over her students, and Rückert bemoaned her fickle ways.67 The related concept of Weltliteratur, introduced by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1827, likewise presupposed a dialectic that placed a subnational locality, perhaps a poet’s town or province, in conversation with universal or transnational themes.68 Although Goethe reserved an “honorable role . . . for us Germans”69 in its creation, world literature was not a specifically German achievement, nor did it even imply an exchange of intact national canons. German literature itself had little internal consistency, Goethe believed, as an assemblage of “heterogeneous, if not conflicting, elements.”70 For Goethe, an emerging world market and “increasing communication”71 among nations placed literary texts in a state of intensified interaction and exchange.72 A plurality of multidirectional translations would encourage equitable dialogue among different languages and cultures. Goethe’s evasion of the national is often tied to the arguably “postcolonial” status of Germany in the Sattelzeit, although it is also a legacy of Weimar classicism. For John Pizer, the liminality of the German states within Europe, their political fragmentation, and a lack of intellectual cohesion made attractive the ideal of world literature. Germany’s subnational status inspired a transnational literary modality as the only possible alternative to cultural fragmentation.73 According to Todd Kontje, late eighteenth-century Germans, such as Novalis, embraced cosmopolitanism to compensate for their relative provincialism. Isolated German intellectuals, imaging themselves as subjects of local lords, not participants in a national state, reached out from their regional environs 65 66 67 68

69

70 71 72

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Rückert, Weisheit des Brahmanen, in Werke, 8: 173. F. Rückert, “An unsere Sprache,” in Werke, 7: 4. F. Rückert, “Die Sprache und ihre Lehrer,” in Werke, 7: 18–19. J. Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 7. J. E. Spingarn, ed., Goethe’s Literary Essays: A Selection in English (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co, 1964), 89. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 90. A. Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 55. Pizer, Idea of World Literature, 24, 31.

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to engage a broader European culture. German writers had no choice but to be cosmopolitan.74 A greater concern for the nation characterized the early Romantic project of progressive universal poetry, which Friedrich Schlegel announced in 1798.75 Faith in the ultimate unity of all spiritual beings evoked in the Romantics a desire to overcome the artistic and historical uniqueness of individual works. The act of translation supposedly brought a foreign text closer to the absolute idea towards which the original tended. Thus German translations could better articulate the true meaning of poetry just as Luther’s translation of the Bible brought Protestants closer to the Christian truth of Scripture.76 This talent for translation called Germany to assume spiritual and literary leadership over other nations. Cosmopolitanism became a source of national distinction.77 Especially after the Napoleonic invasions, Fichte and other authors bound cosmopolitanism more tightly to German nationality, distancing the term from its associations with French culture. For Fichte, achievements in German scholarship and culture justified a form of cultural diffusion in which an increasingly homogeneous world adopted German standards and norms.78 Rückert’s pairing of nationalism and cosmopolitanism ostensibly aimed to re-create the mutual understanding that existed among nations before God destroyed the Tower of Babel. In 1818, Rückert presented himself as the apprentice to a divine creator who had bestowed “one voice upon each life.”79 His mission was to resolve the incomprehensibility of world languages. “Resurrect from rubble creation’s past,” he entreated, “Solve the confusion of languages that caused construction to falter; / Raise for us the idea of the master’s plan, build well!”80 Perhaps for this reason, the rigorous comparativist August Friedrich Pott still found it necessary to dispel biblical accounts of the origin of linguistic difference in 1863.81 For Rückert, knowledge of historical tongues merely brought the language of Adam and Eve closer to modern Germans. In his “Encouragement

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78 79

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Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 99–100. Albrecht, Kosmopolitismus, 397. Berman, Experience of the Foreign, 106–8. ¨ A. Huyssen, Die frühromantische Konzeption von Ubersetzung und Aneignung: Studien zur frühromantischenutopie einer deutschen Weltliteratur (Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1969), 157, 162. Albrecht, Kosmopolitismus, 347–48. F. Rückert, “Deutsches Künstlerfest in Rom (1818),” in Frauentaschenbuch für das Jahr 1823 (Nuremberg: J. L. Schrag), 8. Ibid., 5. See A. F. Pott, Anti-Kaulen oder Mythische Vorstellungen vom Ursprunge der Völker und Sprachen (Lemgo: Meyer’sche Hofbuchhandlung, 1863).

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to Translate the Hamasa” (1831), Rückert argued that “Poetry in all her Tongues / Is for the ordained one language alone, / The language that rang out in paradise.”82 When at last the scattered fragments of humanity were rejoined “in the heart of Europe,” he predicted, “A new paradise will be reclaimed.”83 The divine character of the Weltgespräch that Rückert imagined rested on its inclusivity and universality. Yet despite its apparent disinterest, the cosmopolitanism of which Lagarde accused Rückert was necessarily located and embodied within the German states of the 1830s.84 In the Vormärz, liberal nationalists revived the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism as a way to show their affinity for the fight against absolutism elsewhere Europe, for example in Greece.85 Rückert’s cosmopolitanism was likewise rooted in a liberal nationalist agenda, as well as in the cultural and class ambitions of the educated German bourgeoisie. As Lawrence Venuti has argued, the nineteenth-century encounter with the foreign also helped fashion an “ideal cultural self.”86 World poetry was a specifically German national achievement, for Rückert. “It is my great people,” he wrote in 1831, Who sends out daily Sons from its bosom To lead home Peoples of all tongues.

Works from other nations were to assemble in a distinctly “German pantheon.”87 Critics initially questioned the nationalist credentials of Rückert’s translations. Willibald Alexis, a historical novelist, reported concern that “Rückert, the German poet, was going to ruin as an Oriental philologist.”88 Jacob Grimm dismissed his “ghazal mischief” (Gasellenunwesen).89 For another reviewer, “the new tone” of ¨ Rückert’s Ostliche Rosen was not “the correct and true one . . . from which German

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83 84

85

86

87 88

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F. Rückert, “Ermuthigung zur Uebersetzung der Hamasa” in Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1831, 284. Rückert, “Ermuthigung,” 285. P. Cheah and B. Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1–2. M. Lauster, ed., Deutschland und der europäische Zeitgeist: Kosmopolitische Dimensionen in der Literatur des Vormärz (Bielefeld: Aesthesis Verlag, 1994), 9. L. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995), 110. Rückert, “Zur Einführung der Hamasa,” 293; Rückert, “Ermuthigung,” 286. W. Alexis, “Rostem und Suhrab: Eine Heldengeschichte von Friedrich Rückert,” in Fischer, Rückert im Spiegel seiner Zeitgenossen, 353. Cited in A. Schimmel, Friedrich Rückert: Lebensbild und Einführung in sein Werk (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1987), 23.

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poetry should expect prosperity and progress.”90 By the early 1830s, the collapse of Romantic indology and the outrage that followed the Creuzer affair made for less-receptive audiences. Yet language never ceased to be a defining national characteristic for Rückert. His adaptations of foreign verse aimed to beautify the mother tongue and thereby strengthen German national culture. “Multiplying the treasures of the German language,” Rückert explained, “Since youth has been my endeavor / . . . a new rhyme, a new phrase / Appears to me an expansion of this treasure.”91 As the host of world poetry, Germany would emerge as the cultural center of the world, Rückert believed, no longer subservient to French or antique models. “I’d like to build a German city,” he declared, Centerpiece of a vast empire, Hub of a wheel with many spokes, Glowing focus of the sun, from which the stimulating Rays of life shine into every valley.92

The images Rückert publicized of German cultural dominance offered a remarkably literal alternative to glory earned through political power and sovereignty. “I am king of a quiet nation of dreams,” he wrote in 1823, “Sovereign in the heavenly realm of fantasies.” A poet commands the inhabitants of foreign lands to “Build a world palace with many rooms, / Where united the splendor of the world shines. / Build for me as many rooms as there are nations.” This realm was a “sanctuary” spared the “burden of tyranny” which liberal nationalists faced under the Restoration.93 At the same time, the desire to protect the integrity of the Heimat and the home set limits on how close the foreign could encroach on German readers. “Where does the homeland end and foreign land begin?” Rückert wondered in the Weisheit des Brahmanen.94 His dissertation had envisioned translated texts occupying select “areas” in the “spacious expanses of our language.” Within these confines, the natural tendency of the German language to expel the foreign would be repressed. Rückert wished to prevent foreign elements from crossing “their boundaries into neighboring territory” until they formed an organic bond with the mainstream language. The foreign, he feared, would remain forever “parched and dry” unless readers understood it as an original German creation.95 90

91 92 93 94 95

¨ W. Müller, “Friedrich Rückert: Ostliche Rosen” in Literarisches Conversations-Blatt 15, 18 Jan. 1822, 58. F. Rückert, “Meine Aufgabe,” in Werke, 7: 158. F. Rückert, “Die deutsche Stadt,” in Werke, 1: 255. F. Rückert, “Dichterselbstlob,” in Frauentaschenbuch für das Jahr 1823, 335–7. F. Rückert, Weisheit des Brahmanen, 42. Rückert, “Dissertatio,” 32, 34.

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By the early 1830s, the young Rückert’s confidence in Germans’ willingness to embrace Eastern models began to wane. Reference to the Heimat and the middleclass German household increasingly provided a point of stability or anchor in Rückert’s work that mitigated the otherwise destabilizing effects of encountering foreign worlds. “[B]ring as much foreign ornament, / Home with you as suits your taste,” Rückert counseled, “so long as your domestic comfort tolerates it.”96 Rückert confessed in “Welt und ich” (1834) that although his “Wishes boldly turn / To improving the world,” he only really desired to cultivate his own garden.97 In “Wohnlichkeit” (1834), Rückert explained his ambition to experience other regions “as a wanderer,” but still “build my little cabin / In the green valley of the Heimat.”98 In this Rückert succeeded. The contract he negotiated with the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin only required Rückert to spend winter semesters in the Prussian capital. When classes ended he quickly retreated to rural Bavaria. The literary journals in which Rückert published the majority of his work catered to a small national audience of upper-middle-class men and, more notably, women.99 Rückert escorted these readers on a Bildungsreise through the Middle East and Asia, presenting to them what he considered to be the shared cultural heritage of humanity, while at the same time reaffirming certain middle-class values as essentially German. “The height of erudition,” he asserted in the Weisheit der Brahmanen, was “to appreciate in foreigners / Their foreignness without severing oneself from the self.”100 Rückert’s orientalia regularly appeared interwoven with his more mundane “German” verse in Cotta’s Frauentaschenbuch, in Urania. Taschenbuch für Damen, as well as in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände and the Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen. The orientalist dominated the Deutscher Musenalmanach (1833–9) to such an extent that it folded after he rescinded his contributions.101 Rückert’s contrasting depictions of female sexuality in his “German” and his “oriental” verse illustrate how the project of world poetry threatened an ideal of domesticity that defined the educated German bourgeoisie. In 1831, the Musenalmanach published Rückert’s incomplete translation of the Amaru´sataka, a collection of erotic Sanskrit verses written around 750 ce. According to legend, 96 97 98 99

100 101

Rückert, Weisheit des Brahmanen, 42–3. F. Rückert, “Welt und ich,” in Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1834, 41. F. Rückert, “Wohnlichkeit,” in Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1834, 14–15. See Rückert’s “Antwort auf eine Anfrage” (1837): “Es wünschen schöne Frauen, / Um sich an meinen Liedern zu erbauen, / Sie wünschen ein getreues Konterfei, / Wie meiner Haare Farb’ und meiner Augen sei. / Was soll ich sagen?”, in Werke, 7: 124. Rückert, Weisheit des Brahmanen, 113. E. F. Kossmann, Der deutsche Musenalmanach, 1833–1839 (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1909), 233. See also xxviii.

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the mythical philosopher Shankara wrote the verses to win a debate on the nature of love with the wife of another philosopher. Ill-equipped to converse on the theme, Shankara entered the soulless body of the king Amaru as it lay on the funeral pyre, hoping that the king’s many wives would induct him into the secrets of love.102 Rückert rendered thirty-eight of the stanzas into what he termed “popular and emotional” German verses that were “generally readable.”103 Many years later, he completed the collection and improved the translations. The Amaru´sataka offered Rückert a possible model for spiritual rejuvenation and communion, the language of love serving as a metaphor for how the individual becomes subsumed within the divine. The various emotional states of a lover, ranging from separation, nostalgia, and the desire for intoxication and surrender, can be read as stages through which the devout must pass to commune with a greater force.104 At the same time, the Sanskrit poetry is a tantalizing evocation of female desire. Rückert strung together a series of vignettes in which the corsets of demure girls burst at the seams, sweat builds silently on perfumed breasts, jilted women softly melt at the touch of transient husbands’ hands, and wives go astray. Most are set in the home and involve women of social standing, similar to Rückert’s readers, attended by maids and servants. Rückert’s articulation of female desire may especially have appealed to women.105 The editors of the Musenalmanach seemed apprehensive enough to request from Rückert “nothing Chinese, nothing Sanskrit, rather German” for the next edition.106 His sentimental German verse counteracted the impact of the foreign by marking the cultural difference of German women and thereby the nation. Images of the gender roles Rückert considered appropriate for middleclass German families overflow in the poems he wrote celebrating marriage in the 1830s. There is no hint of female sexuality in these works. Rather, in “Hochzeitlieder” Rückert honored the German bride for being “rich in virtue, grace, morality, and modesty.” The foundation of bourgeois marriage was neither erotic desire nor longing. A “noble wife” governed the home with “diligence and decency.”107 In “Beruf des Weibes,” Rückert attributed to the German housewife all the duties of the proverbial angel in the house. The bourgeois home was a

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103 104 105

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H. Glasenapp, ed., Indische Liebeslyrik in deutscher Sprache nachgebildet von Friedrich Rückert (Baden Baden: Hans Bühler, 1949), 42–5. Cited in ibid., 188. Ibid., 42–5. See K. Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 140. Chamisso regularly entreated Rückert to submit original German poetry, not translations. Kossmann, Der deutsche Musenalmanach, 40. F. Rückert, “Hochzeitlieder,” in Werke, 6: 112–3.

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patriarchal order in which the wife sublimates her own will to her husband’s every desire.108 For Rückert, attaining universality posed a threat to traditions that were German in a narrower sense, a concern that shaped his actual translation practices. As seen below, Rückert’s figurative reconstruction of paradise subjected the foreign to selective translation and a process of Germanization. Nevertheless, a particular vision of Protestant Christianity resolved for Rückert the contradiction Lagarde otherwise saw in his pairing of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. In “Bau der Welt” Rückert explained that Europe had received a divine “beam of light” (Lichtstrom) from the “Orient,” as well as a “powerful torrent” (Machtstrom) in the form of “our ancestors,” the Germanic tribes. “United,” Rückert wrote, this “double current [Doppelstrom] pushed forward against Rome.”109 The project of world poetry glorified German speakers as a chosen people destined for cultural leadership and a universal religious mission. Protestants, especially, were equipped to return Christian spirituality to its original roots in the pagan East. Despite an occasional reference to “Germanic blood,”110 reconciliation and love were the lofty aspirations behind Rückert’s oeuvre. The general fading of cosmopolitanism from German nationalist rhetoric111 in the second half of the nineteenth century does not in itself explain why, by contrast, Paul Lagarde was, in Suzanne Marchand’s words, a “hater of epic dimensions.” His attempt to found a true faith on secure, scientific evidence drew more overtly on ancient “Aryan” cultures such as Armenian, Coptic, Sanskrit, Persian.112 Lagarde assumed that God had revealed to the German nation its own particular religious ideal as part of a spiritual struggle against the world and other nations. Germans were destined to combine evangelical piety with a unique form of inwardness that Lagarde associated with truthfulness, authenticity, and independence of mind. Jews, in his view, constituted a separate nation defined by their religion. Discriminatory legislation, Lagarde believed, should exclude Jews from public and financial life until the overwhelming power of a Germanic and evangelic faith forced their conversion.113 Rückert welcomed Semitic traditions into the German patrimony provided they underwent a process of cultural translation.

108 109 110 111 112 113

F. Rückert, “Beruf des Weibes,” in Werke, 3: 293. Rückert, “Bau der Welt,” 362. Ibid., 364. Thielking, Weltbürgertum, 76–8. Marchand, German Orientalism, 173. Viaene, “Lagarde,” 539, 546–7.

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iii. cultural translation and the foreign The reality of translating ambitious texts into German slowly dampened Rückert’s plans for transcending Babel. The actual proficiency he gained in foreign languages during the 1820s and the strides taken in comparative philology towards more sober linguistic genealogies disrupted Rückert’s youthful expectations. In the foreword to his rendition of the Maqamat or The Assemblies (1826) of Al Hariri of Basra (1054–1122), Rückert thus argued that the “principles” by which translators “Germanized” Homer or Shakespeare were “hardly applicable to an Arabic poet.” German readers lacked the “closer relations” necessary to appreciate a strict translation of this text—an elaborately rhymed cycle of episodic stories composed in prose with short poetic passages. Named for the location near a fire where nomadic tribes once assembled in the evening, Hariri’s Maqamat recounts the adventures of Abu Zayd, who wanders through the Arabic provinces as a beggar after the Byzantines drive him from Saruj, his wealthy hometown. Rückert resorted to a “free reproduction” (Nachbildung) of twenty-four of the fifty original episodes in which a traveling narrator stumbles upon Abu Zayd in a series of ever-changing appearances, including that of a blind man. Other Rückert translations, including Nal und Damajanti (1828), Rostem und Suhrab (1838), the Hamâsa of Abu Temmâm (1846), followed a similar pattern. In Rückert’s view, Middle Eastern and South Asian texts contained culturally specific material that jeopardized what he termed “the cursory attention of the recreational German reader.”114 A process of cultural translation was necessary to make Hariri’s verse inteligible. Rückert’s approach only seemingly ran contrary to the stricter standards of translation that emerged in early nineteenth-century Germany. Earlier translators had acted like original authors, freely altering the tone, style, diction, form, and content of texts to conform to audience expectations. In the late eighteenth century, the new links scholars such as Hamann and Herder established between language, nationality, and thought encouraged translators to honor the intent and cultural context of the original author. The prospect that words evoked culturally specific meanings called into question whether ideas existed independently of their medium of expression.115 In his essay “On the Different Methods of Translating” (1813), Friedrich Schleiermacher thus asked German readers to assume a viewpoint “which is actually foreign to them.”116 This required the 114 115

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F. Rückert, “An die Leser,” in Werke, 11: 214. S. Bernofsky, Foreign Words: Translator–Authors in the Age of Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 2, 43. F. Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” in R. Schulte and J. Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 42.

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translator to invest his text with unfamiliar cultural references, unexpected vocabularly, and startling linguistic structures, as well as to resist alterations that acclimatized the text to new surroundings.117 Conceived during the Napoleonic occupation, Schleiermacher’s approach to translation had clear nationalist overtones. Since Luther the act of translation had been regarded as an integral part of German cultural existence; his Bible translation earned the distinction of having consituted a national identity by forging German linguistic unity.118 Schleiermacher’s model of “foreignizing translation” reacted against the perceived cultural hegemony of French neoclassicism, its aristocratic patrons, and the “domesticating” practices common in France and Britain.119 French translators produced quasi-independent literary works only loosely related to the original; a substantial degree of editorial freedom was tolerated in the name of good taste and “delicatesse.” English translations were distinguished by their practicality and their emphasis on the transferal of knowledge, a response to the demands of colonial rule.120 The early German Romantics were more sensitive to the presence of cultural and historical difference in literary texts and desired to preserve the otherness of the original just as they stressed the uniqueness of German culture. The principles of foreignizing translation, however, did not apply equally to “oriental” texts. Rückert’s practices complied with expectations of accuracy in this regard. Schleiermacher argued that a “free imitation should first awaken and sharpen the delight in what is foreign” so long as the educated part of a nation still had little familiarity with the culture of the text’s origin. The practice of imitation conceded that certain texts had to undergo a “substantial transformation” before being appreciated by German readers.121 In the notes published with his West-östlicher Divan (1819), Goethe similarly proposed that translation practices evolved through three historical epochs, each corresponding to a particular mode of translation. Prose summaries could facilitate German readers’ first exposure to the foreign without disturbing “our national domesticity.” Parodistic translations imitated foreign texts but could only aspire “to represent foreign meaning . . . with one’s own meaning.” The final, most perfected, stage wished “to make the translation identical with the original” so that it could “stand in place of the other.” According to Goethe, each national literature had to progress through these stages individually, so that a prosaic translation of the Schah Nameh was still

117 118 119 120 121

Bernofsky, Foreign Words, 28. Berman, Experience of the Foreign, 11. Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 107, 116. Figueira, Translating the Orient, 30, 24 ff. Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods,” 44, 41.

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appropriate while the better-known Sakuntala could now support a translation of the third mode.122 For Rückert, the difficulty of translating “oriental” texts lay in the mutual incompatibility of languages, a challenge for any language pairing but one accentuated when mapping non-European idioms onto German. The meaning of words, he noted, was “unsteady . . . iridescently ambiguous.” Even when conveying nuances in simple terms, translators, Rückert argued, must gaze into the very depth of the sea. The inability to find proper words in one’s native tongue produced “agony” for the poet. “The more you understand” a language, Rückert concluded, “the less translatable” it becomes.123 Philology, in a sense, complicated Rückert’s ambitions as a poet. In one verse, for example, he recounts speaking Sanskrit in his dreams with a mysterious Brahmin, but abruptly breaking it off as his “criteria grew too critical.” The beautiful verses of his poetic unconscious “dissolved upon waking into whimsical haze.”124 Rückert’s frustrations with the act of translation lay largely in his inability to adapt German adequately to a foreign language.125 Here playing poetry against philology served him well. Poetic license assumed blame for errors in philology, while strict adherence to language explained any awkward turn of phrase.126 In this fashion, Rückert endeavored to enhance the “representability” (Darstellbarkeit) of the Maqamat by overtly Germanizing or repressing aspects of the text that appeared untranslatable. His chief concern was accurately reproducing the “artistic creation” and “the peculiar form” of the text, especially its stylized rhymed prose, for which he was prepared to suppress “all . . . disturbing peculiarities.” His first efforts at translation eliminated “everything unfamiliar, all unintelligible references with which the text abounds.” Later he allowed annotations and explanations designed to “educate and amuse the German reader.” When references appeared too obscure, Rückert simply resorted to “substitutions” or cut portions of the original text. These aspects of the text were, in his view, merely tied to its chance historical location. Remnants of the lost language of paradise lived on for Rückert in the different meters, rhyme schemes, and rhythms not yet present in German. His intention was to show that “even in this extravagant form a spirit lives” that could only be made visible in this form.” Rückert apologized for “the spurious Oriental taste” which he thus introduced to German literature: “the endless plays on words and sounds, the rhymed prose, the exaggerated images, the crafty, exaggeratedly artificial expression.” German readers, he reckoned, were 122 123 124 125 126

J. W. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, ed. H.-J. Weitz (Frankfurt: Insel, 1974), 260–62. Rückert, Weisheit der Brahmanen, 42. F. Rückert, “Der Seele Doppelleben,” in Werke, 7: 110. Rückert, Weisheit der Brahmanen, 42. F. Rückert, “Zum Hariri,” in Werke, 7: 147.

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already accustomed to diverse styles. Hariri’s difficulty guaranteed that German writers would not sacrifice “dominant good taste” for his opaque ways.127 Many of Rückert’s twists and turns in the Maqamat reveal an exceedingly clever use of language and etymology. In “Das alte Weib” episode, for example, Rückert builds on a pun Hariri makes on the Arabic words “undergarments” and “poems,” both of which derive from a similar root: sh-`-r. The original Arabic reads roughly as follows: “She spoke: First I show you my undergarments [‘ashìra] and then I’ll turn you into the transmitters of my poems [‘ashàar].” Rückert transposed it in such a way that the original reference to shabby garments, as well as the affinity between clothes and words, is maintained: “Seht erst meines Gewandes Undichten—und dann meine Gewandtheit im Dichten!” (“First see the leakage in my robes—and then my agility in poetry.”) The German terms Gewand (garment) and gewandt (nimble) are effectively opposed, as are the words undicht (pervious) and Dichten (writing poetry). In other cases, Rückert employed a heavier hand. As Mahmoud Alali-Huseinat details, Rückert’s Maqamat replaced difficult allegories, metaphors, and word plays with ones that German readers understood more easily.128 The thirty-ninth episode, “Der Schulmeister von Hims,” for example, includes a closing speech by a local teacher that adds amusing references not present in the original. The following excerpt plays on similarities in the sounds of the German words Viele (many), lügen (to lie), and Philologen:129 “Du lügst, um zu leimen,—und rügst, um zu reimen;—du gehörst zu den Philologen,—die so heißen, weil Viele logen” (You lie in order to layer,—and reprimand to rhyme;—you belong to the philologists,—so called because many lied).130 Rückert often manipulated his translation to increase the number of rhymes. In the same episode, Rückert added a dizzying ode to the city of Hims entirely of his own invention131 : Heil’ge, hohe Himmelsheimath, hehre Hims, Heil! Du hast den Herrn zum Huldverheißer. Heitre Hügel, Heimlich hohles Haingeheg! Höhn’ euch herb kein harscher Hauch noch heißer! Holder Hirsche Heerde hütet hier der Hirt, Hoffnungshalm’ erhabner Herrscherhäuser. Heissa, hussa, herra, hu hihi, haha, Halle hell, bis Herz und Hals ist heiser.132

127 128 129 130 131 132

Rückert, “An die Leser,” 216. Mahmoud, Rückert und der Orient, 66, 85. Ibid., 66–7. F. Rückert, “Ebu Seid oder die Makamen des Hariri,” in Werke, 11: 526. Mahmoud, Rückert und der Orient, 67. Rückert, “Makamen,” 527.

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Even in the early nineteenth century, arabists criticized Rückert for the “arbitrary liberties in his arrangement,” finding many of his embellishments and substitutions unnecessary.133 Rückert’s translations admittedly opened new cultural spaces in German literature. He introduced, for example, previously unfamiliar poetic forms, such as the maqama and the qasideh, an elaborate fifty- to one hundred-line rhyming panegyric with a consistent meter, into the German literary repertoire.134 Lagarde’s own interest in orientalia dates to his reading “some of the most beautiful ghazals of Hafiz-Rückert” in a German literary anthology designed for gymnasium students.135 Rückert’s orientalizing poetry exposed educated Germans to alternative cultural models not derived from European antiquity. His highly successful Weisheit des Brahmanen, for example, offered readers a melange of moral lessons and philosophical truths through the character of a Brahmin. The “faith and manner of thinking” of multiple cultures could be reconciled, Rückert proposed, just as the Indo-European languages ultimately comprised “One language alone.” The Weisheit des Brahmanen united, among other things, philosophical principles from the Bhagavadgita and Rumi’s pantheism. Yet Rückert remained unwilling to cede ultimate cultural authority to oriental sources. The Brahmin’s wisdom, he explained, was “not purely brahmin,” rather “purely human.” Rückert comforted readers with the notion that much of it “a European acquaintance had entrusted unto him” and presented the text in rhymed Alexandrine meter.136 The text largely consists of Rückert’s own reflections on issues of general concern in Europe.137 “Everything I am now reading must be included,” Rückert wrote of his composition, “8 weeks ago Spinoza, 14 days ago astronomy, now Grimm’s extremely rich German Mythology, everything behind the loosely held-up mask of the Brahmin.”138 An intricate web of reassurances and dilutions mediated the German encounter with the foreign. Critical readings of Rückert’s translations suggest that his reliance on imitation produced a hierarchical form of hybridity in which German conventions dominated. The more unfamiliar the source language, the more thoroughly Rückert overhauled the translation, as in his adaptation from Latin of a collection of Chinese folk songs in 1833. Here Rückert substituted Christian terms and biblical sayings to replace myths and religious rituals in the original; he even

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“Die Verwandlungen des Ebu Seid von Serug oder die Makamen des Hariri,” Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 178, 3 Aug. 1827, 709. See, for example, F. Rückert, “Die Form des Ghasel’s,” in Werke, 5: 200. Lagarde, “Erinnerungen an Friedrich Rückert,” 38. Rückert, Weisheit der Brahmanen, 22. Remy, Influence of India and Persia, 53. Rückert, Briefe, 1: 592.

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inserted familiar landscapes with known animals and trees, as well as scenes from the German Middle Ages that included mounted knights and courtly tournaments.139 The comparative philologist Franz Bopp similarly noted in 1829 that Rückert’s “nationalization” of Nal und Damajanti exchanged the original Sanskrit meter for the rhyming pairs of old Swabian poets.140 Such alterations eased the entry of Rückert’s translations into German cultural space and allowed German speakers to take possession of texts as building blocks in the creation of a cosmopolitan national identity. One reviewer characterized the Maqamat “as a German work of art for a German public,” evidence that German culture had reached “a cosmopolitan standpoint.”141 “Too great a striving for accuracy,” the Arabist J. G. L. Kosegarten claimed, would have produced a text “completely unintelligible and ridiculous to European readers.”142 As it was, reviewers regularly warned their audience about the unsettling effects of Rückert’s orientalia. “Most German readers,” one critic cautioned, would need “some practice . . . to be able to endure” the rhymed prose of the Maqamat; ¨ Rosen advised they should not be “frightened away.”143 Reviews of the Ostliche German readers to take “only short strolls” into Rückert’s perfumed rose gardens, followed by rapid retreats,144 so that the departure from everyday “work, worries, and earnestness” did not appear “strange.”145 Rückert believed that Hariri would forever remain “untranslatable.” Linguistic differences testified to a gap between Arabic and German culture that could never be mediated. The “core itself, the focus” of the Maqamat, Rückert asserted, was bound so tightly to the “original language” that it withered when severed from Arabic.146 Most reviewers supported this diagnosis of untranslatability. The orientalist Friedrich Rosen believed the material basis of Arabic metaphors and their connections to Bedouin life so obscured their meaning that the

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H. Vittinghoff, “Friedrich Rückert und sein Ausflug in die frühe chinesische Dichtung,” in Hartmut Bobzin, ed., Friedrich Rückert an der Universität Erlangen 1826–1841. Schriften der Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg 19 (Erlangen: Universitätsbibliothek, 1988), 244. F. Bopp, “Nal und Damajanti: Eine Indische Geschichte von Friedrich Rückert,” (1829) in Fischer, ed., Friedrich Rückert in Spiegel, 344. “Orientalische Literatur,” in Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 72, April 1828, 93, 89–90. J. G. L. Kosegarten, “Die Verwandlungen des Ebu Seid von Serug oder die Makamen des Hariri,” in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 19, Jan, 1830, 145. “Die Verwandlungen,” Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 178, 3 Aug. 1827, 709. ¨ “Ostliche Rosen,” Literarisches Conversations-Blatt 15, Jan. 1822, 59. W. Alexis, Hermes oder kritisches Jahrbuch der Literatur, Zweites Stück für das Jahr 1822 2/14, 340, 341. Rückert, “An die Leser,” 215–16.

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Arabic language “stubbornly resists every exact translation.”147 Heinrich Ewald, an arabist and Old Testament scholar, concurred that “our relatively much poorer language” rendered a “true and conscientious copy” of the Maqamat impossible.148 Reviewers and Rückert himself presumed, nevertheless, that German translations achieved equivalency with foreign originals. There was a tendency within world poetry to replace and declare superfluous works in the source ¨ language. The Ostliche Rosen may unsettle German readers, one reviewer claimed, but this implied authenticity: “for Orientals Rückert would have become a second Hafiz.”149 Rückert himself depicted the effective translator emerging as a “true Oriental.” As his collection of Rumi’s ghazals opens, Rückert portrays the translator as “a blank mirror” refracting light from the East. He directs readers away from his own person: In the East is the light, I am in the West, A mountain on whose peak the light breaks. I am the pale moon for the beautiful sun; Look away from me into her face!”150

The poet then adopts a turban and Persian dress; he embraces Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism in hopes that Rumi will “not be far, oh, be not far!” Eventually, Rückert emerges as the very embodiment of the east—“I am the East,” “I am the orb of the sun”—and takes possession of the ghazal as a poetic form for German national literature.151 According to Lawrence Venuti, replacing one national tongue with a langauge seeking an international presence threatens the former with invisibility and helps establish cultural dominance in an age of globalization.152 Rückert’s cultural translation represents a variation on what Bhabha terms the “imperialist noun”153 that takes possession by naming space. The German language could only claim to transcend Babel by engulfing foreign texts and bestowing upon them world cultural significance. This required a process of

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ˆ oder die Makâmen des Harˆıri in F. Rosen, “Die Verwandlungen des Ebu Seid von Serug freier Nachbildung von Fr. Rückert,” in Fischer, ed., Friedrich Rückert im Spiegel, 335. H. Ewald, “Die Verwandlungen des Ebu Seid von Serug,” in Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen 117, 20 July 1829, 1165. Dr Mises, “Friedrich Rückert,” in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 61, 2 March 1835, 250. F. Rückert, “Ghaselen von Mewlana Dschelaleddin Rumi,” in Werke, 5: 200. Ibid., 200. “Die neue Form, die ich zuerst in deinem Garten pflanze, / O Deutschland, wird nicht u¨ bel stehn in deinem reichen Kranze.” See Bernofsky, Foreign Words, 40. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 233.

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improvement. Rückert concluded his Maqamat translation with the observation “I ought not be ashamed for doing it badly, / Rather, that I’ve made something bad too good.”154 Such assertions aimed to secure for Germany a position of cultural leadership in Europe. For Rückert, the domesticating translation practices of the French and English could never replicate the spirit of foreign literature as well as the German language. German, in his view, had a particular capacity for compound formations and complex sentence structures that rendered it uniquely suited to translating foreign texts. The greatest difficulty of translating the Sakuntala, for example, Rückert explained, was replicating the “immense, snakewinding meter of Sanskrit verse” (schlangenwandelnde Sanskritversmasskolosse). Ancient Indic poets loved to wind and twist the thread of meaning woven through their work into intricate webs and mazes, he concluded, which French and British translators could not match. Only Germans, in Rückert’s view, preserved this vitality.155 Indeed the success of his own translation hinged in part on Rückert’s exploiting the German language’s capacity for compound formations.156 When Rückert’s collected works appeared in 1834, their first reviewer concluded that the German home and province, not the Orient, lay at the heart of his oeuvre. Dr Mises acknowledged the “Oriental palace” that Rückert had outfitted with a dazzling display of gold and jewels. On top of this palace, however, stood a “a little hut” in which Rückert chose to live. His visitors were escorted through many “magnificent chambers.” After these distractions, Mises advised readers, “you will most long for repose in his own little cabin.”157 Rückert’s efforts to transform his mother tongue into a new language of paradise were to benefit the German nation. The mixture of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in his work reflects not the postcolonial conditions of late eighteenth-century Germany, but the more confident Vormärz. The nation ultimately took priority for Rückert over universalizing forms of religious identification. This helps explain why a disillusioned Rückert turned his back on the Middle East and Asia after mid-century. A day before revolution struck Berlin in March 1848, Rückert retreated to his Bavarian estate and negotiated a permanent release from his teaching responsibilities. Few students had subscribed to Rückert’s grand project due in part to increasing scholarly specialization within the field of philology. Never having engaged intellectual and social life in the Prussian capital, he “happily” exchanged his “unbearable post” for the “old beloved solitude” of the province. Political resignation and Luise’s death marred Rückert’s last years. After Friedrich Wilhelm IV rejected German unification under a liberal constitution 154 155 156 157

F. Rückert, “Schlusswort,” in Werke, 11: 568. F. Rückert, “Sakuntala,” in Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, July 1834, 853. 854. Figueira, Translating the Orient, 71. Mises, “Friedrich Rückert,” 258.

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in 1849, the “failed German empire” forced Rückert further into the “empire of poetry.”158 “Rückert’s life neared its end under great sorrow and affliction,” Paul de Lagarde concluded, “he set the unreachable goals of detecting language in many languages and humanity in many peoples: for this reason he met none of them.”159 Rückert increasingly sought solace in the familiar world of classical antiquity. “My work in Persian suffered a great interruption this winter,” he confessed to Lagarde in 1851, “due to my Greek studies.”160 A friendship with the Erfurt classicist Johann Adam Hartung (1801–67) rekindled Rückert’s lifelong interest in Greek metrics and poetry. He ceased studying Sanskrit as literature, approaching the language “only occasionally now for general linguistic comparisons.” In 1857, Rückert wrote to the publisher Heinrich Brockhaus looking to sell all but select books from collections he received from the Oriental Translation Fund and the Oriental Text Society. Two years later Rückert had his name withdrawn from the membership list of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft and asked Brockhaus to return a recently submitted translation of Persian poetry.161 Unable to re-create the language of paradise in a fallen world, Rückert lost confidence in his project. The scholarly community had relinquished the romantic idealism of his youth in favor of an increasingly scientific and historicized philology. Rückert’s expectations for liberal nationalist reform had likewise fallen short. His appropriation of Persian, Arabic, and Indic texts had produced something new and syncretic in the German literary repertoire. The encounter of the self with its own reflection in the foreign opened the type of in-between space conceived by Homi Bhabha. Yet local and national concerns severely limited Rückert’s receptivity to difference. His acts of cultural translation ultimately entailed a radical process of Germanification that engulfed most elements anterior to it. Those aspects of the ancient East that contemporaries failed to recognize as part of their own cultural heritage could only be rendered meaningful through their re-creation in German forms. His re-creations were always selective and excluded parts of the foreign as irremediably other. A vain attempt to reconcile the world’s languages through comparative grammar occupied Rückert’s final decade. In the summer of 1861 he reported being “deeply immersed in Coptic, a true bridge between Semitic and IndoGermanic.”162 A number of comparative philologists, including Theodor Benfey

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159 160 161 162

F. Rückert, Liedertagebuch: Werke der Jahre 1850–1851, ed. R. Kreutner and H. Wollschläger, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003), 298. Lagarde, “Erinnerungen an Friedrich Rückert,” 49. Rückert, Liedertagebuch, 313. Rückert, Briefe, 2: 1180, 1306. Ibid., 2: 1325.

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(1808–81), regarded Coptic as a potential bridge between the two language families. But after Rückert’s death, when his son asked Lagarde to publish this research, he refused, not wishing to tarnish the poet’s reputation.163 Rückert may have suspected the folly of his attempt to resurrect Babel, citing “mole-like blindness” in his efforts to penetrate the “interwoven roots of the world’s oldest languages.” “Satisfying a vain desire for knowledge” was the only true benefit of language study: no one could “ever unearth the salvation of humanity.”164 The aged orientalist appears to have succumbed to the aura of aesthetic and moral normativity that enveloped classical Hellas. Ancient Greece offered longestablished cultural models more attractive to the liberal German bourgeoisie than Asia and the Middle East. “To forget our own distress,” Rückert confessed in the poem “Rückkehr,” “We wished to travel the world over.” But the great pyramids merely masked disturbed graves; thorns plagued the rose gardens of Persia. “Soon we felt homesick,” Rückert declared, “To tread again the wellknown path of the Odyssey and Iliad.” The poet left behind the flooded plains of the Ganges and the “Forests where demons abide, and misshapen gods rule.”165 Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, was preferable to Rückert in her simple beauty than the fifty-three million Indian Apsarases who sprang from the sea bedecked in spectacular jewels. “Bow down before the one,” he pleaded, “who herself bows in gracious modesty!”166 Germans would do best to honor a European projection of bourgeois gender norms. Local images of femininity ultimately prevailed over a more cosmopolitan appreciation of world literature.

163 164 165 166

Erdmann, 200 Jahre Friedrich Rückert, 323. F. Rückert, “Sprachforschung,” in Werke, 7: 26. F. Rückert, “Rückkehr,” in Werke, 7: 51. F. Rückert, “Indischer und griechischer Mythos,” in Werke, 7: 24.



canonizing dewey: naturalism, logical empiricism, and the idea of american philosophy∗ andrew jewett Department of History, Harvard University E-mail: [email protected]

Between World War I and World War II, the students of Columbia University’s John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge built up a school of philosophical naturalism sharply critical of claims to value-neutrality. In the 1930s and 1940s, the secondgeneration Columbia naturalists (John Herman Randall Jr, Herbert W. Schneider, Irwin Edman, Horace L. Friess, and James Gutmann) and their students who later joined the department (Charles Frankel, Joseph L. Blau, Albert Hofstadter, and Justus Buchler) reacted with dismay to the arrival on American shores of logical empiricism and other analytic modes of philosophy. These figures undermined their colleague Ernest Nagel’s attempt to build an alliance with the logical empiricists, accusing them of ignoring the scholar’s primary role as a public critic. After the war, the prestige of analytic approaches and a tendency to label philosophies either “analytic” or “Continental” eclipsed the Columbia philosophers’ normatively inflected naturalism. Yet in their efforts to resist logical empiricism, the Columbia naturalists helped to construct a sturdy, canonical portrait of “American philosophy” that proponents still hold up as a third way between analytic and Continental approaches.

Writing after World War II, John Dewey’s former student and colleague John Herman Randall Jr declared that logical empiricism and British analytic philosophy “can scarcely claim to be ‘American thought,’” whereas Dewey exemplified the “original and characteristic American philosophy.” Targeting in particular Rudolf Carnap, a leading logical empiricist, Randall described this “Prussian systematizer” as “relatively insulated from the main currents of American experience and thought.” In fact, Randall identified Dewey’s expansive, ∗

For generous financial support, I would like to thank the Visiting Scholars Program of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of the National Academy of Education. I also benefited greatly from comments on earlier drafts by Joel Isaac, my colleagues in Harvard’s History Department, audiences from the National Academy of Education and the University of British Columbia’s Science and Technology Studies Program, and MIH’s editors and reviewers.

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publicly engaged view of philosophy as a prerequisite for open, democratic discourse. Carnap, he wrote, exemplified the “paternalistic” approach of German philosophers, who “thought in terms of ‘experts’ telling people what to do, running things efficiently for them.” By contrast, Dewey, a good democrat, “thought you might find out more about what people need by asking them . . . They know where the shoe pinches better than you do.” In Randall’s portrait, Deweyan pragmatism and Carnapian logical empiricism (frequently called “logical positivism”) stood for more than competing assumptions about the scholar’s public role: they symbolized distinct national cultures.1 Randall served as the informal leader of one of the most cohesive and influential American centers of intellectual resistance to value-neutral scholarship in the mid-twentieth century: a philosophical school called “Columbia naturalism,” which retained its coherence from the 1920s into the 1960s. Historians of philosophy, like those tracing the development of the social sciences, have devoted sustained attention to claims of value-neutrality that enhanced scholars’ professional authority.2 As yet, however, we lack a systematic analysis of alternative epistemologies and their political functions in modern America. The Columbia naturalists would feature prominently in that broad story. To the chagrin of their younger colleague Ernest Nagel, a brilliant logician and philosopher of science who worked to reconcile logical empiricism with indigenous modes of philosophy, the second-generation Columbia figures— Randall, Herbert W. Schneider, Irwin Edman, Horace L. Friess, and James Gutmann, all of whom studied under Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge in the late 1910s and early 1920s before taking up posts in the department—joined Yale’s idealists in finding analytic philosophy to be politically irresponsible as well as conceptually inadequate.3 Indeed, even Nagel, whose cautious temperament

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John Herman Randall Jr, “The Spirit of American Philosophy,” in F. Ernest Johnson, ed., Wellsprings of the American Spirit (New York, 1948), 120–21, 129; idem, review of Cohen, American Thought, Jewish Social Studies 17 (1955), 78; idem, “John Dewey, 1859–1952,” Journal of Philosophy 50 (1953), 11. Professionalization dynamics feature prominently in Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven, 1977); Daniel J. Wilson, Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy, 1860–1930 (Chicago, 1990); and John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Evanston, IL, 2001). Kuklick covers the latter in “Philosophy at Yale in the Century after Darwin,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 21 (2004), 313–36; and sketches Columbia naturalism in A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (New York, 2001), 190–96. Also see William M. Shea, The Naturalists and the Supernatural (Macon, GA, 1984); John Ryder, ed., American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, NY, 1994); Victorino Tejera, American Modern, the Path Not Taken: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and Intellectual History in Classic

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and fascination with technical problems largely aligned him with analytic philosophy, decried its proponents’ apparent embrace of value-neutrality. Dewey, Randall, Nagel, and the other Columbia naturalists used their histories of philosophy, their textbooks, their editorship of the Journal of Philosophy, and their numerous public writings, as well as their specialized work, to promote a vision of philosophy that they regarded as uniquely compatible with American democracy. After World War II, however, the discipline largely rejected their understanding of what philosophy could and should be. As a result, most of the Columbia naturalists adopted a faintly xenophobic tone in the Cold War years. Working to attach the descriptor “American” to their work and to wedge Dewey into the pantheon of national heroes, they attempted to conceptually deport other philosophical systems from the United States. In their efforts to canonize Dewey as the patron saint of American democracy, these figures took aim at many domestic competitors, including Catholics, Protestant fundamentalists, and secular natural-law thinkers such as Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler.4 But the arrival of logical empiricism in the 1930s played a distinctive role in the Columbia naturalists’ attempt to delineate a national philosophical tradition. When the Austrian logical empiricist Rudolf Carnap, his German counterpart Hans Reichenbach, and several other key figures emigrated to the United States, Columbia’s philosophers faced a school of thought that was, like theirs, militantly scientific and politically left-wing.5 Logical empiricism, birthed amid the ideological struggles of 1920s Central Europe and transplanted into the very different academic climate of the Depression-era United States, offered the Columbia naturalists both a potent challenge and a golden opportunity to promote their own brand of scientific philosophy. The Columbia naturalists targeted the logical empiricists’ inclination toward noncognitivism, a theory holding that ethical judgments contain no cognitive content and thus present a fundamentally different kind of claim than do scientific statements. Most of the Columbia naturalists, like the vast majority of other American philosophers, ignored the complexities of logical empiricism and barely engaged the work of its exponents. As a result, they saw at the heart of the movement a particularly uncompromising version of noncognitivism that treated

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American Philosophy (Lanham, MD, 1996); and John P. Anton, American Naturalism and Greek Philosophy (Amherst, NY, 2005). Gutmann taught part-time at Columbia until 1936, when he finally received his PhD: John Herman Randall Jr, “The Department of Philosophy,” in Jacques Barzun, ed., A History of the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University (New York, 1957), 136. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003), 175. Another Austrian, Herbert Feigl, had already landed at the University of Iowa in 1930. Carnap arrived at the University of Chicago in 1936, while Reichenbach found a post at UCLA in 1938. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 233.

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value judgments as little more than individual idiosyncrasies, bearing no relation to the scientist’s empirical investigations and logical reasoning. This conception of ethics, the Columbia naturalists insisted, impoverished democracy by isolating philosophers from normative public discourse. In order for philosophers to fulfill their democratic responsibilities, the argument continued, they needed to recognize that value judgments were profoundly social and publicly observable entities with future referents—in short, that these judgments expressed changes sought, states of affairs desired. Even Nagel, who grasped the subtleties of logical empiricism, defined values as elements of a shared public world and charged that the logical empiricists wrongly isolated values from factual judgments about that world. Although he departed from his colleagues in believing that logical empiricism could be shorn rather easily of its noncognitivist tendencies, Nagel joined the other Columbia naturalists in identifying Dewey’s normatively committed philosophy as an indigenous, democratic philosophy and logical empiricism as a dangerously disengaged European import. Ultimately, Nagel’s attempt to broker a merger between logical empiricism and Columbia naturalism fell short. But his colleagues faced even greater disappointment in the Cold War years, as W. V. O. Quine and other Harvard figures codified a new philosophical paradigm and relegated the synthetic, publicly oriented style of the Columbia naturalists, along with their specific understandings of nature, science, values, and human agency, to the margins of the field. Columbia’s philosophers continued to portray their approach as the democratic alternative to an authoritarian, essentially European form of positivism. But the intellectual culture of the 1950s instituted a very different taxonomy of philosophers, pitting the non-normative “analytic tradition” of Britain and the United States against a “Continental tradition” populated by Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and other European critics of politically neutral scholarship.6 These categories left no room for the Columbia philosophers’ normatively engaged naturalism.

the columbia naturalists on science, religion, and philosophy The rise of American naturalism vividly illustrates the intellectual convergence of liberal Protestants and the children of Jewish immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century.7 At Columbia, heterodox thinkers of Protestant

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On the constructed nature of the analytic–Continental divide, see Simon Critchley’s introduction to A Companion to Continental Philosophy (Malden, MA, 1998), 3–6. David A. Hollinger describes this phenomenon in “Jewish Intellectuals and the DeChristianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century,” in idem, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton, 1996), 17–41.

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extraction set the tone. Randall, Schneider, Edman, Friess, and Gutmann sought to coax Americans toward an inclusive, predominantly ethical faith for a machine age. “Most of the members of the Department are either sons of ministers, son-in-laws [sic] of ministers, or ex-would-be ministers,” complained Corliss Lamont, an outspoken atheist and socialist who took his PhD under these men and taught alongside them for a number of years.8 The second-generation Columbia naturalists assigned to professional philosophers an essentially ministerial role: taking the nation as their pastorate, they would help citizens accommodate their spiritual and political beliefs to new scientific truths and new technological processes. “For men to retain the ardor of the historic religions and to direct this toward social welfare rather than toward the supernatural is the great desideratum,” Randall and his student Justus Buchler wrote.9 Even Edman, the son of Jewish immigrants, adopted this view of the philosopher’s task. The students of Dewey and Woodbridge aimed to provide an alternative to the churches as a source of spiritual guidance for Americans.10 The Columbia naturalists’ views on ethical matters aligned them at many points with other naturalistic philosophers and theologians. Although selfdescribed naturalists such as Max C. Otto at Wisconsin and Roy Wood Sellars at Michigan were kindred spirits, the Columbia naturalists hewed more closely in both tone and substance to religious humanists such as E. A. Burtt at Cornell and A. Eustace Haydon, Edward Scribner Ames, and Henry Nelson Wieman at the University of Chicago.11 The 1933 Humanist Manifesto, written in part by Sellars and signed by Burtt, Haydon, Dewey, and Randall, illustrates the close ties between Mid-western centers of theological heterodoxy and New York.12 But the second-generation Columbia naturalists worked even more closely with New York’s many Jewish naturalists, such as Sidney Hook, a student of Dewey’s who taught at New York University, and the Jamesian pluralist Horace M. Kallen

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Corliss Lamont to Randall, 10 April 1934, “Lamont, Corliss,” Box 2, John Herman Randall Jr papers, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter “Randall papers”). John Herman Randall and Justus Buchler, Philosophy: An Introduction (New York, 1942), 291, original emphasis. Randall, who hoped to direct what he saw as individuals’ innate religious impulses toward human ideals, told Reinhold Niebuhr that he was an atheist but “no infidel.” Randall to Niebuhr, 2 Dec. 1942, “Niebuhr, Reinhold,” Box 2, Randall papers. Donald H. Meyer, “Secular Transcendence: The American Religious Humanists,” American Quarterly 34 (1982), 524–42; Stephen P. Weldon, “The Humanist Enterprise from John Dewey to Carl Sagan: A Study of Science and Religion in American Culture,” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1997, 59–98. Edwin H. Wilson, The Genesis of A Humanist Manifesto (Amherst, NY, 1995).

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at the New School for Social Research.13 Both of these figures blasted away at Catholic neo-Thomists, neo-orthodox Protestants, and other “authoritarian” thinkers during World War II. The institutions surrounding Columbia were not without their “soft,” culturally Protestant, naturalists, including Harry A. Overstreet, who pursued a project of religious reconciliation at the City College of New York, just a short walk north of Morningside Heights.14 Still, philosophical naturalism took on a distinctly militant cast in Depression-era New York, and the personnel were increasingly of Jewish descent. By the late 1930s, Dewey, who had been labeled an enemy of democracy by Catholics and other theistic critics, firmly aligned himself with Hook’s double-barreled attack on Catholicism and Stalinism.15 Columbia’s second-generation naturalists took as their starting point Dewey’s “instrumentalist” version of pragmatism, which was predicated on a reading of Darwinian biology that made a prominent place in nature for minds, values, and other “immaterial” objects. Dewey’s naturalism departed substantially from what Edman called the “billiard-ball physics” of the materialists of yore. Naturalism, Edman wrote, was “simply a faith in the unity of nature or substance, of which all life is a derivation, upon which all action is posited, and within which the structure of mechanism is seen to be simply a systematized technique of practice and of economical understanding.”16 Dewey had reasoned that, if minds affected the external world, and ideals shaped behavior, then these “immaterial” entities necessarily occupied the same realm as material objects. He had explained this conjunction of apparent opposites by arguing that minds were functions or phases of organisms, separable analytically, but not concretely, from bodies.17 The naturalists viewed this approach, and not reductive materialism, as the truly empirical one. “If the subjective is a necessary element in the problem,” wrote Friess in 1926, “then it ought to be recognized like any other necessity.”18 The second-generation naturalists also adopted Dewey’s political project. In the United States, unlike Central Europe, the political right had often mobilized

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Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist (Ithaca, 1997); Matthew Cotter, ed., Sidney Hook Reconsidered (Amherst, NY, 2004); Milton R. Konvitz, ed., The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen (New York, 1987). George Cotkin, “Middle-Ground Pragmatists: The Popularization of Philosophy in American Culture,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), 283–302. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 175; Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991), 464. Irwin Edman, “The Vision of Naturalism” (1937), in The Uses of Philosophy: An Irwin Edman Reader, ed. Charles Frankel (New York, 1955), 197–8. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 182. Horace L. Friess, “The Sixth International Congress of Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 23 (1926), 636.

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the authority of science, in the form of classical political economy. Dewey, a key theorist of Progressivism, sought to prevent the social sciences from becoming an adjunct to capitalist power—as had the natural sciences, in his view. He attributed much of the sway of free-market ideology in the United States to the prevalence of two philosophical positions, Lockean empiricism and strict fact/value separation. In the case of empiricism, Dewey argued that its dualistic postulation of mind as a separate entity could not account for the social origins and consequences of thought. Indeed, he described empiricism as the philosophy of the commercial middle class: like its close relative, Adam Smith’s political economy, empiricism had been developed to tear down oppressive regimes but now served the purely ideological function of sustaining economic individualism.19 Meanwhile, in the realm of ethics, Dewey sought to undermine the postulate, advanced by Hume on one side and religious traditionalists on the other, that normative commitments were transcendent and absolute, and thus impervious to scientific advances, to social upheavals such as industrialization, and to empirically grounded criticism. Such a view, Dewey believed, obstructed the critical impact of scientific inquiry on prevailing moral commitments, especially the reputed primacy of individual liberty.20 Exploring the broad middle ground between liberalism and socialism, the second-generation naturalists offered much the same analysis of commercial power and its cultural sources.21 More than any other group of American philosophers, then or since, the Columbia naturalists allied themselves with the social sciences. Whereas other American naturalists joined idealists and realists in seeking a world view consistent with Darwinian biology and the physics of Newton and Einstein, Columbia’s thinkers identified the technological applications of physical science to economic production as the relevant context for modern philosophy.22 Meanwhile, they viewed the extension and cultural legitimation of the social sciences as the key to properly addressing the

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Numerous commentators have noted Dewey’s relentless campaign against empiricism, e.g. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York, 1995), 126. John Dewey, “William James as Empiricist” (1942), Later Works, 15: 14. All Dewey citations refer to The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953: The Electronic Edition. See especially Randall’s The Making of the Modern Mind (Boston, 1926) and Our Changing Civilization: How Science and the Machine are Reconstructing Modern Life (New York, 1929). Examples of the former tendency include Max C. Otto, Things and Ideals (New York, 1924) and Natural Laws and Human Hopes (New York, 1926); Roy Wood Sellars, Evolutionary Naturalism (Chicago, 1922); Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1926); E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (New York, 1925); and Durant Drake, Mind and Its Place in Nature (New York, 1925).

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dislocations of industrialization. The Columbia figures found particularly congenial the comparative, historicist approach of the Boasian anthropologists and the instrumental, activist orientation of institutional economics and much American sociology. Like Dewey, they viewed the social world as a scene of willful invention, wherein human beings made and remade their beliefs and values, as well as their social practices and institutions, in accordance with desired ends. “Today,” Randall proclaimed, “we are at last in possession of a science that insists on the importance and reality of all man’s experience and enterprises, and has developed concepts that promise to render them all intelligible.” Modern science, he continued, addressed “symphonies as well as atoms, personality as well as reflex action, religious consecration as well as the laws of motion or the equations of the field theory.”23 The second-generation naturalists took for granted Dewey’s epistemological and metaethical claims and his political-historical critiques of the competing theories of knowledge. They worked to flesh out his “anthropological philosophy” by expanding its reach into aesthetics, social and political ethics, metaphysics, and the history of ideas.24 In this project, it was not so much Dewey as the now-forgotten Frederick J. E. Woodbridge who served as the primary role model for the young guns.25 Like Dewey and Harvard’s George Santayana—another important, if less direct, influence on the second-generation thinkers—Woodbridge placed the human mind firmly in nature, finding its products as natural as the rocks, fishes, and stars.26 He leaned heavily on Aristotle, understood as “a man close to nature” rather than “a syllogistic gentleman with a category for every emergency.”27 Spurred on by Woodbridge and other department elders, the precocious secondgeneration thinkers viewed their intellectual contributions in world-historical terms. Friess was only half-joking when, in his mid-twenties, he proposed that he

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Randall, “The Nature of Naturalism,” in Yervant H. Krikorian, ed., Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York, 1944), 369. Randall to John J. Coss, 28 Feb. 1929, “Randall, John Herman, Jr.,” Box 2, Randall papers. Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 116. Woodbridge also inspired Dewey to clarify and articulate his metaphysical views: Westbrook, John Dewey, 321. Another mentor to the second-generation naturalists was John J. Coss, the department’s executive officer. Coss, who built up the famed Contemporary Civilization course and played a key role in hiring decisions, also negotiated with publishers on behalf of Columbia’s young philosophers. W. E. Spaulding to Coss, 27 Oct. 1924, and Coss to Spaulding, 1 Dec. 1925, “Correspondence, 1920–1929,” Box 4, Randall papers. Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, Nature and Mind (New York, 1937); idem, An Essay on Nature (New York, 1940). A critical study is William Frank Jones, Nature and Natural Science: The Philosophy of Frederick J. E. Woodbridge (Buffalo, 1983). Cotkin emphasizes Santayana’s influence on Edman in “Middle-Ground Pragmatists,” 293–6. Woodbridge to Randall, 22 April 1937, “Woodbridge, Frederick J.E.,” Box 3, Randall papers.

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and Randall undertake “a joint editing of The History of Human Philosophies on the scale of the French Encyclopedia.”28 Randall, in turn, was deadly serious when he undertook the massive study The Making of the Modern Mind shortly thereafter.29 Such ambitions stemmed as much from Woodbridge’s influence as from Dewey’s work. In the field of religion, Ethical Culture Society founder Felix Adler profoundly shaped the young naturalists’ views. Since breaking with Judaism in the 1870s, Adler had espoused a purely ethical religion that folded scientific knowledge into inspirational practices and ideals.30 Randall and Friess drifted into Adler’s orbit in the 1920s; the latter married Adler’s daughter in 1923 and intermittently toiled at a biography of his father-in-law.31 Gutmann, who for many years taught ethics in the Ethical Culture schools and had attended one of them himself, introduced his colleagues to the movement.32 Adler’s influence can be seen in the development of Columbia’s program in the study of religion. Launched in the 1920s by the second-generation naturalists, in tandem with figures from other departments and the neighboring Union Theological Seminary, the program emphasized empirical analysis but frowned on the reduction of religious phenomena to reflexes of economic interests or biological urges.33 Columbia’s naturalists saw religions as emotionally necessary symbolic systems through which individuals and communities grasped their particular historical circumstances.34 These

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Friess to Randall, 15 Nov. 1924, “Correspondence, 1920–1929,” Box 4, Randall papers. Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind. Howard Radest, Felix Adler: An Ethical Culture (New York, 1998). Friess to Randall, 22 Feb. 1925 (1 March addition), “Correspondence, 1920–1929,” Box 4, Randall papers. The final product of Friess’s effort was the posthumous Felix Adler and Ethical Culture: Memories and Studies (New York, 1981), which includes some biographical information, as do Gutmann’s foreword to the book and Friess’s “The Affirmation of Man,” in Salo W. Baron, Ernest Nagel, and Koppel S. Pinson, eds., Freedom and Reason: Studies in Philosophy and Jewish Culture in Memory of Morris Raphael Cohen (Glencoe, IL, 1951), 128–41. See the series of 1982 letters in “Black, Algernon D.,” Box 1, James Gutmann papers, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter “Gutmann papers”). Adler taught at Columbia but busied himself little with the department’s affairs: Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 120–22. Schneider to Dwight C. Miner, 17 Sept. 1952, “Corres. from Schneider,” Box 1, Herbert W. Schneider papers, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter “Schneider papers”); Horace L. Friess, “The Department of Religion,” in Barzun, ed., A History of the Faculty of Philosophy, 146–67. Examples include Randall and John Herman Randall Sr, Religion and the Modern World (New York, 1929); Horace L. Friess and Herbert W. Schneider, Religion in Various Cultures (New York, 1932); Irwin Edman, The Mind of Paul (New York, 1935); and Herbert Wallace Schneider, Meditations in Season on the Elements of Christian Philosophy (New York, 1938).

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figures, under the influence of Dewey, Woodbridge (who held a degree from Union), and especially Adler, pursued a strategy that one interlocutor described as “carrying old values forward under usable symbols.”35 A dense web of personal and professional connections tied the younger Columbia naturalists to one another and to the wider community of American philosophy. Bonding tightly in graduate school, they vacationed together in Vermont for decades thereafter.36 At gatherings of the American Philosophical Division’s Eastern Division and the New York Philosophical Club, which they gradually took over from Dewey, Woodbridge, and Wendell T. Bush, the second-generation figures shared their work with a largely Protestant group of various philosophical hues. The profession’s old guard included self-styled idealists (Yale’s Brand Blanshard and Wilbur M. Urban, Harvard’s William Ernest Hocking), realists (Princeton’s E. G. Spaulding, Johns Hopkins’s Arthur O. Lovejoy, Barnard’s William P. Montague), personalists (Princeton’s Warner Fite), pragmatists (Pennsylvania’s Edgar A. Singer Jr), and even behaviorists (Bush).37 Paul Tillich and other Union faculty joined these men at Philosophy Club meetings.38 Deeply invested in solving the puzzle of knowledge, and thereby harmonizing science with religion, these philosophers vigorously debated the relationship between science and human ideals.39 In the interwar tussles over the nature of cognition and related matters, the disputants shared a broad sphere of agreement. The schools of American philosophy that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— first, idealisms derived from Hegel, Kant, and their British and German interpreters; then versions of pragmatism, realism, and naturalism—attempted to place the scientific enterprise on more solid philosophical ground than that 35

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Lee H. Ball to Randall, 19 Nov. 1931, “Correspondence, 1930–1939,” Box 4, Randall papers. Coss had studied at Union as well: Randall, “Towards a Functional Naturalism,” in John E. Smith, ed., Contemporary American Philosophy (New York, 1970), 56. E.g. Schneider to Randall, 30 July 1942, “Schneider, Herbert W.,” Box 2, Randall papers; Sterling P. Lamprecht to Gutmann, 25 May 1943, “Lamprecht, Sterling P.,” Box 1, Gutmann papers. Lamprecht was an exiled member of the second generation; he studied with the others at Columbia but taught at the University of Illinois and later Amherst. For his version of naturalism, see Empiricism and Natural Knowledge (Berkeley, 1940). Schneider to Randall, 24 Feb. 1937, “Schneider, Herbert W.,” Box 2, Randall papers; W. E. Hocking to Randall, 19 April 1944, “Hocking, William Ernest,” ibid. Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, KY, 2003), 494; Ernest Nagel, transcript of interview with Kenneth W. Duckett, 10 Oct. 1966, “Arranged Correspondence. Miscellaneous (2),” Box 2, Ernest Nagel papers, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter “Duckett transcript,” “Nagel papers”). On the centrality of science to America’s early professional philosophers see Wilson, Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy.

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provided by nineteenth-century empiricism. The empiricist claim that external objects presented themselves immediately to the mind as sensory impressions seemed, to its American critics, to render the mind purely passive in relation to the world. The theory struck them as denying the very real consequences of moral ideals, scientific concepts, and other mental products.40 While offering different answers to the question of how scientists produced reliable knowledge of the world, most leading philosophers shared two assumptions about the character of knowledge and the role of the scholar. First, they viewed human minds—and intellectuals—as active agents in the world, not as passive mirrors of reality. By the 1930s, this emphasis on the mind’s shaping power led many American thinkers to stress the role of theories, symbols, frameworks, and other historically contingent conceptual structures in processes of cognition and even perception.41 To some extent, this concern overlapped nicely with the logical empiricists’ attention to questions of syntax and the role of symbols in the sciences. But Carnap and crew hardly shared the second assumption common among American philosophers: that normative public engagement represented the key component and the primary justification of philosophical scholarship. Dewey wrote in 1929, “The greatest need of our national culture is an awakening of courageous faith in the value of speculative imagination, provided it is supplied with an adequate body of experience.”42 Though the commitment was often honored in the breach, most American philosophers agreed that political responsibility required normative intervention in democratic discourse—or, at least, the adoption of a theory of values that rendered such intervention legitimate. Into the late 1940s, the discipline’s leading figures viewed themselves as humanists, helping citizens clarify and implement their value commitments, and usually also as metaphysicians, constructing a

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This and the following paragraph represent my reading of the material in Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 95–224. It is revealing that Harvard’s W. V. O. Quine, who carried many features of logical empiricism into the postwar era, felt like a fish out of water at Harvard in the 1930s. His colleagues disdained his highly technical approach. Joel Isaac, “W. V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United States,” MIH 2 (2005), 205–34. Brigitte Nerlich, “The 1930s—At the Birth of a Pragmatic Conception of Language,” Historiographica Linguistica 22 (1995), 311–34. Randall described empiricism as an “identification of knowledge with vision.” This “spectator theory” failed utterly to account for modern science, in Randall’s view: “It is difficult to ‘see’ a scientific hypothesis or theory, or a framework of measurement,” despite the indispensability of these conceptual objects. Randall found in empiricism no place for the “use of intellectual tools,” the “getting from one place in experience to another,” typical of scientific practice. Randall to Ewing P. Shahan, 17 April 1942, “Correspondence, 1940–1949,” Box 4, Randall papers. Quoted in Friess, “The Sixth International Congress,” 621.

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theory of reality that could account for both natural structures and value-driven behavior. Ernest Nagel represented an exception to this rule. Taking up his professorial post in 1931, Nagel stood midway between the second generation of Columbia naturalists and the third: Charles Frankel, Joseph L. Blau, Albert Hofstadter, and Justus Buchler, all of whom ascended from graduate study at Columbia to faculty positions in the era of World War II. Like Frankel, Blau, and Hofstadter, Nagel was Jewish, an immigrant from Austria–Hungary in his youth. In an era of informal quotas at Columbia College, he pursued his undergraduate training under the Kantian Morris R. Cohen at City College before moving on to graduate work with Dewey.43 This trajectory meant that Nagel missed the key socializing experiences shared by members of the second generation: introductory courses in history with Carlton J. H. Hayes and politics with Charles A. Beard, admission as an undergraduate to Woodbridge’s first-year graduate seminar in the history of philosophy, and graduate teaching in the Contemporary Civilization core.44 Nagel taught in the city’s public schools throughout his undergraduate and graduate years and first made his name with an influential logic textbook, co-authored with Cohen. Yet he seems always to have viewed himself as a researcher rather than a teacher, even as he faithfully discharged what he saw as his obligation to educate the public regarding science and its relationship to social values.45 Until the late 1930s, Nagel was the only Columbia philosopher with any real competence, or even interest, in the fields developed by the logical empiricists: symbolic and mathematical logic, semantics, the foundations of mathematics, and philosophy of science. During the 1920s, the members of the second generation had fanned out into precisely the value-laden areas of inquiry that the logical empiricists eschewed. Possessing a strong sense of collective mission, they sought to cover the gamut of undergraduate teaching needs by carving

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Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 134–7. The department employed an informal hiring policy, relying heavily on personal vouchsafes and often giving outside prospects trial runs, though it favored its own students. E.g. John J. Coss to Randall, 28 Feb. 1934, “Coss, John J.,” Box 1, Randall papers. It is difficult to find details about Nagel’s life. Characteristically, his Festschrift offers neither a biographical essay nor a bibliography: Sidney Morgenbesser, Patrick Suppes, and Morton White, eds., Philosophy, Science, and Method (New York, 1969). Irwin Edman, “The College: A Memoir of Forty Years,” in Dwight C. Miner, ed., A History of Columbia College on Morningside (New York, 1954), 5–7; Schneider to Dwight C. Miner, 17 Sept. 1952, “Corres. from Schneider,” Box 1, Schneider papers. Box 27 of the Nagel papers contains dozens of speeches on topics such as “Philosophy as a Social Science,” “Logic and the Good Life,” and “Science and Contemporary World Views.” See also Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof (New York, 1958). Nagel and Cohen’s book is An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (New York, 1934).

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out broad specialties in traditional domains of philosophy: Randall took on the history of ideas, Gutmann wrote on ethics, Edman covered aesthetics, and Friess and Schneider specialized in the philosophy of religion, with Schneider adding political theory and, later, the history of philosophy to his portfolio. The thirdgeneration naturalists tilled the same fields.46 Nagel, by contrast, emerged from a different professional context, wherein logical empiricism loomed increasingly large. Attracted to logical empiricism’s rigor and critical potential in the wider culture, and viewing it as fundamentally compatible with Columbia naturalism, Nagel worked diligently to build bonds between the two movements. This was a difficult balancing act, however. Nagel regarded logical empiricism as a special case or limited application of Deweyan naturalism, one that could be detached rather easily from noncognitivist ethics and rendered an ally of Columbia philosophy. By contrast, the other Columbia naturalists detected a radical separation of science from public values at the very heart of logical empiricism. They viewed logical empiricism and Deweyan naturalism as direct competitors for the mantle of scientific philosophy. Indeed, they identified logical empiricism as merely an updated version, in new terminological dress, of a Lockean and Humean outlook that, in their view, powerfully buttressed commercial capitalism. Nagel’s reconciliation project made little headway within his own department; his colleagues at Columbia regarded logical empiricism as an apolitical, scholastic form of philosophy that would allow American public culture to go to seed.

logical empiricism and the question of values The logical empiricists hewed to a very different form of progressive politics than that of their interlocutors at Columbia. Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Philipp Frank were committed socialists. Through their Unity of Science Movement, which sponsored a series of international congresses (including one at Harvard in 1939) and produced several installments of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science after 1938, these figures advocated national planning and the redistribution of resources. The FBI kept a watchful eye on Carnap and Frank following their arrival in the United States.47 46

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Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 131–3, 136. On the centrality of the history of ideas to the department’s self-conception, see Woodbridge to Randall, 5 April 1940, “Woodbridge, Frederick J.E.,” Box 3, Randall papers; and Nagel to Frank D. Fackenthal, 22 April 1944, “Nagel, Ernest,” Box 1, Nagel papers. Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley, 1997), esp. 155, notes the prevalence of the ideal of “balance” in interwar departments. George A. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (New York, 2005), 27–56, 115. Other helpful sources include Malachi Hacohen, Karl

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Yet the movement did not look politically engaged to leading American thinkers, who possessed a different understanding of the political meaning of epistemological and ethical theories. Even Carnap’s colleagues at the University of Chicago typically missed the political ambitions fueling his technical studies in logic and semantics.48 After all, mainstream American philosophers sought to open up normative debate, bringing ethical judgments to bear on a culture that seemed mired in self-seeking materialism. “Anything that obscures the fundamentally moral nature of the social problem is harmful,” Dewey wrote sharply in 1939.49 The Progressive movement, to which American scholars had contributed extensively, had been framed in such terms: the task was to reembed capitalism in a moral framework. By contrast, logical empiricism had emerged in a political context where normative claims appeared to be the problem, rather than the solution. The more radical logical empiricists viewed socialism as a scientific alternative to ideology and hoped to purge from public debate the unverifiable claims upon which Catholic traditionalists and bloodand-soil nationalists grounded their political programs. Whereas most American philosophers, no matter how friendly to science, saw their primary function as that of humanizing industrial society by infusing public culture with ethical precepts, the logical empiricists took on the opposite project of purifying politics by criticizing irrational claims.50 In point of fact, the logical empiricists stood closer to the Columbia naturalists in the realm of ethical theory than this political analysis would suggest. The two groups agreed that all value judgments were conditional, relative to the human contexts in which they emerged. Such judgments took the form, “If you want to achieve X normative end, then you should take Y action.” Even supposedly transcendental values actually exhibited this form, according to the naturalists and logical empiricists. “It generally turns out upon examination,” as Edman put it in 1937, that the “eternal values, or the highest good, are simply the current

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Popper, The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (New York, 2000); Thomas Uebel, “Political Philosophy of Science in Logical Empiricism: The Left Vienna Circle,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 36 (2005), 754–73; Gary Hardcastle and Alan Richardson, eds., Logical Empiricism in North America (Minneapolis, 2003); Alan Richardson and Thomas Uebel, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (New York, 2007); and the symposium on Reisch’s book in Science & Education 18 (2009), 157–220. A. W. Carus, Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment (New York, 2007), 36. Indeed, he continued, such obscurantism “helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.” John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (1939), Later Works, 13: 172. Peter Galison, “The Americanization of Unity,” Daedalus 127 (1998), 65.

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social and economic prepossessions of an influential class, local clichés, written, as it were, across the sky.”51 Both groups also agreed that value judgments could be criticized from the standpoint of empirical investigations, making science directly relevant to the formation of plans for private and public action. They assigned empirical inquiry the potent social function of sorting out achievable collective goals and effective plans of action from utopian visions, pipe dreams, and partisan agendas. Yet when they discussed conditional value judgments, the Columbia naturalists employed the term “normative” in a different fashion than did the logical empiricists. The latter group implicitly sorted and labeled value judgments on the basis of their empirical adequacy, describing as “normative” only those judgments they deemed “metaphysical”—i.e. unachievable or ideological, out of step with scientific truth. For their part, the Columbia naturalists labeled all conditional value judgments “normative,” and only then distinguished between them on the grounds of empirical adequacy.52 To put the point another way, the naturalists employed “normative” in pragmatic, behavioral terms, applying the label to any beliefs or ideals, no matter how misguided, that actually functioned as motives to action. They viewed their cultural task as that of replacing empirically unsustainable normative commitments with more reliable normative commitments. By contrast, the logical empiricists imported their own conceptions of truth into the term “normative,” restricting it to those beliefs or ideals that should not compel behavior, given the extant empirical findings. They sought to replace normative judgments with thoroughly empirical ones. In short, the logical positivists understood “normative” and “empirical” as opposites, whereas the Columbia naturalists viewed empirical judgments as a subset of the category of normative judgments: some normative judgments were empirically sound, and others were not. In part, this divergence reflected competing conceptions of philosophy’s role in the university and in the wider polity. As Stanley Cavell and Alexander Sesonske pointed out in 1951, the characteristic questions asked by the logical empiricists (“What does this statement of science mean?”) and the American inheritors of pragmatism (“What can science do to secure values?”) led the latter to task philosophers and even scientists with analyzing conditional value judgments, whereas the former banished these from philosophy and the

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Edman, “The Vision of Naturalism,” 204. Dewey told Charles W. Morris in 1939, “Of course I agree that ‘metaphysical’ statements in the sense of non- or anti-empirical are unverifiable. But I think the attempt to dismiss them entirely at one swoop by calling them ‘meaningless’ is a serious tactical mistake.” Quoted in Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 95.

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sciences.53 The Columbia naturalists, in accordance with what is now considered the “Continental” approach, believed that their discipline stood alongside anthropology, sociology, political science, and other fields in a transdisciplinary formation that Randall called “the cultural sciences.”54 All scholars, in this view, bore a responsibility to demonstrate the impact of scientific knowledge on the conditional value judgments offered by public speakers. The leading logical empiricists, by contrast, relegated the articulation of science with values to other groups of experts. It seems plausible to suggest that these differences reflected the Columbia naturalists’ relatively sanguine view of science’s ability to resolve the normative conflicts racking modern societies, and of the openness of all parties to scientific resolutions of this sort. The logical empiricists expected to defeat their opponents on the field of intellectual battle, not to convert them via acts of empirical mediation.55 This difference between the movements found clear expression in their distinct conceptions of science. Again, the starting point was a common one: Columbia’s naturalists and the logical empiricists rejected a representational account of knowledge as a picture of the world “out there.” Instead, they understood scientific claims in functional terms, as “instruments or regulative principles” connecting other statements.56 Yet the naturalists argued that scientific theories served not just to harmonize empirical statements, as the logical empiricists thought, but also, and far more importantly, to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal, the present and the future. Dewey put it simply: “The relation between objects as known and objects with respect to value is that between the actual and the possible.”57 For the Columbia naturalists, science was not a means of isolating statements of public reason from a morass of private prejudices, but rather a way of determining which prejudices were the most public under current circumstances, by assessing the consequences that would flow from their implementation. The naturalists wanted philosophers to explore the sources and impact of value judgments, not banish them from the field of inquiry altogether. They did not share Carnap’s dismay that the behavior of individuals was “dominated more by their passions than by their reason.”

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Stanley Cavell and Alexander Sesonske, “Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism in Ethics,” Journal of Philosophy 48 (1951), 8–9. Randall to James Putnam, 25 May 1944, Randall papers, Box 4, folder “Correspondence, 1940–1949.” To the logical empiricists, Peter Galison has written, metaphysics meant “not some limited concept, but the alive, well, and dangerous movements for Godliness, Volk, mysticism, and Deutschtum.” Galison, “The Americanization of Unity,” 65. Ernest Nagel, “Some Theses in the Philosophy of Logic,” Philosophy of Science 5 (1938), 50. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929), Later Works, 4: 239.

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Columbia’s philosophers viewed reason as disciplining, directing, and thereby socializing the passions, not eliminating or blocking them.58 Still, the two movements might have coexisted fairly comfortably, had Americans not closely identified epistemological and methodological commitments with political positions in the late 1930s. That era witnessed bitter debates concerning the intellectual foundations of democracy and the role of values in the disciplines. A growing number of progressive scholars joined the Columbia naturalists in rejecting a value-neutral conception of social science.59 However, powerful critics of “scientism” lumped together all secular social scientists and philosophers, no matter where they stood on the value question. The charge hit close to home at Columbia, as a swelling chorus of critics portrayed Dewey as a symbol of the relativistic, deterministic, and hedonistic implications of modern science. By the late 1930s, the politicization of American epistemological discourse had proceeded to the point where each party to the argument routinely dubbed the others totalitarian.60 A 1940 controversy wherein a coalition of religious and political leaders scotched Bertrand Russell’s proposed appointment at City College, on the grounds that the freethinking Russell countenanced immorality, heightened tensions between New York’s naturalists and their cultural critics.61 Given the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that an intellectual movement appearing to wall off empirical claims from value judgments, in the name of science itself, would threaten Columbia’s philosophers, as well as their realist and idealist counterparts.

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E.g. John Dewey, The Theory of Valuation (1939), Later Works, 13: 249. Robert C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880– 1940 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987); Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994). Secondary accounts include Edward A. Purcell Jr, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and The Problem of Value (Lexington, KY, 1973); David A. Hollinger, “Science as a Weapon in Kulturkämpfe in the United States during and after World War II,” in idem, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, 155–74; and James Gilbert, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago, 1997), 63–94. Within philosophy, the Yale idealist Wilmon H. Sheldon took the offensive: “Critique of Naturalism,” Journal of Philosophy 42 (1945), 253–70. Ernest Nagel, John Dewey, and Sidney Hook, “Are Naturalists Materialists?” Journal of Philosophy 42 (1945), 515–30, 530, retorted that the real threat to human values was Sheldon’s mind–body dualism. Such a view, they wrote, “deprives human choice of effective status, opens the door wide to irresponsible intuitions, and dehumanizes the control of nature and society” by insulating values from scientific criticism. Cf. C. I. Lewis, “Logical Positivism and Pragmatism” (1941), in Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis, ed. John D. Goheen and John L. Mothershead Jr (Stanford, 1970), 107–8. Thom Weidlich, Appointment Denied: The Inquisition of Bertrand Russell (Amherst, NY, 2000).

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Several features of logical empiricism’s importation reinforced its American reputation as apolitical and imperious. The most accessible accounts in English— Herbert Feigl and Albert E. Blumberg’s 1931 article on the movement, Carnap’s short book The Unity of Science (1934), and the British philosopher A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic (1936)—forcefully insisted on the irrelevance of scientific inquiry to values, and vice versa. “[E]thics as ‘normative’ science is impossible,” Feigl and Blumberg declared. “Experience reveals what is, never what ought to be.”62 The descriptions in these texts of almost all prior philosophy as the pointless rehashing of linguistic errors gave the logical empiricists a reputation for arrogance and led critics to convict them of “the unbelievable effrontery of labeling a large part of significant human discourse meaningless.”63 The American response to logical empiricism focused on Carnap, who was extremely reticent about connecting technical analyses to ethical or political positions.64 At a 1941 conference, Carnap responded to a call for an empirical approach to religion by agreeing on the importance of “a ‘path of life,’ and a certain type of person as goal.” But he resisted the term “religion,” and mused that his response reflected the influence of the Central European context, “where the antagonism between our efforts and the influence of the Catholic church was particularly strong.”65 On the few other occasions when Carnap identified a public role for philosophers, he sought to dispel hopes that they could determine normative goals. At Harvard’s tercentenary celebration in 1936, Carnap told the audience that the logician would often need to promote the cause of “spiritual hygiene” by “cautioning men against the disease of intellectual confusion.” However, he cautioned, other experts would “conduct the therapeutic treatment,” because “the mere discovery and acknowledgement of errors have no significant influence upon the thought and action of men.” It was the job of psychologists and social scientists to root out the “laws of human conduct in observing and

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Albert E. Blumberg and Herbert Feigl, “Logical Positivism,” Journal of Philosophy 28 (1931), 293; Rudolf Carnap, The Unity of Science (London, 1934); A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York, 1936). Wilbur M. Urban, “Value Propositions and Verifiability,” Journal of Philosophy 34 (1937), 591. Quine identified Carnap with the movement in his 1934 lecture series and at the Harvard Tercentenary: Isaac, “W. V. Quine,” 229. Patterns of emigration further reinforced this focus on Carnap; the alternative versions of logical empiricism crafted by Otto Neurath and Moritz Schlick, who did not make it to the United States, barely registered among American philosophers. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 13, 15–16. Reisch addresses Carnap’s “neutralist activism” at 47–53. Carnap, comment on Charles W. Morris, “Empiricism, Religion, and Democracy,” in Lyman Bryson and Louis Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion: Second Symposium (New York, 1942), 238.

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violating the requirements of logical thinking,” whereupon educators would “apply . . . prophylactic methods for eliminating the source of illogical types of thought.”66 Carnap’s strictly delimited conception of philosophy overshadowed his indirectly formulated, and often entirely unstated, commitment to political change through the application of expertise. Many of logical empiricism’s American supporters, who had typically received their graduate training in the ideologically charged 1930s, likewise suspected that normative debate could divide but not unite. Figures such as Quine viewed the decades-old skirmishes between pragmatists, idealists, and realists as parochial and counterproductive. As Joel Isaac has shown, logical empiricism came to Quine as a breath of fresh air in what he viewed as the conceptually vague and hopelessly utopian universe of American philosophy. In the 1950s, Quine would become a central figure in the analytic tradition by jettisoning certain theoretical claims of the logical empiricists, along with their left-wing politics, while retaining their core questions and style of argumentation.67 Though swimming against the tide, Quine evinced no inner tension about the new analytic approach; he firmly rejected the prevailing forms of American philosophy.68 By contrast, Nagel and the University of Chicago’s Charles W. Morris, both slightly older than Quine, straddled the division between Deweyan naturalism and logical empiricism. Nagel and Morris found unsettling Carnap’s refusal to sanction normative engagement. But they recognized the movement’s political intent and believed that Carnap would eventually come around to Dewey’s view of ethics. As Quine crafted his technical objections to core tenets of logical empiricism, Morris and Nagel sought to convince American naturalists

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Rudolf Carnap, “Logic,” in Factors Determining Human Behavior (Cambridge, MA, 1937), 108, 117–18. Isaac, “W. V. Quine,” esp. 223. Less fortunate was Charles L. Stevenson, who classed ethical statements with oratory and declared that their analysis fell outside the realm of philosophy. His Yale colleagues disagreed. When Stevenson came up for tenure, they unanimously convicted him of a “lack of thorough grounding in philosophy” and “a grave deficiency of temper.” The question of logical empiricism’s validity remained open at Yale, but Stevenson himself was off to Michigan. “Summary of the Action Taken with Regard to the Status of Assistant Professor Charles L. Stevenson,” 7 March 1945, “Hendel, Charles W., 1943–1945,” Box 17, Series I, Brand Blanshard papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. A slightly different interpretation of these events appears in Kuklick, “Philosophy at Yale,” 324–5. Isaac, “W. V. Quine,” 227. Early in his career, Quine may have felt the need to prove his commitment to social efficacy; see his popular articles “Relations and Reason,” Technology Review 41 (1939), 299–301, 324–7; and “Russell’s Paradox and Others,” Technology Review 44 (1941), 16–17. Characteristically, however, he still confined himself to the technical needs of private citizens rather than wider aspects of public policy.

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and logical empiricists that the latter occupied one corner of a larger, normative field that Morris dubbed simply “scientific empiricism.”69 Morris, a student of the pragmatist George Herbert Mead whose office wall was festooned with pictures of William James and Dewey, described any modern philosophy lacking “an adequate scientific theory of value” as “a torso without a head.”70 In a series of articles, he touted the uniquely democratic character of American pragmatism and identified logical empiricism as a mere variant or branch of it. Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938), Morris’s contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science and the work for which he is known today, stressed that a fully developed semiotics would attend to language’s pragmatic uses along with its formal characteristics. It was thus no real departure—Neurath’s shock notwithstanding—when Morris produced Paths of Life: Preface to a World Religion (1942). As Morris saw it, public engagement and its epistemological and ethical correlates were nonnegotiable elements of the philosopher’s vocation. He tasked the philosopher with releasing the “creative cultural forces,” namely “mind, value, art, and moral behavior,” from “the subservience to science which a scientifically minded age has seemed, wrongly, to impose.”71 Nagel likewise worked to convince American philosophers that Dewey and Carnap were natural allies rather than bitter enemies. In 1934, a year-long pilgrimage had taken Nagel to Austria, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Britain, as well as the area of his birth, near Prague, and brought him face to face with Carnap and other logical empiricists.72 Upon returning to the United States in 1935, he joined Morris and Quine as a key American contact for the movement, whose conceptual tools he deemed without parallel as “a cathartic to men’s beliefs

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Charles W. Morris, “Some Aspects of Recent American Scientific Philosophy,” Erkenntnis 5 (1935), 148. George A. Reisch, “Doomed in Advance to Defeat? John Dewey on Logical Empiricism, Reductionism, and Values,” in Elisabeth Nemeth and Nicolas Roudet, eds., Paris-Wien: Enzyklopädien im Vergleich (New York, 2005), 244; Charles W. Morris, “The Unity of Science Movement and the United States,” Synthese 3 (1938), 27–8. Morris, “The Unity of Science Movement,” 28. Also see “Pragmatism and the Crisis of Democracy,” Public Policy Pamphlet No. 12 (Chicago, 1934). Morris’s books are Foundations of the Theory of Signs (Chicago, 1938) and Paths of Life: Preface to a World Religion (New York, 1942). On Neurath’s response see Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 47. Despite his broad political ambitions, Neurath objected to philosophers’ use of such terms as “good,” “justice,” and even “interests.” George A. Reisch, “Economist, Epistemologist . . . and Censor? On Otto Neurath’s Index Verborum Prohibitorum,” Perspectives on Science 5 (1997), 474–6. I have reconstructed Nagel’s itinerary from letters in Leonora Rosenfeld, Portrait of a Philosopher: Morris R. Cohen in Life and Letters (New York, 1948), 399–401.

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and ideas.”73 Still, Nagel’s writings of the 1930s and early 1940s offer a consistent, if calmly and often obliquely stated, critique of the logical empiricists for failing to extend their powerful methods of intellectual clarification into the realm of ethics.

resistance at columbia Neither Nagel’s efforts within the department, nor Morris’s integrative project, swayed the second-generation naturalists at Columbia. Nagel viewed noncognitive ethics as a dead branch that could be pruned from an essentially Deweyan tree. But his colleagues took noncognitivism to be the very root of logical empiricism. Moreover, they believed that, despite the logical empiricists’ admirable opposition to classical empiricism, the movement actually repeated many of empiricism’s errors, if in new linguistic forms.74 Randall and his contemporaries variously attacked logical empiricism, ignored it, or treated its practitioners as novices groping toward truths that the American pragmatists had long since illuminated. Despite vigorous efforts by Nagel to harmonize Carnap’s technical innovations with Dewey’s value-inflected naturalism, Columbia became the nerve center of a powerful current of American resistance to logical empiricism. Although Dewey himself largely ignored logical empiricism in print, his few published comments were pejorative. His The Theory of Valuation (1939) appeared in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science but focused almost entirely on indigenous movements in value theory. There, Dewey dismissed noncognitivist approaches in a few short passages and a sharply worded footnote, asserting that they denied the real-world consequences of ethical judgments.75 He fleshed out his political critique of logical empiricism and British analytic philosophy in a 1942 essay on William James. These movements, Dewey argued, relied on a “pre-Jamesian psychology”; they continued, at least implicitly, to view minds in isolation from bodies. Such a view underwrote a spurious neutrality that relegated ethical matters to “decision by superior force” and came close to endorsing the totalitarians’ politicization of science.76 These scattered invocations aside,

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Ernest Nagel, “The Fight for Clarity: Logical Empiricism,” American Scholar 8 (1939), 47. Joseph [Garvin?] to Randall, 18 June 1939, “Correspondence, 1930–1939,” Box 4, Randall papers. Both Woodbridge and Dewey took this approach: Randall, “Towards a Functional Naturalism,” 71; Duckett transcript. Dewey, The Theory of Valuation, 410; Westbrook, John Dewey, 402–12. Dewey added the footnote after Carnap and Neurath protested that they rejected Ayer’s strict version of noncognitivism. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 91–3. John Dewey, “William James as Empiricist” (1942), Later Works, 15: 14.

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Dewey’s letters and published texts contain few references to Carnap and his allies. Dewey found Marxist theories of science, Catholic invocations of authority, and the Aristotelian pretensions of Hutchins and Adler more worthy of his attention. Friess and Gutmann ignored logical empiricism even more completely. Randall, on the other hand, took numerous potshots at “our latest fashion in scientific philosophizing” after 1939.77 The most consistent practitioner of intellectual history in a group strongly inclined toward that approach, Randall also served as the informal leader of the decentralized Columbia department after Woodbridge’s day. He portrayed the gap between logical empiricism and Columbia naturalism as the product of divergent starting points. Versions of naturalism that concerned themselves with mathematics and physics, Randall wrote in the 1940 revision of The Making of the Modern Mind, limited their purview to “the logical structure of scientific knowledge,” whereas those “that start from biology, psychology, and the social sciences emphasize the further context of the process of inquiry within which that structure is discriminated.” Randall observed that these approaches shared a view of science as institutional and functional, not representational. However, the question of values divided them. “[I]n industrial society,” wrote Randall, “cultural change” provided “the ultimate context and subject-matter of all our thinking.” The “philosophies of human experience” pointed toward “a science of values comparable to the science that was the glory of Greek thought.” By contrast, Randall argued, the physicsworshipers avoided the subject altogether.78 Most of Randall’s criticism appeared in the 1950s, when elements of logical empiricism had taken firm root in American soil; he declared Carnap and Reichenbach to be inward-looking and myopic, “disdainful of Dewey’s contention that philosophers should concern themselves with the problems of men.”79 However, Randall worked in the early 1940s on a book manuscript that would have codified his critique of logical empiricism. A 1944 outline began with “The Promise of New Worlds, 1915–1928,” featuring “The Morning of American Social Science,” “The Humanizing of American Religion,” and “The Emergence of an American Philosophy.” Then came “The Failure of Nerve and the Quest for Certainty,” including a “Retreat to Positivism” alongside such other errors as “The Flurry of Humanism,” “Refuge in Thomism,” “Protestant Neo-orthodoxy,” and

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John Herman Randall Jr, “Dewey’s Interpretation of the History of Philosophy,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey (La Salle, IL, 1939), 80. John Herman Randall Jr, The Making of the Modern Mind, Revised Edition (Boston, 1940), 612, 614–15. Randall, “John Dewey,” 12.

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“The Gospel of St. Marx.”80 Randall’s book, had it been written, would almost certainly have elaborated the Columbia naturalists’ charge that noncognitivism, like moral absolutism, fueled political quiescence. Edman challenged the ethical neutralism of the logical empiricists on a number of occasions. Author of the widely read Arts and the Man (1928) and a frequent contributor to literary magazines, he wrote dismissively in 1934 of the Wittgenstein-inspired “cult” that would “reduce philosophy to a series of definitions, postulates, [and] logical relations.”81 Later in the decade, Edman seems to have joined Dewey in perceiving a greater threat from reductive, deterministic approaches to knowledge than from Carnap’s ivory-tower ethics.82 But his understanding of philosophy as “a wide and disciplined poetry” on the theme of “nature and destiny” clearly ruled out logical empiricism.83 Edman went on the attack in 1941, claiming that laboring in the realm of pure logic deprived philosophers of a feel for human and even nonhuman nature, and thus robbed them of the basis for “an effective scientific control of society.” Edman emphasized the centrality of the social context for philosophical inquiry, and ridiculed noncognitivists for acknowledging “nothing between statements empirically verifiable in physical facts and the exclamations of Oh and Ah.”84 In 1946, he observed that even the most abstruse investigation “is made from a given perspective.” The “counsel of intellectual detachment,” Edman wrote, “is a way of life,” with distinct moral consequences. Edman insisted that real scientific progress, by which he meant “mutually intelligible discussion of common standards and categories,” could occur in the normative realms of ethics, aesthetics, and religion.85 Schneider, a frequent commentator on moral theory, criticized the logical empiricists’ noncognitivism on several occasions. His dissertation had identified a “moral science” as the key philosophical need of the modern layman.86 In 1939,

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Outline of The Impact of the War on the American Mind, “Curti, Merle,” Box 1, Randall papers. Irwin Edman, “The First Quarter of 1934 in the U.S.A.,” Aryan Path 5 (1934), 477. Irwin Edman, “The Uses of Philosophy” (1937), in Frankel, ed., The Uses of Philosophy, 25. Irwin Edman, Four Ways of Philosophy (New York, 1937), 325. Irwin Edman, “Lyric and Analytic Elements in Naturalistic Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 38 (1941), 562, 564, 567. Irwin Edman, “The Private Thinker and the Public World,” Journal of Philosophy 43 (1946), 617, 623, 627. On Edman, see his “The College”; Charles Frankel, “Edman, Irwin,” Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Five (New York, 1977), 198–9; and Allan Shields, “The Aesthetics of Irwin Edman (1896–1954),” Journal of Aesthetic Education 14 (1980), 23–42. Herbert W. Schneider, Science and Social Progress: A Philosophical Introduction to Moral Science (Lancaster, PA, 1920).

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Schneider argued that Vienna circle cofounder Moritz Schlick had reified “the idea of private ownership of motives” in a recent book on ethics, offering “nothing in his analysis of motives that might encourage collectivism.”87 Schneider renewed his criticism in the McCarthy era, reiterating that values were “objects which can be discovered and verified in a biological and temporal context, as a necessary consequence of the purposive nature of existence.” However, he now felt that the entire philosophy discipline had succumbed to the siren of value-neutrality.88 Seeking an antidote, Schneider translated a section from a recent critique by the German value theorist Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen. There, von Rintelen argued that positivist methods should be integrated with a deeper and more spiritual conception of “Bildung, ‘paideia,’ or human self-realization” than the humanitarian ideal they had shaken off. Schneider believed that a positivist account of knowledge could “serve the cause of humaneness, of the humanities, and of human dignity in general.”89 Nagel responded to such challenges by emphasizing the critical potential and essential familiarity of logical empiricism. He sought to steer philosophers around red herrings and direct their criticism toward what he saw as the new movement’s primary weaknesses. Reporting in 1934 from a philosophical congress in Prague, Nagel told American readers that the logical empiricists offered the proper diagnosis of society’s ills, but the wrong cure; the “dissection of logical problems” would hardly suffice to dispel undisciplined thinking. To the work of Reichenbach, Carnap, Neurath, and Schlick, he applied the criticism of Vienna circle member Felix Kaufmann, who had warned against “using Occam’s Razor so as to cut the jugular vein of philosophic inquiry.” Nagel stressed that “the price of a precipitate dismissal of genuine difficulties as meaningless is only too often sterility.” Meanwhile, he saw in Morris’s contribution a “more inclusive form of pragmatism” promising “an adequate theory of meaning,” by combining formal analysis of symbols with sustained attention to their “social and biological contexts.”90

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Herbert W. Schneider, review of Schlick, Problems of Ethics, Journal of Philosophy 36 (1939), 633–4. See also Herbert W. Schneider, “Moral Obligation,” Ethics 50 (1939), 45– 56. For biographical information see Craig Walton and John P. Anton, “Herbert Wallace Schneider: A Biographical Sketch,” in Walton and Anton, eds., Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts: Essays Presented to Herbert W. Schneider (Athens, OH, 1974), xi–xxii. Herbert W. Schneider, “Philosophic Thought in France and the United States,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11 (1951), 382. Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen, “Positivism, Humanitarianism, and Humanity,” trans. Herbert W. Schneider, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11 (1951), 413. Both quotes are from Schneider’s introduction to the text. Ernest Nagel, “The Eighth International Congress of Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 31 (1934), 591–2. Nagel also lauded Morris’s approach in his review of the International

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Looking back on his Europe sojourn, Nagel noted, with a mixture of admiration and dismay, the neutrality of analytic thinkers in the face of the “moral and social chaos” threatening their “intellectual oases” since Hitler’s rise. Despite his misgivings, he held out hope that analytic philosophy would prove “a keen, shining sword helping to dispel irrational beliefs and to make evident the structure of ideas.” If “the way of intelligence becomes part of the habitual nature of men,” Nagel reasoned, “no doctrines and no institutions are safe from critical reappraisals.” Yet he worried that the new mode of philosophy would instead create “quiet green pastures” in which philosophers could “find refuge from a troubled world and cultivate their intellectual games with chesslike indifference.” Nagel believed that analytic philosophy could avoid becoming yet another expression of academic neglect of the world only if its practitioners reconceived their work as the criticism of prevailing cultural formations.91 On the question of facts and values, Nagel followed Dewey closely, maintaining that the same forms of empirical analysis could be applied to ethical judgments as to all other statements about the world. He argued that the logical empiricists carried forward much of the nineteenth-century empiricism they claimed to have superseded, by treating value judgments as private mental possessions cut off from public discourse. Unlike most of Columbia’s philosophers, Nagel recognized that Carnap, Neurath, and Frank had given up their early belief—the source of the comparison to Lockean empiricism—that scientific claims could be analyzed into discrete “atomic facts” subject to definitive confirmation or rejection through empirical testing. He reassured American readers that the logical empiricists no longer meant by “verification” simply “comparing statements with ‘facts’ lying outside of discourse.”92 Yet in Nagel’s view, the movement’s leaders had not fully considered the implications of this move. How could they locate scientific propositions in the world of shared, public, communicable experience without doing the same for value judgments? Either there was a separate realm of individual, subjective thought or there was not; the logical empiricists could not have it one way for facts and another way for values. To the Columbia naturalists,

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Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Journal of Philosophy 35 (1938), 691; and in a letter of 11 Nov. 1938 to Morris, “International Institute for the Unity of Science,” Box 1, Nagel papers. Ernest Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe. I,” Journal of Philosophy 33 (1936), 6, 9. Nagel took Moritz Schlick to task for failing to make this move. Ernest Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe. II,” Journal of Philosophy 33 (1936), 32. See also idem, “Charles Peirce’s Guesses at the Riddle,” Journal of Philosophy 30 (1933), esp. 376. He argued several times that the logical empiricists had only just arrived at positions established by Peirce and taken for granted by American thinkers. In 1948, however, Nagel allowed that Carnap had finally come abreast of “some of the American realists in 1912.” Review of Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, Journal of Philosophy 45 (1948), 471.

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all meaningful experience was fundamentally social and communicable, and therefore subject to empirical criticism. Nagel denied that ethical judgments were either “assertions about some transcendental autonomous realm of values” or mere “records of the private feelings of those who make them.” Rather, they were “hypotheses concerning ways of organizing or reorganizing the human scene in the interests of the well-being of its members.”93 Nagel’s writings of the late 1930s and the 1940s sounded the other keynotes of the Columbia naturalists’ response to logical empiricism as well. He charged, for example, that the logical empiricists ignored the history of ideas to their own detriment: they often failed to recognize age-old dead ends when these reappeared in new linguistic guises. Nagel wrote pointedly that “the historical approach, when wisely cultivated, can frequently produce the same kind of intellectual catharsis and dissolution of pseudo-problems as does the analytic method.”94 He also accused the logical empiricists of dismissing metaphysics too stridently and indiscriminately. According to Nagel, many American metaphysicians would actually agree with the logical empiricists’ “anti-metaphysical” position, if only the movement’s “missionary zeal” and “shrill tones” were dampened.95 Finally, a rare mention of aesthetics indicates that Nagel viewed artworks, like ethical judgments, as proposals for rearranging the world.96 His writings illustrated each of the main tenets, if not the rhetorical style, of Columbia naturalism. It is important to recognize that Nagel’s version of what the logical empiricists called “physicalism” did not portray physics as the master language of human thought. Rather, it signified the existence of a shared world whose structures and processes all scientific thinkers (and everyone else) sought to capture in language. Nagel viewed science and philosophy as secondary to, and derivative of, this “work-a-day world” of everyday practice, wherein ordinary people and scholars alike carried out their pragmatic experiments.97 Scholars served the inhabitants of the work-a-day world by criticizing the abstractions put forward by other wouldbe leaders—other philosophers and scientists, certainly, but also politicians, businessmen, and ordinary citizens, speaking on any and all subjects.98 He thus portrayed naturalism as both more and less than a school of philosophy: it simply meant recognizing, and seeking to improve, that shared social world in which all theories emerged and functioned. As Nagel wrote, naturalism “merely

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Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals II,” 49. Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals I,” 6–7 (italics removed). Nagel, “The Fight for Clarity,” 58–9. Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals II,” 49. Ernest Nagel, “Charles S. Peirce, Pioneer of Modern Empiricism,” Philosophy of Science 7 (1940), 77–8. Ernest Nagel, “Recent Philosophies of Science,” Kenyon Review 3 (1941), 315.

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formulates what centuries of human experience have repeatedly confirmed.”99 Nagel’s perception of harmony between Columbia’s philosophers and the logical empiricists rested in large part on his belief that the latter, too, adopted a “common-sense naturalism” and accepted the findings of “common experience and informed practice” as the ultimate philosophical authority.100 Nagel’s project differed in another important respect from that of his colleagues, and from the harmonization effort pursued by Morris at Chicago: he seems to have been uncomfortable with the sweeping generalizations and grand pronouncements of his culturally Protestant peers. Nagel believed that Deweyan conceptions of epistemology and ethics fit neatly with democratic politics, but he could not himself muster the persona of public prophet, and he viewed the proclamations of those who could with a mixture of admiration and distrust.101 “I am convinced as much as you are of the need for an adequate and well-rounded philosophy,” Nagel told Randall in 1942. But, he observed, “I do not feel confident in the soundness of general principles until I can see them worked out in some detail in connection with fairly specific and concrete problems.”102 Although committed to the broad frame of Columbia naturalism, Nagel thought and wrote as a specialist exploring a few small corners of that collectively tilled field. His technical interests, rhetorical flatness, and conceptual rigor, rather than his substantive arguments, would characterize American philosophy by the end of the 1950s. Still, American critics could find in Nagel’s own commentaries much to reinforce their belief that logical empiricism countenanced ethical and political irresponsibility.

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Ernest Nagel, “Naturalism Reconsidered,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 28 (1954–5), 7, 12. Cf. Woodbridge, Nature and Mind, 258; Edman, Four Ways of Philosophy, 229; and Randall, “Dewey’s Interpretation,” 82. Justus Buchler, Charles Peirce’s Empiricism (New York, 1936), 261, dubbed this view “public empiricism.” Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals I,” 7. To broad audiences, in fact—in whose minds Nagel sought to establish the superiority of the “antimetaphysical empirical philosophies” (“Cambridge analytic philosophy, logical positivism, and pragmatism”) over unscientific competitors such as Marxism, rather than touting the benefits of Columbia’s particular version—he described logical empiricism as having already “fuse[d] the use of refined logical techniques successfully with a biological, social approach.” Ernest Nagel, “On the Philosophical Battlefront,” Partisan Review 15 (1948), 711; idem, “The Fight for Clarity,” 50. See also idem, “Recent Philosophies of Science,” 315–316. By contrast, Nagel rejected Wittgenstein’s “self-denying” reduction of philosophy to “the reinstatement of the unsophistication of the ‘plain man.’” Idem, “Impressions and Appraisals I,” 22. Nagel directed much of this criticism toward Neurath, whose writings he found sloppy. Nagel to Charles W. Morris, 11 Nov. 1938, “International Institute for the Unity of Science,” Box 1, Nagel papers; Nagel to Arthur Bentley, 2 Dec. 1944, “Bentley, Arthur,” Box 1, Nagel papers. Nagel to Randall, 31 July 1942, “Correspondence, 1940–1949,” Box 4, Randall papers.

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legacies In the end, Nagel never witnessed the convergence between logical empiricism and Columbia naturalism that he so diligently sought. Although logical empiricism, as a coherent movement, disintegrated in the 1950s, Quine’s department at Harvard, with its technical orientation and close ties to the center of British analysis at Oxford, shone most brightly in the firmament of postwar American philosophy. The discipline shifted toward more specialized modes of analysis and found a new center of gravity in logic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. Along the way, the discrepant programs for political engagement favored by the Columbia naturalists and the logical empiricists ceded ground to a third conception of the philosopher’s social role. Whereas Carnap and Nagel expected political change to flow from an array of technical researches, Quine truly was apolitical, for all intents and purposes.103 Nagel’s mediation project thus remained unrealized: analytic thinkers did not adopt even the limited version of public engagement modeled by Nagel himself, in his many lectures and his popular Gödel’s Proof (1958). Nagel’s 1954 presidential address to the APA’s Eastern Division featured the same reminders he had issued for two decades. After telling critics that analytic philosophy had achieved “substantial feats of clarification,” he urged its proponents to look up from their technical studies and to articulate “their substantive views on things in general,” especially their commitment to “a naturalistic moral theory.”104 Nagel remained optimistic about naturalism’s long-term prospects, believing that a naturalistic perspective was native to both the working scientist and the common man, as well as to scientific philosophers. However, his Columbia colleagues were hardly so sanguine. Yet while Quine’s approach was in the ascendant after World War II, it hardly swept the field. As Hilary Putnam has observed, the prevailing image of 1950s American philosophy as a vast analytic wasteland stems from an overly narrow focus on “the internal development of analytic philosophy,” which causes naturalists, realists, and idealists to vanish by definition.105 At Columbia, as at Yale, a broad, pluralistic definition of philosophy still held sway, even as prestige and funding flowed disproportionately to Harvard and its satellites. The Columbia department did move slowly toward the growth fields, most notably by hiring

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Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 243–58; Isaac, “W. V. Quine,” 225–6. Ernest Nagel, “Naturalism Reconsidered,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 28 (1954–5), 7, 12. Hilary Putnam, “A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed From Within,” Daedalus 126 (1997), 176, original emphasis. The standard image has found its strongest formulation in McCumber’s Time in the Ditch.

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another logician, John C. Cooley.106 However, the second-generation naturalists joined other members of the old guard in voting with their feet, pushing ever further into value theory, social philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics, and the history of ideas.107 The third generation, too, carried on in this expansive vein.108 Of the Columbia naturalists, only Nagel and Buchler are remembered today, and then only by specialists. Yet the group’s core commitments, and the fields they helped to build, became deeply entrenched in American intellectual culture. Many readers will have noted parallels with the “end-of-ideology” outlook and the antiabsolutist stance of postwar American liberalism, especially as put forward by the “New York intellectuals,” who in many cases were the naturalists’ undergraduate students, Columbia colleagues, or close friends.109 Believing that the industrial West was moving toward a less capitalist, more egalitarian future, the Columbia naturalists portrayed themselves as articulating “the values immanent in our civilization” rather than erecting fixed blueprints for the future.110 Back in the 106 107

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Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 137. John Herman Randall, Nature and Historical Experience: Essays in Naturalism and in the Theory of History (New York, 1958); Herbert W. Schneider, “Metaphysical Vision,” Philosophical Review 58 (1949), 399–411; idem, Three Dimensions of Public Morality (Bloomington, IN, 1956); idem, Morals for Mankind (Columbia, MO, 1960); idem, Ways of Being: Elements of Analytic Ontology (New York, 1962). On these writings see Beth J. Singer, “Metaphysics without Mirrors,” in Tom Rockmore and Beth J. Singer, eds., Antifoundationalism Old and New (Philadelphia, 1992), 189–208; Tejera, American Modern, 176–94; and Anton, American Naturalism and Greek Philosophy, 163–222. Harvard’s C. I. Lewis illustrates the wider trend; his postwar books include An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, IL, 1946), The Ground and Nature of the Right (New York, 1955), and Our Social Inheritance (Bloomington, IN, 1957). Buchler and Hofstadter, attracted to logical empiricism during their student days in the late 1930s, soon questioned its “dread of imprecision” and took up metaphysics and aesthetics respectively. Justus Buchler, review of Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, Nation 172 (1951), 620. Representative postwar writings include Justus Buchler, Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment (New York, 1951); and Albert Hofstadter, Truth and Art (New York, 1965). Frankel and Blau wrote on political and social ethics, stressing the inseparability of value judgments from their human contexts: e.g., Charles Frankel, “Empiricism and Moral Imperatives,” Journal of Philosophy 50 (23 April 1953), 257–69; and Joseph L. Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Indianapolis, 1954). Lionel Trilling to Gutmann, 22 March 1956, “Trilling, Lionel,” Box 1, Gutmann papers; Edman, “The College,” 10; Richard Hofstadter to Randall, 16 Jan. 1954, “Hofstadter, Richard,” Box 2, Randall papers; Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 66. Cotkin notes this parallel with postwar liberals in “Middle-Ground Pragmatists,” 284. Randall, Our Changing Civilization, 354. On the “postcapitalist” sensibility of that era, see Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY, 2006).

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disciplines, the naturalists helped to establish the relatively secular mode of analysis characteristic of religious studies, which flourished after World War II.111 These figures also made their mark on the initially intertwined fields of intellectual history, history of science, and history of philosophy, along with the later-emerging discipline of American studies.112 They played a part in defining “Western civilization” as well, arguing that “American philosophy and thought, like American culture in general, began in Palestine and Greece.”113 However, the clearest legacy of these naturalists’ work is a canon of American philosophy that still holds firm. In the 1930s, the acerbic Randall and the breezy Edman took the lead in aligning philosophies with national character. They ascribed to the United States a unique set of social, cultural, and political conditions that had been captured in philosophical terms by those whom

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Friess, “The Department of Religion”; Charles Y. Glock, “Remembrances of Things Past: SSSR’s Formative Years,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39 (2000), 425. Programmatic statements include Herbert W. Schneider, “Religion as a University Concern,” Columbia University Quarterly 23 (1931), 93–102; and Horace L. Friess, “The Importance of Religion,” Kenyon Review 8 (1946), 617–32. Columbia’s naturalists also worked closely with the faculty at Union Theological Seminary. For example, Randall cotaught for years with Paul Tillich and also socialized and shared students with Reinhold Niebuhr. Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 140; Niebuhr to Mercedes Randall, 5 Nov. 1965, “Niebuhr, Reinhold,” Box 2, Randall papers. Key texts include Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind; idem, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padova, 1961); idem, The Career of Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York, 1962–5); Herbert W. Schneider, The Puritan Mind (New York, 1930); and Ernest Nagel, “‘Impossible Numbers’: A Chapter in the History of Logic,” in Studies in the History of Ideas, vol. 3 (New York, 1935), 429–74. On Randall’s role in the history of science, see Nathan Reingold, Science, American Style (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991), 369. Schneider helped launch the Journal of the History of Philosophy: Walton and Anton, “Herbert Wallace Schneider,” xix. On American studies see Philip Gleason, “World War II and the Development of American Studies,” American Quarterly 36 (1984), 343–58. Randall, “The Spirit of American Philosophy,” 118. Randall also penned Aristotle (New York, 1960) and Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason (New York, 1970); translated Ernst Cassirer’s Rousseau, Kant, Goethe (Princeton, 1945) with Gutmann and Paul Oskar Kristeller; and co-edited, with Cassirer and Kristeller, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago, 1963). Other Columbia figures translated and anthologized additional Western writers: Schleiermacher’s Sololiquies, trans. Horace L. Friess (Chicago, 1926); The Works of Plato, ed. Irwin Edman (New York, 1928); Friedrich Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries Into the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (La Salle, IL, 1936); Rousseau: The Social Contract, ed. Charles Frankel (New York, 1947); Herbert W. Schneider, ed., Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy (New York, 1948); Dante Alighieri, On World Government, or De Monarchia, trans. Herbert W. Schneider (New York, 1949); Irwin Edman, ed., The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (New York, 1950); and Herbert W. Schneider, Ralph Ross, and Theodore Waldman, eds., Thomas Hobbes in His Time (Minneapolis, 1974).

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Schneider later called the “big four” of the “revolutionary generation”: Charles S. Peirce, Josiah Royce, James, and Dewey.114 Frankel dubbed this period the “golden age of American philosophy.”115 In the Columbia naturalists’ accounting, all philosophy in the United States before the heyday of classical pragmatism, and most of it since, had failed to fit its time and place, because it reflected the classbound social structures of the Old World rather than the fluid, pluralistic culture of a New World democracy.116 The naturalists’ postwar texts traded heavily in images of immigration and assimilation. “American philosophy has continually been given new life and new directions by waves of immigration,” Schneider wrote, making it “useless to seek a ‘native’ tradition.” Though no longer “intellectually colonial,” he continued, the nation remained “intellectually provincial,” with “an unfavorable balance of foreign trade in ideas.” Yet the “imported goods” from “Cambridge, Paris, and Vienna,” Schneider noted, “are not being swallowed raw; they must be blended with those homegrown ideas, for which an established taste and preference exists.”117 Randall and the other naturalists likewise spoke glowingly of American diversity. “The essence of the American spirit,” Randall wrote, “is to be cosmopolitan, to be free from the provincialism, the parochialism, and the prejudices of European lands, with their tight unified national traditions bred of a millennium of competition and warfare.” Indeed, he declared that the United States “is not a ‘nation’; it is not bound together by those ties which European nations cherish—a common origin, a common ‘stock,’ common traditions, a common religion . . . America faces forward to a shared task, not backward to shared memories.” As a result of this fact, Randall concluded, genuine American philosophy possessed “a pluralistic temper,” “an experimental attitude,” and “an egalitarian spirit.”118 From their student days, the second-generation naturalists had understood philosophical systems as the products of leading social groups. Friess argued in 1925 that philosophies were “idealizations” of their originating societies,119 while Randall took every opportunity to emphasize the social contexts of philosophical 114

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Herbert W. Schneider, Sources of Contemporary Philosophical Realism in America (Indianapolis, 1964), ix. Charles Frankel, The Golden Age of American Philosophy (New York, 1960). In addition to the texts cited below, see Woodbridge to Randall, 31 Jan. 1932, “Woodbridge, Frederick J.E.,” Box 3, Randall papers. The sociologist Neil Gross explores the identification of pragmatism with democracy in “Becoming a Pragmatist Philosopher: Status, SelfConcept, and Intellectual Choice,” American Sociological Review 67 (2002), 52–76. Herbert W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (New York, 1946), vii–viii. Randall, “The Spirit of American Philosophy,” 122, 124. Friess to Randall, 22 Feb. 1925, “Correspondence, 1920–1929,” Box 4, Randall papers (underlining removed).

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clashes. All of them joined Dewey in viewing British empiricism as the ideology of a commercial elite.120 Just as Kant’s central concepts reflected “middle-class German Pietism,” Edman added, “[a]uthoritarianism in morals and absolutism in metaphysics have, too, their social roots.”121 The onset of World War II brought a flood of texts identifying Dewey as the patron saint of American democracy, and the Dewey boom continued unabated into the 1950s, as New York’s philosophers painted American landscapes in which logical empiricism was marginal, foreign, or simply absent.122 Edman’s John Dewey (1955), published alongside volumes on Andrew Jackson, Roger Williams, and Benjamin Franklin in Bobbs-Merrill’s Makers of the American Tradition series, deemed Dewey as American as apple pie.123 An influential vector for this nationalist argument, albeit in a muted form, was Schneider’s classic A History of American Philosophy (1946). Whereas most of the naturalists placed Dewey at the head of the canon, Schneider bracketed the dispute over values and ended his narrative with the emergence of “radical empiricism,” a category uniting pragmatists, realists, and naturalists with behaviorists and operationalists in the social sciences.124 However, logical empiricism did not appear under this heading, or anywhere else in the book. By 1963, when Schneider revised the volume, he could no longer ignore logical empiricism altogether. Still, he concluded the new edition with the rise of American realism in the early twentieth century, merely gesturing toward such recent developments such as the “importation of less radical empiricisms.” Schneider’s only substantive comment on logical empiricism in the 1963 edition explained that it had “given technical elaboration to some aspects of the pragmatic movement” but “corrupted others.”125 Only in the 1970s would Schneider openly lash out against new analytic modes.126

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E.g. Albert Hofstadter, Locke and Scepticism (New York, 1935), 133–4. Edman, Four Ways of Philosophy, 318. E.g., Sidney Ratner et al., The Philosopher of the Common Man: Essays in Honor of John Dewey to Celebrate His Eightieth Birthday (New York, 1940), Irwin Edman, Fountainheads of Freedom: The Growth of the Democratic Idea (New York, 1941); Sidney Hook, ed., John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom (New York, 1950). Irwin Edman, John Dewey: His Contribution to the American Tradition (Indianapolis, 1955). Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, 511–71. Herbert W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, 2nd edn (New York, 1963), xiii, 477. By this time, Schneider had retired from Columbia and moved to California, where he helped to build up the Claremont Graduate Center. Walton and Anton, “Herbert Wallace Schneider,” xix. Herbert W. Schneider, “The American Establishment, the Civilizing Arts, and Philosophy,” in Walton and Anton, eds., Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts, 439.

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Other Columbia figures challenged analytical philosophy much earlier. During the immediate postwar years, as the philosophical tide turned against them, the Columbia naturalists discarded the argument that Americans should be naturalists and took up the more coercive claim that naturalism represented the only truly American philosophy. In 1948, Randall differentiated “American philosophy” from mere “philosophy in America.” He insisted that democrats could abide neither logical empiricism, with its stress on expertise, nor the neo-orthodoxy and existentialism “born of the agonies of European culture.” Before pragmatism, Randall wrote, American thinkers had simply “worked over European ideas . . . without American experience contributing very much to their thought.” Dewey and the other golden-age figures had ended this “colonial situation” by refitting European thought to American realities. Picturing Dewey as a homespun man of the people rather than an ivory-tower egghead or a manipulative technocrat, Randall denied the potent adjective “American” to much of the philosophical work under way in the United States.127 A few years later, Blau reiterated Randall’s historical narrative in an even more combative chapter on “Recent Philosophic Importations.”128 Though hardly as bellicose as his colleagues, Nagel also contributed to the canonization of Dewey, in a 1947 essay for European readers on “Philosophy and the American Temper.” Unlike Randall, Nagel used a sociological account of philosophies to emphasize the continuity of Western thought, noting that “contemporary America shares with western Europe a comparable literary and religious heritage, a similar social and economic structure, and above all an identical science.” Yet Nagel acknowledged the uniqueness of Americans’ “political and social experience,” which led them to bring to Western philosophies “a certain habit of mind and a set of general convictions.” He wrote that this “objective relativism” or “contextualistic naturalism” captured “the dominant temper of American life” far better than did Calvinism, absolute idealism, Thomism, phenomenology, existentialism, and other non-empirical modes of thought. Though “sane and reasonable at a time when the tides of irrationalism run high in the world,” Nagel explained, contextualistic naturalism was “vigorously anti-reductionist” in its insistance that “the world contains at least as many qualitatively distinct features as are disclosed in human experience.” Such a view, he contended, “expresses the aspirations of a people still young enough to believe that the good life can be achieved through

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Randall, “The Spirit of American Philosophy,” 119–20, 128. Cf. “The Department of Philosophy,” 103. Joseph L. Blau, “Recent Philosophic Importations,” in Baron, Nagel, and Pinson, eds., Freedom and Reason, 87–96. See also idem, Men and Movements in American Philosophy (New York, 1952).

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an overt participation in worldly affairs, rather than through a melancholy resignation.”129 The Columbia naturalists’ writings on philosophy’s past and present, coupled with parallel efforts by other critics of analytic methods, produced the nowfamiliar canon of “American philosophy.”130 In the decades since World War II, various naturalists, pragmatists, realists, idealists, process philosophers, and even neo-Thomists have faithfully retraced the canon’s contours, with an eye toward recapturing the publicly engaged vision of Dewey and his interwar peers.131 These figures oppose the canon to two other bodies of philosophical work, namely analytic philosophy and what we now call “Continental” thought. Canon advocates portray both of these conceptions of the philosophical enterprise as European in origin and character, and see in them the opposing errors of technique without vision and speculation untethered from reality. Although specific formulations of the canon vary—Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, and George Herbert Mead often appear alongside Peirce, Royce, James, and Dewey as “golden-age” thinkers—the core of the argument holds steady: these towering figures gave philosophical voice to a native strain of thought that underpins the American experience, yet had been glimpsed only by the transcendentalists and perhaps the Puritans, and then only hazily. As it emerged, then, the canon of American philosophy comprised a set of texts that cutting-edge practitioners in the field—those who took their cues from Quine and other analysts—neither read nor valued. After World War II, accounts of American philosophy floated ever higher above the research programs of most actual philosophers in the United States.132 This growing disjuncture was hardly lost on the Columbia naturalists, as their influence waned. Even as they declared their approach to be quintessentially American, these figures also

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Nagel noted that the American temper also took such names as “functional realism” and “process philosophy.” Ernest Nagel, “Philosophy and the American Temper” (1947), reprinted in Sovereign Reason (Glencoe, IL, 1954), 51–3, 55, 57. The clearest statement of Nagel’s postwar political stance is his Dewey Lecture, Liberalism and Intelligence (Bennington, VT, 1957). A full account of the formation of the American philosophical canon would also include such landmark texts as Max H. Fisch, ed., Classic American Philosophers (New York, 1951) and John E. Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York, 1963). Of course, not all adherents of the philosophical schools mentioned have aligned them with American democracy. But the strategy has proved widely attractive. Defenders of the canon often join Randall in explicitly differentiating “American philosophy” from “philosophy in America.” The first sentence of Armen Marsoobian and John Ryder’s introduction to The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy (Malden, MA, 2004) draws this distinction. Cheryl Misak takes a more ecumenical approach in The Oxford Guide to American Philosophy (New York, 2008).

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described themselves as part of “the philosophical opposition,” as Gutmann put it in planning for Dewey’s centenary of October 1959.133 That centenary celebration symbolized Dewey’s rapidly declining prestige. It was far more modest and scholarly than the effusive bash of 1949.134 Even the keynote speech paled by comparison, as Dwight Eisenhower’s triumphant claim that Dewey was “the philosopher of freedom” gave way to Grayson Kirk’s awkward description of Dewey as “one of the main figures in what we hope is the Columbia tradition of intellectual inquiry.”135 Behind the scenes, the tone was equally guarded. In the months leading up to the centenary, Gutmann and the rest of the organizing committee compiled a wish list of speakers that was remarkably broad, in disciplinary terms, but clearly delimited by epistemological considerations. On the one hand, the committee’s roster included not only pragmatists and naturalists, but also idealists, realists, and phenomenologists. Heterodox versions of logical empiricism and analytic philosophy found a spot as well, in the form of the ecumenical Philipp Frank and Morton White. Nor was the list limited to philosophers. Appearing alongside the Columbia naturalists and other philosophers (Brand Blanshard, Arthur E. Murphy, Stephen C. Pepper, Marvin Farber) were the psychologist Gordon Allport, the economist Paul Douglas, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the historian Merle Curti, and the art historian Meyer Schapiro, among many others.136 Yet the list had clear boundaries as well. Dewey acolytes Alvin Johnson and Joseph Ratner worked to strike a number of names from the roster, including those of the outspoken atheists Bertrand Russell and Corliss Lamont. The organizers’ criterion for selection was friendliness to normative engagement, not a commitment to the specific tenets of Columbia naturalism. Indeed, their list of potential speakers represented a cross-section of the interwar “cultural sciences,” led by the aging philosophical mainstream of the 1930s and 1940s, with its sharp critics of value-neutrality. Here, Dewey’s defenders saw a genuinely democratic, if deeply embattled, alternative to the disengaged studies of the analysts. Here, they saw America.

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Gutmann to the Provisional Committee for the Observation of John Dewey’s Centenary, 10 July 1958, “Dewey Centenary Committee,” Box 35, Randall papers. “John Dewey Fete Set,” New York Times, 18 Oct. 1959, 134; “Dr. Dewey, 90 Oct. 20, To Be Widely Feted,” New York Times, 7 Sept. 1949. Quoted in Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey (New York, 2002), 477; “Columbia Hails John Dewey,” New York Times, 21 Oct. 1959, 28. Gutmann to the Provisional Committee, 10 July 1958.

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beyond “academicization”: the postwar american university and intellectual history∗ richard f. teichgraeber iii Department of History, Tulane University E-mail: [email protected]

i 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 creativewriting 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. (If one includes current undergraduate degree programs, the number grows to 720.) The university has become the principal site of American literary and artistic life in another way. With the decline of independent literary and artistic life in ∗

My thanks to Bliss Carnochan, Charles Capper, Geoffrey Harpham, and Thomas Haskell for several valuable suggestions.

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big cities, dozens of university towns such as Cambridge, Amherst, Ann Arbor, Madison, Austin, and Berkeley have emerged as artificial Sohos, prosperous cosmopolitan centers where traditional academic inquiry and new and alternative forms of cultural life flourish side by side. Add to all this countless website and blogs dedicated to the doings of professional academics and universityemployed writers and artists, and what intellectual historian asked to give an honest assessment of where things stand would hesitate to say that the nation’s intellectual and cultural life is in many respects remarkably healthy—perhaps even healthier than it has ever been—and that we have the American university to thank for much of what makes this so? The postwar American university’s embrace of writers and creative artists is not entirely unprecedented. Literary historians usually identify Robert Frost as our first true visiting “writer-in-residence,” a position he held at various times and in various ways at Amherst, Middlebury, and the University of Michigan between 1916 and 1963. Pride of place here, however, arguably goes to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was appointed to the Harvard faculty as a visiting lecturer by Charles W. Eliot in the summer of 1870, and again in the winter of 1870– 71. Whatever the date of the first embrace, there is no question it remained an occasional and informal practice until the end of World War II, and then gradually—and quite unexpectedly—became a regular way of life. Or as Mark McGurl puts in more precisely at the outset of his brilliant study of the rise of creative-writing programs, the gradual and widespread conjoining of the activities of writers and other creative artists and university teaching in the postwar era is—both in the enormous scale of academic program-building upon which it depended, and in the striking reversal of attitudes it entailed—about as close to a genuine cultural innovation as one could ever hope to see. Sixty years ago, the American university was perceived as an opponent of modernist experiments in literature and the arts, and therefore the last place any selfrespecting writer or artist would want to work, or be welcome to ply his trade. Today, with the rise of academic programs and faculty chairs in almost all varieties of literary and artistic work, one could say that American colleges and universities are, collectively, the single most important source of support for serious and literary and artistic practice in the United States.1 Put more flatly, the American university system today is the main economic lifeline for countless literary and artistic careers, as well as home to programs in writing and the creative arts that are getting more numerous and more popular every year.

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Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 21–2. Subsequent page references are given in parentheses in the text.

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One might imagine that the causes and consequences of this broad-based flowering of literary and artistic life within American higher education would long since have attracted considerable attention from intellectual historians, and not just because many of us have been on hand to observe it happening at close range. For if we still want to say that the primary purpose of universities is to assemble positive knowledge of the world and how it works, it is by no means obvious why they should make so much institutional space available for the literary and creative arts. Has there been a fundamental change in our understanding what universities are supposed to do? Does the change represent progress? To be sure, intellectual historians writing about the postwar American university have had no trouble in seeing that, by the mid-1980s, all roads in the nation’s intellectual and cultural life seemed to lead to the university. But a number of influential voices have not liked what they have seen. Serious discussion of the university’s role as the primary supporter of the nation’s arts and ideas has been confined largely to the question whether the new arrangement has benefited or harmed what remains of intellectual and cultural work being done outside the academy. And the obviously unhappy sentiment running throughout most of the discussion is that there has been something inherently wrong with so much of our intellectual and cultural work being—in a neologism routinely employed to characterize what has happened—“academicized’ in such a way. If all roads lead into the university, apparently almost none lead out. So the remarkable increase in the scale and variety of literary and artistic activity taking place on campuses at best represents an ambiguous success. The lament about the “academicization” of the nation’s intellectual life dates back to the beginning of the postwar era, when the widely read Harvard committee report General Education in a Free Society (1945) warned against giving free rein to academic “specialism” in undergraduate teaching. But it is probably Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, published to widespread acclaim in 1987, that contains the bestknown criticism of the postwar American university as a devouring juggernaut of “academicization.” The heart of Jacoby’s complaint was that as more and more American intellectuals became academics after World War II, they “had no need to write a public prose; they did not; and finally could not.” An irony also colored his sustained lament, since in his view the full weight of “academicization” hit a generation of American intellectuals who had come of age during the upheavals of the 1960s. How was it possible, Jacoby asked, that veterans of student movements that often “targeted the university, derided their teachers, and ridiculed past thinkers” had matured into such earnest and quiet professional academics? His answer was that they had little choice. For when the smoke of the 1960s cleared, American universities “virtually monopolized intellectual work, and intellectual life outside the campuses seemed quixotic” (7–8). As result, many young would-be

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intellectuals had never left school; others discovered there was nowhere else to go. By the mid-1980s, Jacoby concluded, almost all serious American thinkers were flocking to the universities, where internecine conflicts over the curriculum loomed larger than once more pressing problems in American society at large. That same year, Thomas Bender, in New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginning of Our Own Time, also gave a thumbs-down to the dominant role universities had come to play in the nation’s intellectual and cultural life. In the book’s Epilogue, Bender argued that while admirably guided from its inception by a metropolitan cultural ideal, New York City had been “deeply damaged” in the 1960s when the nation’s universities, “flush with money, bought up not only intellectuals and writers, but painters, choreographers, and composers as well.” Bender acknowledged that university employment has helped to provide regular salaries for literary and artistic talent, as well as to spread it across the country. But such positive changes have not offset the serious damage done by universities in rendering literary and artistic work the subject matter of theoretical, self-referential academic study, and thereby undermining their association with the once more open and vital culture of large cities such as New York. Like Jacoby, Bender also believed that by the mid-1980s the principal categories of American intellectual life had become “academic rather than urban.” In his view, however, a change clearly evident in literary life was now also apparent in “much self-consciously post-modernist writing, poetry, dance, and architecture.” So Bender’s conclusion was even gloomier than Jacoby’s: widespread “academicization” of the nation’s intellectual and artistic life had “terribly reduced” the range and significance of both art and ideas in American society at large. In this essay, I want to set my reactions to three recently published books on the American university against the background of this disenchanted historiography. I also want to consider how they might provide guidance for intellectual historians who believe it is time for us to move beyond the lament about “academicization.” Jacoby, Bender, and others have asked, is the dominant role the American university has come to play in the nation’s intellectual and cultural life a good or a bad thing? There is, of course, nothing wrong raising this question. The flaw is that talk of “academicization” makes the outcome of discussion all too predictable, because “academicization” is not a category of evaluation, but a stigmatizing label. The neologism “to academicize” means to reduce a subject to a rigid set of rules, principles, and precepts. So if one wants to say that the university has “academicized” art and ideas, one can only mean the university has enclosed them and drained them of vitality. There is no way of refuting the charge of “academicization.” Not just the postwar American university, but apparently anyone intent on doing serious “academic” work in literature or the arts, stands hopelessly condemned in advance. If we study history only to be disillusioned, one could say that much of the job has been done for the postwar American university. But surely intellectual


historians can do more than wring their hands here. I would suggest this as a first step. Take the vast increase in the intellectual and cultural resources of America’s colleges and universities not as an occasion for celebration or condemnation, but as an established and complicated historical fact still in need of documentation and interpretation. Because each book under review here sheds different light on how we might go about developing this approach, I will consider each in turn and on its own terms. But an interest in suggesting some new and more sympathetic ways of placing the university in the intellectual and cultural history of postwar America frames my comments. How, why, and to what end has the academy become the center of the nation’s intellectual and cultural life? What information and interpretive framework would allow us to explore this question without assuming at the start that we are discussing a change whose only possible consequence is to “terribly reduce” the range and significance of ideas and art in society at large? Finally, I also want to suggest that however future intellectual historians choose to explain what caused the postwar American university to gain such a dominant position in our intellectual and cultural affairs, they should also highlight and explain the fact that the consequences of this change have been many-sided. What we need to come to terms with, in other words, is not a one-dimensional “academicization” of serious intellectual and cultural work, but its astonishing proliferation. The dirty secret of postwar American intellectual history, if you will, is not that our colleges and universities have reduced the nation’s art and ideas to a rigid set of academic rules and principles. Rather, they have been, collectively, the source of more art and ideas than anyone can possibly take in. What, then, should intellectual historians do when they write about the postwar American university with these considerations in mind?

ii One plausible answer would be to start where Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender start in their fine introduction to the anthology of documents they gather in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940–2005: by underlining the fact that, in addition to assuming a dominant role in the nation’s intellectual and cultural life, the American university experienced so many other substantial changes during the postwar era that it became “a wholly new institution” (1), one both qualitatively and quantitatively different from that of the first half of the century.2 In 172 selections, Smith and Bender document much of this sweeping 2

Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender, eds., American Higher Education Transformed, 1940– 2005 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Page references are given in parentheses in the text.

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transformation by stressing changes in the curriculum and the ideal of liberal learning in an age of mass education; the position and leadership of universities in American society; the powerful new role of the federal government, including its courts; and postwar academic life as a profession. The years immediately after World War II are illuminated by selections from a series of reports— beginning with the Harvard report General Education in a Free Society (1945)— that addressed pressing issues at every level of the educational system, and also provided the academic community with distinguished, if sometimes conflicting, advice on how to proceed. Intellectual historians who study American thought and culture in the 1960s should welcome this volume’s generous supply of documents illustrating heated campus controversies of that decade, especially the text of Richard Hofstadter’s anguished defense of the university in his commencement address at Columbia in the troubled spring of 1968. American Higher Education Transformed also provides a selection of Supreme Court decisions that trace the evolution of the concept of academic freedom in the 1950s and 1960s. As with the other selections in this volume, here they continue work that Wilson Smith began with Hofstadter almost fifty years ago in their still invaluable two-volume American Higher Education: A Documentary History (1961). The last word in this new anthology is left for speeches and essays of college and university presidents who distinguished themselves in various ways during the 1980s and 1990s. The selections in American Higher Education Transformed are not arranged chronologically, but under thirteen topical headings. Each section is provided with a short historical introduction, and each document with an abbreviated guide to relevant bibliographical material. Unfortunately, this volume does not come with a conventional detailed index of authors, subjects, titles, and instructors. It ends instead with a bare-bones, one-page concordance of its major subjects that, I fear, may limit this anthology’s usefulness. American Higher Education Transformed contains a rich and valuable sampling of sixty years of a huge literature of controversy and discussion. But like every anthology it also raises expectations that are not, and perhaps unavoidably cannot, be met. Because Smith and Bender focus on the efforts of people who had a direct hand in transforming postwar American higher education, they must overlook people not involved in such work. But we know that important changes in this period at times were driven by interested parties outside the university. An important case in point here would be Lewis Powell, whose widely circulated 1971 memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” did not find its way into this anthology. Soon to be a Supreme Court justice, Powell urged American corporate leaders to retake command of public discourse by financing new conservative think tanks, reshaping mass media, and seeking to influence appointments in the universities


and the courts—all of which in fact would happen in the decades that followed, and in turn helped to fuel, the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s.3 Smith and Bender make it clear at the outset that they have excluded the social life of students, the business of intercollegiate athletics, and institutional budgets in favor of questions of access, the diversity of students, and their studies and their place in educational change. Omission of these issues, of course, is what makes space for the other material. But it does so at the risk of drawing attention away from what some would say now stand among the most pressing issues in American higher education. At all levels, for example, tuition has increased far beyond any measure of inflation—currently to above $37,000 at elite institutions and exponentially at formerly inexpensive state universities. Among the consequences is that, in the year 2000, a typical graduating student received not only her degree but a paper book for a debt of $18,000, a debt which was twice what it had been in 1992 and still continues to climb. It should be said, too, that American Higher Education Transformed will not allow its readers to explore the complicated question of “diversity” in all of its dimensions. It is safe to say that when the intellectual history of the American university during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is written, the incessant and perhaps promiscuous use of the word “diversity” will stand out as one of its most salient features. But talk about “diversity” in American higher education is hardly a new thing. In national debates of the late 1940s, no premise was more widely accepted by leaders in academia and government than the importance of preserving functional diversity among institutions. Institutional variety—colleges and universities existing primarily to serve local and regional needs rather than a national culture—was seen as an academic characteristic essential to the proper functioning of democracy. “Diversity,” of course, remains a sacred concept in American higher education. But during the last decades of the twentieth century, it came to mean something rather different: essentially, faculty and students of different ethno-racial and economic backgrounds, who have needs, skills, and interests more heterogeneous than in the immediate postwar era. This change also has made for a paradox that goes unnoticed in American Higher Education Transformed: a decline in institutional diversity among our leading colleges and universities. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the student population served by these institutions certainly has became more diverse and the societal purposes they 3

For a thoughtful discussion of the background and significance of Powell’s memorandum see David Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), chap. 4.

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pursue remarkably more varied. But there also is no question that these same institutions have come to look more and more alike in their programs, their faculties, their finances, their organization, and their conception of institutional purpose.4 There are some other important blank spots in this anthology. Is it providing a documentary history of American higher education in the late twentieth century when it barely touches on the nationwide controversy over academic tenure that was reignited in the 1990s? Should the peculiarities of the American system of academic governance—nowhere outside the United States and Canada are modern universities still governed by boards of laymen—be ignored? Why are there no selections to illustrate how changes in the postwar American system of higher education compare to changes in national systems elsewhere? To raise these questions, I hasten to add, is not to make a serious criticism of a volume that is unavoidably limited in its reach, but simply to remind intellectual historians that the changes that reshaped the American university since World War II have been vast and complicated, and require more systematic study than we have given them to date.

iii Louis Menand’s name would sit high atop any informed observer’s list of people who have made important contributions to national discourse about the current condition of the American university. Since the early 1990s, he has produced a steady stream of lucid and pungent essays that have addressed some of the most highly charged academic issues of our time. Because his work has appeared regularly in publications such as the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the New Yorker, his views also have been widely circulated. It is no surprise, then, to find one of his most provocative essays—a 1996 New York Times Magazine article arguing that our current timeconsuming and costly system of graduate education would immediately gain greater efficiency and focus if we reduced all PhD programs to three years, with no teaching or PhD dissertation—reprinted in American Higher Education Transformed. The word “academicization” never appears in that piece, nor does it in the essays Menand has revised and expanded for publication in The Marketplace of Ideas.5 But I think it fair to use it as a shorthand description of what bothers 4

5

This is one of the central themes in Richard M. Freeland’s invaluable Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–70 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). Page references are given in parentheses in the text.


him about the American university. For on my reading, what Menand has been saying in one essay after another for almost two decades now—and what he repeats and extends in The Marketplace of Ideas—is that the main problem with the university is a lack of creativity and imagination that we can blame largely on a rigid and antiquated set of rules, principles, and precepts that guide the workings of professional academic disciplines. Consider his answers to the four questions he takes up in The Marketplace of Ideas. Why is it so hard for liberal arts colleges to decide which subjects their students should be required to study? Answer: because any effort to establish robust general education programs automatically triggers effective resistance from a liberal-arts “autoimmune system” (43) designed to reproduce and sustain professional academic specialists. General education programs try to connect what undergraduates learn with the world outside the academy. Within the academy, however, most professors see their teaching as a matter of disseminating specialized academic knowledge that has no immediate practical application. For them, the serious work of teaching is done entirely inside separate departments, where an undergraduate major is viewed as preparation for graduate work in the same field, work which in turn will lead to specialized faculty appointments. Why did academic disciplines in the humanities undergo a crisis of legitimacy in the 1980s and 1990s? Answer: they were victims of an understandable backlash against the exaggerated respect given to humanities disciplines during the immediate postwar decades. The backlash began in the 1980s with English and philosophy professors who proclaimed the arbitrariness of disciplinary boundaries and chose to work in a more interdisciplinary manner. Things got worse in the 1990s when scholars who initially seemed bent only on uncovering the guiding assumptions of their disciplines began to insist that disciplinarity itself was the main roadblock. In the institutional meltdown the followed, Menand tells us, the humanities disciplines have not disappeared, but today the notion that they have some sort of objective referent can no longer be taken seriously. Why has “interdisciplinarity” become a magic word in the academy in recent decades? Answer: it speaks to the widespread belief that one of the main reasons why the university is not working well is “the persistence of academic silos known as departments,” and that if colleges and universities could only get past “this outmoded dispensation, a lot of their problems would disappear” (95). Menand shares this belief. But he does not think “interdisciplinarity” is the way forward. In practice, “interdisciplinarity” serves only to ratify the disciplines, he argues, thereby leaving us with the very problem we want to get rid of, and this for the same reason that “general education” programs typically come to life as muddled compromises. Professional academicians are disciplinary specialists trained to respect the autonomy and expertise of professional academicians in other disciplines. As a result, they are almost never in a position to provide useful

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evaluations of one another’s claims. In a typical interdisciplinary encounter, they “just shout at each other from the mountaintop of their own discipline” (120–21). And, finally, why are professors overwhelmingly mainstream liberals in their politics? Answer: it is not a matter of being trained in a way that converts them to liberal opinions; rather, university professors tend to think alike politically because the American academic profession has become “increasingly selfselected” (155). For more than four decades now, the main obstacles to a successful academic career in the liberal-arts disciplines have been a lengthy and expensive doctoral education process and a disastrous job market. College students who have some interest in further education, but are unsure whether they want careers as professors, Menand tells us, are not going to risk eight or more years finding out. The result has been “a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity” of undergraduates entering the profession. Students who go to “graduate school already talk the talk, and they learn to walk the walk as well” (153), ultimately intent on joining an academic system whose primary purpose is not to assure that professors are liberals, so much as to fashion academic specialists more likely to identify with their disciplines than with their campuses and the world outside academia. The Marketplace of Ideas addresses questions that, in Menand’s view, tell us that the American university is in need of fundamental reform. He also finds them troubling, because he believes they speak to problems that it should be easy for universities to resolve. What makes all of them intractable, in Menand’s view, is a rigid set rules and practices that govern the workings of professional academic disciples that are housed in universities. From start to finish, The Marketplace of Ideas rehearses the familiar lament about “academicization.” How should an intellectual historian judge this book? The answer is complicated, partly because Menand is hard to categorize as an academic figure. An English professor by training, he says that for most of The Marketplace of Ideas he writes as a historian “whose emphasis is on the backstory of present problems” (19). He also says that the questions he addresses are “essentially intellectual matters, that should be amenable to debate and resolution. They are not, in any significant way, about money” (16). Perhaps. But there are reasons to wonder what Menand thinks he is doing when he writes about “essentially intellectual matters” within the American university. For all his emphasis on the primacy of ideas, it would not be fair to judge The Marketplace of Ideas as the work of a practicing intellectual historian. On my reading, the book is the handiwork of a skilled aphoristic essayist. For when it comes to the American university, Menand is a writer who favors compact arguments, and likes to cover a lot of ground very quickly. He also displays an exceptionally fluent generalizing power, and obviously believes he is telling his readers unpopular truths. That said, it is fair to ask if Menand has gotten the “backstory of present problems” right, because


his understanding of the “backstory” represents the novel feature of his rehearsal of the familiar lament about “academicization.” Or, more precisely, Menand believes that the best way for us to understand why the American university is currently hamstrung by professional academic disciplines is not to analyze what has happened to the disciplines since World War II, but to recall the central role they played in bringing the American university to life in the first place. The gist of Menand’s “backstory” is that, during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, nearly every subject taught in American colleges and universities was equipped both with a new or refurbished professional disciplinary organization that was national in membership and specialized in scope, and with a new or modified departmental organization that quickly became the building block of most college and university administrations. These changes were more than formal rearrangements of the faculty, because all of them testified to the increasingly powerful hold of academic specialization in American higher education. And the hold was so powerful, Menand argues, that by the time World War I began, the nation’s academic life was restructured from top to bottom, with the professionalization of academic disciplines serving as the driving force behind all of the most important changes. Why is this “backstory” important? Menand’s answer is straightforward: very little has changed at American colleges and universities since World War I, and that is what makes for our biggest problem. More precisely, while the four questions that trouble Menand arise from the way in which professional academic disciplines currently sustain and reproduce themselves, the single most significant fact about American higher education in his view is that its institutional structure has remained almost entirely unchanged since the First World War. Indeed, the entire current arrangement of departments and disciplines that form the building blocks of the modern American university can only be understood as “a late nineteenth-century system, put into place for late nineteenth-century reasons.” Menand acknowledges in passing that the university has changed in many ways during the postwar era. But unlike Wilson and Bender, he does not believe that the changes transformed it into a wholly new institution. Moreover, he also believes that, to the extent that this “late nineteenth-century system” still determines the workings of the modern American university, trying to reform it is like “trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter, or like riding a horse to the mall” (17). Is all this true? Let’s start with Menand’s “backstory.” Twenty years ago, many intellectual historians did believe that the “professionalization” of academic life captured the primary mission of the American university movement.6 Today 6

The main source of Menand’s “backstory” is Walter Metzger, “The Academic Profession in the United States,” in Burton R. Clark, ed., The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and Institutional Settings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

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many are not so sure. As is often the case with terms that are assigned integrating roles in historical narratives, scholars returning to the field in recent years have come to recognize what the architects of the American university understood at the outset: “professionalization” captures only some of the complex variety of developments that gave rise to the university. The phrase “organize it on a more professional and specialized basis” does describe part of what the university accomplished in reshaping American intellectual and cultural life before World War I. But we now know that academic professionalization during this period not only occurred at a ragged and uneven pace, it also took different and not mutually reinforcing forms. Consider the case of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The primary aim of the figures who spearheaded the founding of the APSA— some fifty members of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the American Economic Association (AEA) who gathered in Tulane University’s Tilton Memorial Library on 30 December 1903—was to promote more systematic collection and exchange of information on legislation at the municipal, state, and national levels. The new association they established for this purpose, however, did not introduce any new set of rules or precepts for the “scientific” study of politics. Nor, for that matter, did it immediately inspire any significant growth of “political science” as an independent academic profession. Fewer than half of the fifty AHA and AEA members present at the founding signed up as charter members. Ten years later, it is true, the APSA’s membership had grown impressively to about fifteen hundred men and women. But of these only twenty percent identified themselves as professors or teachers. As with economics and history, it turns out that modern academic inquiry into politics was supported by institutional structures built well in advance of any substantial new base of specialized knowledge or academic methodology. Moreover, because this sequence of events reversed the pattern in the natural sciences, the professionalization of the social sciences was, by comparison, more deeply embedded in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century events. Problems with Menand’s “backstory” make for problems with his account of our “present problems.” Not just the professionalization of academic life, he tells us, but “almost every aspect of higher education we are familiar with” dates back to what he calls the “big bang” (97) of American higher education, the period between 1870 and 1915. But this makes things much too simple. It may be true (although there are good reasons to doubt it) that some of our leading private colleges and universities have changed very little structurally since the late nineteenth century. But the transformation of American higher education after World War II did not simply strain an existing system. It so fundamentally altered things that it no longer makes sense to talk of American higher education as if it were a single system.


Anyone wanting to know how much the landscape has been transformed for the American professoriate, for example, would do well to pick up American Higher Education Transformed and go straight to Burton Clark’s illuminating “Small Worlds, Different Worlds ” (338–42). A sociologist who is longtime student of the academic profession, Clark acknowledges that self-amplifying disciplinary differences have come to play an important role in dividing the American professoriate. But he argues persuasively that “institutional differences” have come to play an even more important role. In 1995, this particular “axis of differentiation” placed roughly two-thirds of American academics in institutions other than that of doctoral-granting universities. About a fourth of total faculty were in colleges and universities that offered degree work as far as the master’s; a small share, about 7 percent, were in liberal-arts colleges. The largest block— roughly one-third (over 250,000)—were employed in the nation’s nearly 1,500 community colleges. Student numbers were even more telling. Doctoral-granting universities had just 26 percent of total enrollment; the master’s level institutions, 21 percent; specialized institutions, 4 percent. Two-year community colleges had 43 percent—far and way the largest share; they also admitted over 50 percent of all entering students. One can only speculate what professional academics who have made their careers teaching in community colleges—and therefore have done most of the heavy lifting in postwar American higher education—would make of The Marketplace of Ideas. “This book is not talking about our world,” would not be a bad guess about their first response. Like other writers who think of themselves as telling their readers unpopular truths, Menand too often closes himself off to the complexities of American higher education, both past and present. I doubt Menand really is dreaming about how the American university might work stripped of all its traditional liberal-arts disciplines. Doubtless he also knows that not all the problems confronting these disciplines are problems of their own making. In recent decades, other forces at play have included the surging growth of public higher education and the relatively slower growth of private colleges and universities. In fact, if it makes sense to talk of a “big bang” period in the history of American higher education, we have just gone through it, and it has taken a heavy toll on the liberal-arts disciplines. Between 1972 and 2005, more young people entered American higher education than at any other time in the nation’s history, and the vast majority of them—13 million of a total of 17.5 million—wound up in public colleges and universities, and the vast majority of these tended towards majors in managerial, technical, and preprofessional fields. One would never guess in reading The Marketplace of Ideas that, while public universities have an interest in teaching the liberal arts, their primary interest lies elsewhere: in research science, engineering, the health sciences, and applied disciplines such as agriculture,

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veterinary medicine, and oceanography. At universities that still prize the traditional liberal-arts disciplines, they are in trouble for reasons not of their own making and arguably beyond their control. With tuition rising at three times the rate of inflation, and with consequent growth in debt after graduation, parents and college-age children have become anxious about the relative earning power of degrees in English, philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred traditional academic fields, including history. On college and university campuses, as William Chace has pointed out, administrative efforts to exploit available resources to manage ever-growing costs have created a paradox. In recent decades, the preferred way to bring in more money, over and above tuition income, has been to hire more and more people who will assure a continuing flow of research dollars from government and corporate sources and attract private and philanthropic gifts. The upshot has been a significant expansion in the number of non-faculty staff—development officers, technical support staff, research assistants, lawyers attuned to federal regulations—as well as human-resources personnel to handle the ever-growing number of just such new employees. The paradox here is that while college and university staffs on the whole have grown substantially, the institutional presence and power of the faculty has been in relative decline.7 Seen against this background, Menand’s account of why the liberal-arts disciplines are in trouble looks like a case of blaming the victim.8

iv The word “academicization” also never pops up in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era. But here again I think it fair to use it as a shorthand for a familiar and disparaging view of the university-based creative-writing programs that book 7

8

William M. Chace, “The Decline of the English Department,” American Scholar (Autumn, 2009), 34–8. For a more sustained critical discussion of the shortcomings of Menand’s view of the academic discipline, see Thomas Haskell, “Menand’s Postdisciplinary Project,” Intellectual History Newsletter 24 (2002), 107–19. Menand also overlooks the fact that the trouble faced by liberal arts disciplines varies greatly among different segments of a highly stratified system of higher education. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, liberal-arts and sciences degrees increasingly have been concentrated in two elite segments of the system—research universities and top-tier liberal-arts colleges. Among other things, the change tells us that what was once a largely functional divide within the system—different kinds of institutions emphasizing different curricula—is now largely a status divide. For a thoughtful discussion of how this change has affected humanities disciplines, see Roger Geiger, “Demography and Curriculum: The Humanities in Higher Education from the 1950s through the 1980s,” in David A. Hollinger, ed., The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 50–72.


addresses—the essence of which is that they have occasioned a sad decline in the quality and interest of American fiction. I also think it fair to say that McGurl’s book not only refutes this view of creative-writing programs, it quite brilliantly turns it on its head. The Program Era offers students of postwar American literary and cultural history a great many other very interesting things as well, to be sure. In its pages, they will find vivid case studies of individual careers and texts of several of the leading MFA graduates of the postwar era, including Flannery O’Connor, Ken Kesey, Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sandra Cisneros; illuminating accounts of the nation’s leading writing programs, and of the different approaches they have taken in teaching writing; fascinating and related discussions of the creative-writing program as a medium of influence, a place were teachers exert themselves on students; and a provocative concluding discussion of evidence showing that, after standing alone as an American phenomenon for some fifty years, creative writing now seems on its way to becoming a globally anglophone phenomenon. But ultimately, for all its attention to individual writers and the internal workings of creative-writing programs, the organizing argument of The Program Era is that American colleges and universities have embraced American fiction not to coopt it or suffocate it, but instead to generate a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with great energy—and sometimes brilliance—by a now long and growing list of writers who have also been students and teachers. Like Menand, McGurl also describes this constellation of problems in systematic terms. But where the academic system Menand uncovers is antiquated and lacking in creativity, the one McGurl reconstructs has been created in recent decades. In his view, it also has been generated not to produce another specialized academic discipline, so much as to spawn a great variety of new literary styles and to teach writers to make sense of at least two of the actual worlds that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the world of the white-collar workplace.9 All this makes for a complicated but also enormously provocative book. One of McGurl’s purposes is to show that the overriding problem for postwar American fiction has been to find new ways of adapting modernist principles, developed well outside the university in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to a literary field now largely dominated by the bureaucratic institutions of higher education. The signature preoccupation of modernist fiction with the technical

9

It is worth noting that Menand has written a long and glowing review of The Program Era that does the book much better service than I have space for here. Menand’s high praise is puzzling, however, given how completely McGurl’s book rejects his view of American higher education as a system lacking in creativity and imagination. See Louis Menand, “Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?”, New Yorker, 8 and 15 June 2009.

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problem of the story narrator’s “point of view” found new meaning after it was transferred to an academic environment engaged on many levels with the problems and promise of cultural diversity. But this is just one of several examples. McGurl wants to show us that postwar American fiction not only reflects the fact that America’s colleges and universities are the places where most of the nation’s serious writers are trained, but also reflects that fact in various ways, none of which can be said to have diminished its quality or interest. With that end in mind, while McGurl offers us a number of close and vivid readings of careers and texts, he regularly circles back to the more ambitious task of sketching what he calls a “total” form of aesthetic appreciation designed to capture the importance of creative writing as the vital institutional setting within which postwar American fiction has been fashioned. Here his challenge is to generate an interpretive framework broad enough to describe an entire historical era, but also flexible enough to recognize that the phenomena it tries to capture were gradually assembled over several decades, and continue to change before our own eyes. To sort things out, McGurl divides the chapters of The Program Era into three roughly chronological parts. The first tracks the gradual organization of the system as we know it across the first two-thirds of the twentieth century; the second studies the “upheaval and elasticity” of that system in what McGurl considers the pivotal period of the 1960s, when creative writing programs really began to multiply; the third analyzes its normal functioning since then. McGurl’s effort to map the totality of postwar American fiction also has him breaking it down into three discrete but in practice overlapping aesthetic formations. The first is “techomodernism” (exemplified in fiction produced by John Barth and Thomas Pynchon), best understood as a tweaking of the term “postmodernism” in that it emphasizes the all-important engagement of postmodern literature with information technology. The second is “high cultural pluralism” (exemplified in the work of Philip Roth and Toni Morrison), which McGurl uses to describe a body of fiction that joins the high literary values of modernism with an interest in documenting the experience of cultural difference and the authenticity of the ethnic voice. The third is “lower-middle-class modernism” (exemplified in the fiction of Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates), which describes a large body of work—and some would say the most characteristic product of the writing program in recent decades—that usually takes the form of the minimalist short story, and is preoccupied more than anything else with economic insecurity and cultural anomie (31–2). McGurl is quick to concede that these three “more or less barbarous neologisms” (32) are not native to the pedagogy of the creative writing and postwar fiction that they seek to describe. But there is no need for apology here. Neologisms or not, McGurl employs them skillfully in showing us how to resist


the impulse to lump all postwar American fiction into single category. And it is precisely here, I think, that he turns the lament about “academicization” on its head by organizing the university-based world of creative writing with what he employs as flexible and sympathetic categories of classification, not stigmatizing labels. In showing us that the image of the American academic system as “a gray plane of deathly regularity is an outdated and impoverished one” (xi), McGurl tells the story of the rise of university-based creative writing with a density of detail and complexity of analysis that is truly remarkable. But there are some problems along the way. After four hundred pages, it is still hard to say precisely when and why writers became a welcome presence on campus. McGurl says that while only a small cluster of creative-writing programs were established in the immediate postwar period, the numbers “exploded” (20) with the progressive educational revival of the 1960s. But the numbers do not add up here. The Associated Writers Program (AWP) was founded in 1967 with just thirteen members. By 1975, membership had increased noticeably to fifty-two. But the real explosion in numbers clearly took place between 1975 and 2005: from fifty-two to more than 350. History, of course, is not chronology. But a more refined temporal articulation of the rise of creative writing invites a less sanguine reading of events than The Program Era provides. McGurl tends to see the rise of creative writing mostly against the background of the widespread good fortune experienced by American higher education in the quarter-century after World War II—a time when, as he puts it, “ a sense of the comfortably absorptive largeness of a suddenly swollen faculty body would encourage the admission of a different and riskier sort of individual . . . into the usual mix of teacher–scholars” (114). But if the real boom in creative writing programs took place during the last quarter of the twentieth century, it occurred during a time when the job market for the “the usual mix of teacher–scholars” dried up. So more jobs in creative writing, it would seem, must have come at the expense of jobs for “the usual mix” of professional academics—and, it would be safe to guess, only rarely with their support. There also are problems with what McGurl tells us about where the rise of creative writing stands among the many events that define the rise of the postwar American university. University-employed creative writers, he argues, contribute a new form of prestige to the modern American university’s “overall portfolio of cultural capital, adding their bit to the market value of degrees it confers.” In this role, they also resemble varsity athletes, “but whereas varsity athletics symbolize the excellence of competitive teamwork, creative writing and other arts testify to the institution’s systematic hospitality to the excellence of individual self-expression.” (408). I suppose the comparison is meant to flatter university-employed writers and artists, but it seems a bit far-fetched. As with the rise of big-time athletics—and big-time research science—creative-writing

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programs were partly the products of changes in funding. But it would be a very big stretch to say that funding here has been generous. In fact, it looks like chump change when compared to what has been made available to athletes and their coaches. In 2006, the director of the AWP estimated that the total annual budget for all creative programs was roughly $200 million. By contrast, during 2007–8, the budget for the athletics department at the University of Texas alone was $107.6 million. At first glance, the huge increase in creative-writing programs during the last quarter of the twentieth century does suggest that universities believe they serve important purposes. Set alongside the university’s commitments to big-time athletics and science, creative writing looks like little more than an inexpensive sideshow. Finally, on this count, it also should be said that McGurl avoids more than passing mention of the fact that not all creative programs are created equal. Of necessity, perhaps, he focuses mostly on the impressive results of elite programs, most of which also turn out be long-standing ventures. (The Iowa Writers Program was founded in 1936; the Stanford Creative Writing Program in 1945.) As a result, he has little to say about what some critics say is the real downside of “the program era.” Not the ‘academicization” of American fiction, so much as the likelihood that the academy has been generous to a fault in establishing creative-writing programs, and that programs at the bottom of end of the food chain too often house middling writers/professors who are rarely “academic” or rigorous in their teaching.

v By way of a conclusion, I want to return to the question of how intellectual historians might develop a fresh and more sympathetic understanding of the dominant role the American university has come to play in the nation’s intellectual and cultural affairs. At least three answers emerge from my reading of these books. The first is the simplest, and perhaps the most important: make more effort to document what has happened within American colleges and universities during the postwar era. There has been no shortage of serious reflection on how the major academic disciplines have changed over the decades since World War II, and much of this work has been done ably by intellectual historians. But strikingly few of us have been interested in explaining how and why college and university campuses have become important sites of literary and artistic activity in their own right. What McGurl has done in showing the causes and consequences of making fiction a subject of modern academic study needs to be done for virtually all the other literary and creative arts (many of which— beginning with poetry—are even more dependent on the university for their


continuing existence). Work also needs to be done in tracing roles that particular programs in writing and the arts have played in the history of local and regional cultures. There are dozens of interesting and untold stories of how programs in writing and the arts have thrived in such unlikely settings such as West Lafayette, Indiana; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Lincoln, Nebraska; Houston, Texas; and Irvine, California. Second, exercise caution in generalizing about “American higher education.” The Marketplace of Ideas does not give us, as its publisher claims, an answer to the question “has American higher education become a dinosaur?” As it stands, the question is unanswerable since we deceive ourselves if we choose to generalize about higher education as if it were a single set of institutions with a common purpose. Menand’s book is mostly about problems that confront elite institutions and certain disciplines (almost all in the humanities) within those institutions. Serious understanding of American higher education begins with the recognition that it is not just a huge and highly stratified landscape, but one peopled by what Burton Clark has called “a multitude of academic tribes.” Highly specialized research scholars in liberal-arts disciplines form one of the nation’s academic tribes, but they are less numerous (and increasingly less powerful) than Menand lets on. Finally, whatever intellectual historians may develop in the way of new interpretations of the dominant role universities play in the nation’s intellectual and cultural affairs, they should recognize that American universities have never been, and surely will never become, places devoted primarily to nurturing the life of the mind, let alone safeguarding the prerogatives of the imagination. What follows from this recognition—apart from a call to abandon the lament about “academicization” once and for all—is hard to say. Should we be surprised to discover that there is so much serious literary and artistic work being done in universities across the country? Should we be concerned there is not more of it, and if so, on what grounds? Such questions invite a variety of responses. An answer made in good faith, however, depends on one’s ability to accept the fact that throughout its history the American university has been something of a makeshift institution, pursuing several ideas of what a university is for and as a result always ready to adapt to different social and economic needs. Seen from this vantage point, the dominant role universities play in our intellectual and cultural life certainly looks less formidable, perhaps even contingent. It is by no means the most important of the many roles universities play in our national affairs. It also is not unthinkable that developments which combined to assign them this role could give way to others which will diminish or even reverse it. In some moods, idealistic champions of the university like to proclaim it has a true inner core that consists of a commitment to reason and its rigorous application. But anyone who has spent time at a typical American university knows that it is a sprawling,

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multitasking institution that struggles to meet seemingly irreconcilable demands. Or, as Harvard’s president Drew Gilpin Faust put it recently, the American university tries “to be practical as well as transcendent; to assist immediate national needs and to pursue knowledge for its own sake; to both add value and question values.”10 And the list of course could go on.

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Drew Gilpin, in New York Times Book Review, 6 Sept. 2009.



forum: the idea of sustainability introduction emma rothschild Department of History, Harvard University, and Joint Center for History and Economics E-mail: [email protected]

The encounter of environmental history and intellectual history is a union of two insidiously oceanic inquiries. “Oceanic” in the sense of limitlessness, or oneness with the universe.1 “All history is the history of thought”, and the history of thought is in modern intellectual history a universal investigation, of advertisements for sofas and Ayn Rand and adoption laws in early colonial Bihar.2 But all history is also the history of space, and of the environment that surrounds the sofas and the laws. It is apparent, now, that “history occurs in space as well as time”.3 Environmental history is everywhere as well as nowhere.4 It is a new universal understanding, which subverts even the historians’ own anxieties about universalization: a “negative universal history”.5 The symposium on History and Sustainability is the product of a workshop at the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University in October 2008. Gro Harlem Brundtland, who initiated the late twentieth-century idea of sustainable development in the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, was the first speaker, interviewed about the environment, the United Nations, and transnational environmental policy. Paul Warde spoke about ideas of durability in discourses on agriculture and

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“Our present ego-feeling is [a] residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an allembracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it”. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (London, 1968), 64, 68. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1994; first published 1946), p. 215. On history in space see David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (New York, 2006), p. 15. On environmental history as everywhere and nowhere see the essays by Mark Elvin and Peter Burke in Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, eds., Nature’s End: History and the Environment (Basingstoke, 2009). Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009), 197–222, 222.

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forestry in early modern Europe, and Sverker Sörlin about nineteenth-century ideas of humanity as a global entity. Alison Frank described the history of unsustainability, in the rise and decline of the Galician oil industry. My own paper, on environmental capital, was about the twentieth-century idea of nature as a capital stock. There were comments by David Blackbourn, Angus Burgin, Anthony La Vopa, and Charles Rosenberg. The meeting was part of a programme on environmental history that was started in 1994 at the Cambridge Centre for History and Economics, by Paul Warde and Meena Singh.6 One of the consequences of the 2008 meeting has been a new programme on the global history of energy, at the Joint Center for History and Economics and at the MIT Research Group on History, Energy, and Environment. There is new work on the early twentieth-century projects of a geo-engineered Euro-African continent Atlantropa, by Philipp Lehmann; on tsarist and Bolshevik efforts to change the physical landscapes of Central Asia, by Maya Peterson; on the environmental and energy history of the ranching and meat-packing industry in the United States, by Joshua Specht; and on the history of artificial lights in North America, by Jeremy Zallen.7 The papers in the symposium are an interesting illustration of the “new” intellectual history of the past few years, in which the history of ideas is extended to the most diverse kinds of intellectuals—theorists of coppicing and the central inspector of the Lviv–Czernowitz railway, economists and congressmen and the authors of illustrated guidebooks—and to diverse kinds of thoughts. All the papers are also influenced by the even more all-embracing prospect of an intellectual or intellectual/cultural history of the ideas of individuals who are not intellectuals. “The meanest of men has his Theory”, in Coleridge’s words, and “to think at all is to theorize”.8 There can be an intellectual history of low ideas, in this sense, or a history which is inspired by the techniques of intellectual history, in taking seriously languages and ideas in context. Even the history of forest wardens and itinerant oil collectors, like the history of Bohemian serfs and slaves chained in New Orleans slave markets, is a history of thought.9

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See http://www-histecon.kings.cam.ac.uk/ees/index.html and http://www-histecon. kings.cam.ac.uk/research/environmental_security.htm. See http://www.fas.harvard.edu/∼histecon/energy/index.html. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4 (Princeton, 1969), pt. 1, p. 189. See Alison Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Paul Warde, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2006); Sheilagh Ogilvie, “The Economic World of the Bohemian Serf”, Economic History Review 51/3 (2001), 430–53; and Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 1999).

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The new environmental history is even more embracing. Environmental history has always been a history of ideas and of imagined space.10 Changes in the Land is a history of the early American–European world of ideas about plants and animals and names, and so is The Roots of Dependency.11 But in the last decade or so of an institutional expansion in the discipline (or subdiscipline), in the US, Europe and Asia, the techniques of environmental history have been extended to ever more diverse inquiries. The multiple or variable scales which have been so important in recent historiography—shifting between the local, regional, national, transoceanic and global—were the insights, initially, of environmental historians.12 There is a “nascent historiographical middle ground” in early American history that “focuses on the interplay among political, economic, cultural, and biological forces”, and “by blending environmental history, transatlantic history, borderlands history, ethnohistory, and colonial studies”, extends to even the largest of political investigations: into the “potency of state power” and the “arrows of environmental and historical change”.13 The romance of environmental and intellectual history is the encounter, in these auspicious circumstances, of two inclusive inquiries. It is connected to other imposing changes, and in particular to the new prospects for economic history, the history of economic thought, and the history of economic life. One of the continuing preoccupations of the “new” intellectual history (and of MIH, from its inception) has been with the history of economic ideas, and thereby—because even the highest or most theoretical economic intellectuals were concerned, since the origins of political economy, with the “medium” economic thought of public policy and the “low” economic thought of public expectations—with thoughts and ideas of different kinds.14 The new environmental history has also, to a striking extent, been a history of traditionally economic subjects, including cities, industries, energy, land use, population and migration.

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Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, p. 15; and see Susan Schulten, “Get Lost: On the Intersection of Environmental and Intellectual History”, MIH 5/1 (2008), 141–52. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, rev. edn (New York, 2003); Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, NE, 1983). See Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature”, Journal of American History 86/3 (1999), 976–86. Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands”, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 67/2 (2010), 173–208, 175. See Angus Burgin, “The Radical Conservatism of Frank Knight”, MIH 6/3 (2009), 513–38; and Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

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The new political or cultural or environmental history of economic life has room for individuals with ideas, expectations and memories, including ideas about distant places and metaphors of distant times. Galicia was the “Polish Baku” and the “Austrian El Dorado”, in the history recounted by Alison Frank; in Paul Warde’s history of agricultural ideas, coal was “England’s Peru”. The Thirlmere reservoir in the English Lake District was the site of a spectacular conflict of economic interests, as Harriet Ritvo described in The Dawn of Green, and it was also a site of political and hydraulic inspection by the engineer of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in the Californian Sierra Nevada.15 The history of migration in Asia is in part a history of changes in ideas about climate and cultivation, as Sunil Amrith has shown, and the history of environmental change in the Malayan peninsula is in part a story of “family histories of movement, displacement, and loss”.16 The history of the environment has been of new interest, recently, to economists and to historians of political thought.17 It has also offered the possibility of a renewed economic history, or a new and permissive history of economic life, in which economists and historians, cultural or intellectual or political, are alike included. These possibilities are the outcome of very large changes within historical (and economic) thought. They are the opportunities, in particular, of a postmaterialist world of the mind, in the familiar sense of going beyond the vulgar Marxian presumption of ideas as determined by material circumstances, and in the sense, too, of going beyond the other vulgar nineteenth-century presumption, of rational economic man. This is an emancipation for intellectual history, because it becomes possible to investigate the economic contexts of thought, without the anxiety that the economic is more real than the thought. It is no longer necessary, as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out in 1955, to see “ideals and movements [as] transitory and superficial, lobbying in some sense eternal and ‘real’”.18 For environmental history, the postmaterialist world is even more emancipating. It

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Harriet Ritvo, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago, 2009), 161–3. Sunil Amrith, “Histories and Ecologies of Migration across the Bay of Bengal” (unpublished MS, Birkbeck, University of London, 2010); and idem, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge, 2011). See Richard Hornbeck, “Barbed Wire: Property Rights and Agricultural Development”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 125/2 (2010), 767–810; idem, “The Enduring Impact of the American Dust Bowl: Short and Long-Run Adjustments to Environmental Catastrophe”, NBER w15605 (2009); and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Nature’s Commerce: The Environmental Context of the Scottish Enlightenment 1750–1820 (New Haven, 2011). “Marxists have had to remind [political historians] that history is the struggle of men for ideas, as well as a reflection of their material environment”. Eric Hobsbawm, “Where are British Historians Going?”, The Marxist Quarterly 2/1 (1955), 14–26, 21–2.

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makes possible a history of rocks and rivers and pathogens, without the anxiety that the rivers are more real—and more determining—than the individuals who live around them: a new material history. The expansion of environmental–intellectual history is the outcome, finally, of an even larger transformation. The “negative universal history” that Dipesh Chakrabarty described in his essay “The Climate of History” was the union of the historians’ “suspicion of the universal” and the “emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change”: “a universal that arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe” and “calls for a global approach to politics without the myth of a global identity”.19 The history of global environmental policy is itself an intriguing prospect for a non-national political– intellectual history, with room for the “high”, “medium” and “low” thought of public officials.20 But environmental–intellectual histories, including histories of the consumption, production and politics of energy—which are histories of how we came to live as we live now, and of the other outcomes that were possible for individuals in the past—are important to historians of other kinds as well. They are histories which are important in our own times, or our own lives.

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Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History”, pp. 220–22. On the history of policy see Charles E. Rosenberg, Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now (Baltimore, 2007), 186; on global histories of environmental and medical ideas see Sunil Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65 (London, 2006); and Matthew Connelly, Fatal Mis-conception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA, 2008).

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the invention of sustainability paul warde School of History, University of East Anglia E-mail: [email protected]

This essay attempts something a little peculiar: a study of the genesis of a concept within discourses which did not, in fact, use the word. This is at least true of “sustainability” in English. The emergence of the German equivalent, Nachhaltigkeit, which might also be expressed by the idea of “lasting-ness”, is, however, usually dated to the use of the word nachhalthende by Hanns Carl von Carlowitz in his Sylvicultura oeconomica of 1713, the first great forestry manual of the eighteenth century. In fact, the term can be found in the 1650s.1 The most familiar modern definition of the “sustainable” comes from the Brundtland Commission’s report of 1987, where the term “sustainable development” was defined thus: “development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.2 Formulations of sustainability are frequently rather vague, but they generally address the sense that humankind must ensure its material reproduction in a way that does not diminish the fortunes of future generations. This issue is, of course, a very current preoccupation for us, but preindustrial societies that laboured under the exigencies of the “organic economy” have frequently been assumed by historians to be effective ecological “optimizers”, and to have developed institutional structures and economic practices to ensure their sustainability. In contrast, I will suggest that the modern notion of sustainability largely draws on ideas developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when new understandings of soil science and agricultural practice combined to develop the idea of a circulation of essential nutrients within ecologies, and hence allow the perception that disruption to circulatory processes could lead to permanent degradation. Whether agricultural practice was in most cases sustainable or not is, of course, a separate issue.

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H. C. von Carlowitz, Sylvicultura oeconimica (Leipzig, 1713); P.-M. Steinsiek, Nachhaltigkeit auf Zeit. Waldschutz im Westharz vor 1800 (Münster, 1999), 78. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford, 1987). See http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm.

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¨ the HAUSVATERLITERATUR

From the sixteenth century, handbooks of advice and estate management were published in northern Europe, mostly in imitation of classical predecessors such as Virgil and Xenophon, of which the first English translations emerged in the 1530s.3 When Conrad von Heresbach came to write his Foure bookes of husbandry (originally published in German in 1570), he cited some fiftyseven ancient authors, but only eighteen of his near contemporaries.4 Early, and enduringly popular, forms of the genre were calendars advising on what agricultural tasks to perform throughout the year. While authors of what was known in Germany as the Hausväterliteratur (writings for the “father of the house”, or the “patriarch”) drew liberally on the classics, they nevertheless also felt compelled to assert their own experience in farming, and they by no means absorbed other thinking uncritically.5 The Hausväterliteratur also provided a slow diffusion of ideas from south to north, sometimes, of course, bringing specific recommendations to inappropriate climes, and provided a kind of guidebook for the management of a country estate. The bottom line in these handbooks was the maintenance of household income. Thus in Gervase Markham’s 1616 English edition of Claude Estienne’s La maison rustique, a work that originally appeared in 1554, he proclaims, it is my purpose . . . to lay out unto you the waies, so to dwell upon, order, and maintaine a Farme, Meese or Inheritance in the Fields (name it as you please), as that it may keepe and maintaine with the profit and increase thereof, a painefull and skilfull Husbandman, and all his Familie.6

There was little, if any, attention given to either the capital stock, or the land itself as a source of revenue that could be alienated or used to secure debt. The focus was squarely on year-to-year production (and to a large extent autoconsumption) on an estate that was expected to endure into an unforeclosed 3

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See discussions in J. Sieglerschmidt, “Die virtuelle Landwirtschaft der Hausväterliteratur”, in R. P. Sieferle and H. Brueninger, eds., Natur-Bilder. Wahrnehmungen von Natur und Umwelt in der Geschichte (Frankfurt a.M, 1999), 223–54; A. McRae, God Speed the Plough. The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1996); G. E. Fussell, The Old English Farming Books from Fitzherbert to Tull 1523–1730 (London, 1949); M. Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1350–1850 (Cambridge, 1997). C. von Heresbach, Foure bookes of husbandry, trans. B. Googe (London, 1577), iv–v. See Sieglerschmidt, “Die virtuelle Landwirtschaft”. C. Estienne, Maison rustique, or The countrey farme, trans R. Surflet, revised G. Markham (London, 1616), 1–2.

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future. The moral centre of this idealized household was the virtue of thrift, as Thomas Tusser put it, or to “Eate within thy tedure”, as John Fitzherbert put it in his Boke of Husbandry of 1523. By “eating within thy tedure . . . thou nedest to bege nor borowe of no man, so longe shalte thou ecncrease and growe in richesse”; if needs to beg or borrow, “that wylle not long endure, but thou shallt fall in to poverty”.7 Behind these encomia to making shift by thrift was the assumption that it was not overworking of the land that could prove one’s undoing, but the overexpenditure of its products. These “how-to” books provided commentary on best practice for particular tasks, often organized according to the layout of the estate. This made them practical and easy to navigate, but also presented a conceptual obstacle that they could not convey a sense of how the various elements of farming were interconnected. The possibility of certain agricultural practice compounding difficulties or advantages in other areas of farming would be enduringly difficult to formulate effectively.

a theory of the soil Any sensible explanation of how agriculture could endure had to address the soil and the weather. The able husbandman had to be able to read both, a capacity that might require “long and assured experience” to nurture.8 It was not long before the international range of the Hausväterliteratur confronted readers with regional differences in soil, clime and practice; some of the latter having no obvious explanation except for customary practice.9 Such problems came to the fore in agronomic literature with an outpouring of works in the 1610s and 1620s from Gervase Markham, who exemplified a great agronomic tradition of publishing numerous versions of the same book under a slightly different title with minor emendations. Markham made soil type the organizing principle of his treatises, and this would exercise a profound influence thereafter: local environmental variations became the foremost theme for agronomy.10 What was the soil? According to Estienne, soils are either simple or compound, and loose or binding.11 In an English context, “loose” or “binding” was understood as a sandy or a clayey soil. These represented the two simple kinds

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J. Fitzherbert, The boke of husbandry (1533), 71; T. Tusser, Fiue hundred pointes of good husbandrie (London, 1573), 7v.–12v. Estienne, Maison rustique, 24. T. Tusser, Fiue hundred pointes of good husbandrie (London, 1580), 41v, 43. G. Markham, Markhams farwell to husbandry (London, 1620). Estienne, Maison rustique, 528.

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of earth, and all compounds were a mix of these. In turn, all soils displayed qualities derived from the four humors: clays were cold and moist, sands hot and dry, and most soils some blend of this palette. The farmer had to start, stated Markham, from a “true knowledge of the Nature and Condition of your Ground” that was to be combined with “the Clyme and Continent wherein they lye” and inferred by their “outward faces and charracters”. Colour, texture and taste were the indicators on which the husbandman could develop such knowledge, largely derived from long observation: “every man in his owne workes knows the alteration of climates”.12 Farmers knew very well that soil could become exhausted, fields worn out, or the land out of “heart”. But as this focus on the “heart” of the particular field was preoccupied with balance, or at least an appropriate matching up of soil, husbandry, crop and climate, as yet it precluded a broader sense of the possibility of permanent degradation. Land was “out of heart” simply because the soil embodied an imbalance of the humors, or was being put to an inappropriate use. There was no essential element that could be, or come to be, deficient: all imbalances could be meliorated by the requisite lashings of some substance which provided the appropriate quality, or as Sir Hugh Plat wrote, “contraries are remedied by their contraries”.13 The prevailing theory of the soil thus helps explain the surprising optimism of early modern improvers, and equally their complete lack of sense that there could be a long-term trend in soil quality. Durability, or as we might say sustainability, was conceived as a question of balance, not, as would later be the case, of flows. Agronomists would hold true to humoral thinking about the soil long into the eighteenth century. But the sixteenth century also provides us with an inkling of what was to come, from the pen of Sir Hugh Plat. His theory of “vegetative salts” as the source of generation was the first trial of a theory of soil nutrients that offered the possibility of circulation-based thinking about agriculture and ecology. His 1594 work on salts drew very heavily on translating the work of Bernard Palissy, another Renaissance polymath who wrote on fossils, hydrology and chemistry and practised ceramics, painting and surveying. It was a kind of salt (and for Plat there were many, including copper, nitre and sugar), that maketh all seedes to flourish, and growe, and although the number of those men is verie small, which can giue anie true reason whie dungue shoulde doe anie good in arable groundes, but are ledde thereto more by custome than anie Philosophicall reason, neuerthlesse it is apparaunt, that no dungue, which is layde vppon barraine groundes, coulde anie way enrich the same, if it were not for the salt which the straw and hay left 12

13

Markham, Markhams farwell, 1620, 7–8; idem, The English husbandman (London, 1635), 95. Sir H. Plat, The iewell house of art and nature (London, 1594), 3.


behinde . . . it is not the dung itselfe which causeth fruitfulnes: but the salt which the seed hath sucked out of the ground.14

Plat prefigured later writers in seeking to identify more exactly the active agent that brought herbaceous growth. Whatever that agent might be, everyone agreed that the soil could be subjected to amelioration to improve its fertility. In 1523 Fitzherbert had dwelt on the matter fairly briefly, drawing on Virgil: the dung of doves was best, that of all animals that chew the cud good, and the horse worst.15 As fields also seemed to recover heart of themselves, in part because of inundations from the atmosphere, but also because fallowing permitted the removal of weeds, it was important to give many grounds their “rest” or “recreation”. A field had to be kept in balance in a manner not unlike a person: “as a field starveth, if it not be dunged at all, so it burneth if it be over-dunged.”16

providence and particularity By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the English focus had shifted from the maintenance to the increase of profit. Writing was still a mix of reportage on best local practice (with considerable respect for the Dutch and Flemish), sometimes sceptical reference to the ancients, and an increasing zeal for Baconian experimentation. Two phases of more coordinated networks of correspondents emerged: one associated with the Commonwealth and the circle around the Baltic immigrant and reformer Samuel Hartlib, the second connected with the Royal Society.17 This era was in some ways the culmination of an accelerating transfer of information into and around England, but also reflected the special circumstances of displacement by war and the development of wide networks of letter writers who were confronted, like Sir Richard Weston in Flanders in the 1640s, with agricultural and botanical knowledge that appeared developed far beyond that of Britain. Weston’s observations facilitated a shift from a preoccupation with the maintenance to the increase of profit: “But I advize you to make Trial your selv’s of all these several Husbandries, and then to follow that which you finde cheapest and best.”18 Markham had rather tentatively and apologetically made some estimates of the costs of several inputs into agricultural production; Weston, developing the emerging art of the estate 14 15 16 17

18

Plat, The iewell house, 14–5. Fitzherbert, Boke of husbandry, 23; Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown, 231. Estienne, Maison rustique, 536. C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975). Sir R. Weston, A Discours of Husbandrie Used in Brabant and Flanders (London, 1650), 15.

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and farm account, provided a balance sheet of the benefits of new techniques calculated over several years.19 Authors remained, however, very particular in their observations, stressing the different practices to be employed for the melioration of particular soils and aspects of the land. Nevertheless, their confidence in their transformatory power was high; witness Walter Blith’s assertion of 1649: All sorts of lands, of what nature or quality soever they be, under what Climate soever, of what constitution of condition soever, of what face or character soever they be (unless it be such as Naturally participates of so much fatnesse, which Artificially it may be raised unto) will admit of a very large Improvement.20

Thus the literature of improvement was not at all concerned with potential failings in production, but with the level of yields and profit attained. However, this was not a discourse of “mastery” over nature. The mid- and late seventeenthcentury authors still operated with a strong sense of providentialism. The great synthesis of agronomic works provided by John Worlidge in 1669 consistently gave space to the “uncertain Dispositions of an Over-ruling Providence”.21 Some thirty years later, Timothy Nourse would agree: the farmer, “after he has cast his Business to the best Method his Reason can propose, must still depend upon Providence, as to the event, here being so many Accidents which may traverse his Designs, and such as can be never provided against, nor foreseen.”22 Indeed, part of the explanation for this general confidence in the responsiveness of the soil to human endeavour may have arisen from the increasingly widespread view that God rewarded industry and that godly virtues were most manifest in the industrious and sober husbandman. It was a highly disturbing and bewildering aspect of enclosure for its opponent Henry Hallhead that it could lead to higher yields apparently being achieved by less labour.23 There was no space for the idea that misplaced labour could actually diminish the fertility of God’s earth. Neglect could allow “barreness both by little and little [to] increase”, but “nature is no niggard, but giveth riches to all that are industrious”.24 And in the end, fertility was in God’s gift: in the collections of letters and discourses edited by Samuel Hartlib in the 1650s, “It is the Lord that maketh barren places fruitfull”, so a husbandman must “walk as becommeth a Christian, in all Sobriety, Righteousnesse and

19 20 21 22 23

24

Weston, Discours of husbandrie,16–9. W. Blith, The English improver improved (London, 1652), 17. J. Worlidge, Systema agriculturae (London, 1669), 179. T. Nourse, Campania Foelix (London, 1706), 37. J. O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), 69–70. G. Plattes cited in Webster, The Great Instauration, 356–7.


Godlinesse: not to trust his confidence in his own labours, and good Husbandry; but on the Lord that hath made all things.”25 Agronomy engaged with a broader debate about nature in the seventeenth century that nevertheless only tangentially touched upon agriculture: was Nature subject to a long-term process of degeneration over time, requiring the active and continuing intervention of God in the workings of the world? Or did Nature operate according to a set of constant laws—the more mechanistic view—that the virtuous could come to understand and use to restore the fertility of the past? Either way, whether farming practices were unsustainable or not was not a matter for concern, and those writers who on a more epochal scale suggested that tillage over the centuries could cause soil erosion simply saw this as a displacement elsewhere—partly an explanation of why soils were thin on mountains.26 Success or failure in agriculture was determined by localized virtuosity subject to the long- or short-term course of providence.

forestry and sustainability Forestry, however, presented a rather different case to farming. Here we find from an early date the linkage of concerns for the durability of local wood supplies with the fortunes of the state itself. In part this rested simply upon the biological properties of wood: any concern with it operates on a different time horizon to crops and animals. Nevertheless, early writing about wood still related it to the household economy: did woodland management ensure that you obtained an affordable supply? Regulations and advice sought to demarcate space dedicated to wood production, protecting the wood from grazing and hunting, rather than mastery of the processes that brought good wood yields. Hence much earlier writing was about jurisdiction and access. This was the key preoccupation of the first two books devoted to forest matters published in Europe in 1560 and 1576 by the German jurist and bureaucrat Noé Meurer.27 Coppicing, the systematic cutting back of trees to the rootstock and reharvesting after a set period of years, had been widely practiced in Europe for very many centuries. During the sixteenth and

25 26

27

S. Hartlib, The compleat husband-man (London, 1659), 80–81. M. H. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, 1959), 233–70; S. Schaffer, “The Earth’s Fertility as a Social Fact in Early Modern Britain”, in M. Teich, R. Porter and B. Gustafsson, eds., Nature and Society in Historical Context (Cambridge, 1997), 131–4; C. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley, 1967), 408–11. N. Meurer, Vom forstlicher Oberherrligkeit und Gerechtigkeit (Pforzheim, 1560); N. Meurer, Jag und Forstrecht (Frankfurt a.M, 1576).

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seventeenth centuries, governments began to try and set the periods by which this cyclical harvest should occur, although this often related to a desire to calculate revenue. In the case of Colbert’s famous Forest Ordinance of 1669, for example, the rather arbitrary ten-year cycle seems to have been set to make it easier to draw up leases of Crown estates.28 From the late fifteenth century, governments began to pass state-wide legislation relating to the supply of wood and the condition of the forests, pioneered in Italy and particularly in Germany. This legislation was largely concerned with demarcating forest space, preventing waste, and subjecting felling to the approval of a new forestry administration: a power that was largely negative and juridical. Everywhere—whether true or not—the word was of impending shortages and scarcity. In Bavaria the looming wood shortage would imminently lead to men leaving “their goods, homes and sustenance including even their wives and children and go from the same because of its lack.” The fate of stands of trees was clearly linked to the general welfare.29 An English act of 1544, much like German contemporaries, spoke of “the great decaye of Tymber and Woodes” meaning “ a great and manifest likelihood of scarcity”. By 1577 William Harrison was also concerned about the possibility of general shortage: “it is to be feared that brome, turfe, . . . heth, firze, brakes, whinnes, ling, . . . straw, sedge, reede, rush, & seacole will be good marchadze even in the citie of London”. And by 1611, after a period when woodland had become a prominent concern of commissions examining Crown land revenues in the first Jacobean years, Arthur Standish produced his Commons Complaint: his first grievance was “the generall destruction and waste of woods in this kingdome”, there being “too many destroyers, but few or none at all doth plant or preserve”. The consequences could be dramatic: “so it may be conceived, no wood, no kingdome”.30 Standish presents something of a watershed in that he sets out his work as a systematic attempt, along with plenty of rough calculations, to lay out a plan for a secure national wood supply. What increasingly marked writing about wood was its concern for, as we might say, intergenerational justice: a new conception of struggles over allocation. As Noé Meurer put it in 1576 (echoing in fact language to

28

29 30

See, for example, P. Warde, “Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe, c.1450–1850”, History Workshop Journal 62 (2006), 28–57; A. Corvol, “La décadence des forêts. Leitmotiv”, in A. Corvol, La forêt malade. Debats anciens et phénomènes nouveaux XVIIe—XXe siècles (Paris, 1994), 3–17. Warde, “Fear of Wood Shortage”, 42. 35 Henry VIII c.17; W. Harrison, An historical description of the Island of Britain (London, 1577), 91; A. Standish, The commons complaint (London, 1611), 1. See also idem, New directions of experience (London, 1614).


be found in court cases from the 1550s), forestry officials were to prevent anyone overcutting wood, so that “not they alone, but also their descendants, heirs and children, will always have from their woods what they need [die notdurft] for building and burning”.31 Standish condemned men who overexploited woods, “desiring to become heyres of their owne time, without respect had to such heyres as shall succeed them”. He thought that recent history contained a salutary lesson: “forty years ago . . . the poorer sort scorned to eate a piece of meate roasted with sea-coles, which now the best Magistrates are constrained to do”.32 The most famous of seventeenth-century works on timber is John Evelyn’s Sylva, a compendium of discussions among various members of the Royal Society in the early 1660s with a particular concern for the shortage of timber for shipbuilding (in fact, a rather exaggerated fear). As Evelyn put it, each generation was not born for itself, but for “posterity”. The same word justifying action, posterité, was employed in Colbert’s great forest ordinance of 1669. Defending “posterity” had long been a theme asserted by those defending customary rights, such as to commons. But to assert that that the resources themselves, rather than the right to utilize them, should belong to posterity represented a new sensibility that arose in the context of wood.33 The proposals in Evelyn’s Sylva, which went through many subsequent expanded editions and became the standard text on arboriculture, were in fact rather more modest than those of Samuel Hartlib, who had wanted a Crown Officer of the Woods on the Continental model. Evelyn provided what could be an extended chapter in the Hausväterliteratur tradition: short essays on how best to propagate particular trees, rather than—as Standish did—a project of national regeneration. The estate owner’s handling of his plantations was linked to the fate of the nation, most explicitly in having a national store of shipbuilding timber, but there was no advance on the notion propagated by Standish that a proper and systematic balance in wood management could be developed to ensure supplies in perpetuity.34 In the end, the English Crown’s interest in wood supplies was weak; unlike most parts of Europe, they no longer controlled many woodland assets, having leased Crown woodlands out as part of the desperate efforts to

31

32 33

34

Meurer, Jag und Forstrecht, 5; P. Warde, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2006), 325. Standish, New directions, 2. J. Evelyn, Sylva, or, A discourse of forest-trees (London, 1664), 111. For a German example see K. Mantel, Forstgeschichte des 16. Jahrhunderts unter dem Einfluß der Forstordnungen und Noe Meurers (Hambrurg, 1980), 70. Evelyn, Sylva; Worlidge, Systema, f.4v.

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shore up state finances under James I and Charles I. In the same period, coal had rapidly overtaken firewood as the primary source of heat.35 Further steps were taken in Germany. It was there that the particular preoccupation with the durability of wood supplies came together with a tradition of state-wide resource regulation and a new science of government in the shape of “cameralism”. Since the mid-seventeenth century, German political theory had displayed a preoccupation derived from the Hausväterliteratur with fostering good agricultural practice, including the notion that “each region can properly maintain only so many people from its own resources as can get their means of support from its yield”.36 Potential problems, as with the farm or estate, were conceived as arising for the hungry populace, not in the environment. Of course, the idea that if you continually extract more wood from a given area than grows back in the same time period then your wood will disappear was well known. Only gradually, however, was the notion implanted that this process could be controlled artificially, with conifers as well as deciduous trees, in such a way that the yield itself could be predicted even after long periods between harvests. This was the particular contribution of German forestry, especially in areas of high industrial demand—such as the Saxon mining districts overseen by von Carlowitz, who used the term nachhaltende in 1713.37 The eighteenth century saw the development of “sustained-yield” theory, the cornerstone of modern forestry. This came to rely on a limited number of reliable conifer species (in fact the systematic cultivation of conifers could be found around Nuremberg as early as 1368), the surveying and maintenance of fixed areas of growth divided into “age classes” that could be calculated from the moment of planting, or measuring the basal circumference of the tree.38 This in turn required an expansion of the supply of professional foresters trained in surveying and geometry. One step forward was taken by Carl Christoph Oettel in the 1760s with the recognition that tree trunks should be treated as cones,

35

36

37 38

On the leasing of the Crown estates see R. Hoyle, ed., The Estates of the English Crown, 1558–1640 (Cambridge,1992); on coal use see P. Warde, Energy Consumption in England and Wales, 1560–2000 (Naples, 2007). From Seckendorff’s Der Christen Staat of 1685, cited in A. W. Small, The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Policy (New York, 1909), 48; see also K. Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse 1750–1840 (Cambridge, 1989). See note 1. There is a voluminous literature on these matters. See for example W. Schenk, Waldnuztung, Waldzustand und regionale Entwicklung in vorindustrieller Zeit im mittleren Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1996); U. E. Schmidt, Der Wald in Deutschland im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Saarbrücken, 2002); L. Sporhan and W. Stromer, “Die Nadelholzsaat in den Nürnberger Reichswäldern zwischen 1469 und 1600”, Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 17 (1969), 79.


not cylinders. Oettel and his successors realized that by accurate calculation of growth volumes one could accurately calculate area yields by the multiplication of individual trees of a specified age. The logical consequence of this was that forests were most economically managed where standard trees could be grown on points where their growth rates could be predicted. Surveying the forest became a search for districts of homogeneity whose yields could be planned long into the future. The concept of the “normal tree”, the Normalbaum, was born; the forest became the aggregate of the individual tree; and the best forest was that where what the famed “classic” forester Gottlieb Hartig called the “arbitrary” deviations of nature could be eliminated. The role of quantification shifted from being descriptive to being prescriptive.39 Not just studies by foresters, but general cameralist works on the fiscal state also could contain large sections on forest management, notably in the work of Johann Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi in the 1750s and 1760s. The purpose of the management was straightforwardly to work out how much “wood can be annually felled sustainably, economically and without ruin to the woodlands”. Von Justi noted that the forester must adapt his methods to the what “was possible given the nature of the matter and the qualities of the ground”; wood was an important source of revenue but more important was an “indispensable necessity for the maintenance of the Inhabitants”.40 Government should also seek to record demand and keep that, too, in balance. All these were tasks that proved beyond the capacity of eighteenth-century administrations, but they set out a clear framework for the ambitions of scientific forestry.

management and improvement in the eighteenth century In the early eighteenth century, the number of publications on agricultural improvement grew rapidly. Renowned authors could become consultants to estate managers, whether directly on the ground, as with the Hertfordshire farmer William Ellis, or via networks of correspondents, as with Richard Bradley, who probably conned his way to the chair of botany in Cambridge in 1720. In the case of lawyer and landowner Jethro Tull fame came by word of mouth, but he

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H. E. Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany”, in T. Frangsmäyer, J. L. Heilbron and R. R. Rider, eds., The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1990), 315–42. J. H. G. von Justi, Politische und Finanzschriften u¨ ber wichtige Gegenstände der Stattskunst, der Kriegswissenschaften und des Cameral- und Finanzwesens (Kopenhagen und Leipzig, 1761), 440–44.

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was eventually persuaded into publication and eager antagonism from 1732.41 As the number of publications expanded, so disputes became sharper, and authors became more insistent that their recommendations were based on observation, practice and success. Most eighteenth-century works began with a detailed discussion of the properties of soil, and the wide range of substances that might be used to manure them: other soils, marl, lime, dung, rags, soot, ashes, animal remains. Agriculture remained a localized and particular enterprise; as Ellis wrote, every Farmer ought to make it his primary Study to inform himself of the several Sorts of Ground that often belong to his Farm, and that besides his own Judgment to consult his Neighbours, who as Natives on the Place may be able to let him know more than the Dictates of his own Reason, that formerly were more remote from the same.

The development of careful comparative analyses of soil types and local climates also gave a clearer sense of the limits of fertility, as Ellis again observed: “Manures to the Earth are in some degree as Food to Animals . . . as they exhaust, the other feeds and supplies, or else the tone of the Ground’s strength will soon be debilitated.”42 This perception may have arisen as a result of the clearly increasing application of all kinds of manure, the most prominent of which were marl, lime and animal dung, that had effects of varying duration. Yet this remained a question of balance, and one that could be remedied by not persistently sowing the same crop, although the reason why different crops seemed to extract different things from the soil was not clear; or mixing soils with dressings and manures from elsewhere. Thus for Bradley, “the earth can never be rendered unprolific, unless she is constantly constrained to feed one kind of herb or plant”. The mix was key, because in line with humoral theory (and in this regard Aristotle was still held in high regard), excess of any one element was the source of problems: “As the barrenness of most soils depends on the abundance of some one ingredient, there is scarce any one kind that may not serve as manure for some other.”43 All who wrote on the subject could agree that plant nutrition came from some kind of salt, as Hugh Plat had averred, and generally the consensus viewed that salt as being derived from the atmosphere in combination with sunshine and rain, a viewpoint that in part went back to experiments by Van Helmont indicating that plant growth did not diminish the 41

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Fussell, The Old English Farming Books, 82–111; idem, More Old English Farming Books from Tull to the Board of Agriculture, 1731 to 1793 (London, 1950), 1–12; D. E. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London, 1976), 16. See Bradley’s Dictionary of National Biography entry at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3189. W. Ellis, Chiltern and vale farming explained (London, 1733), 48, 372. R. Bradley, A General Treatise of Agriculture (London, 1757), 97; T. Hale, A compleat body of husbandry (London, 1758), 107.


mass of the soil. The significant properties of different soils were in the manner they absorbed salts from the atmosphere. The focus on atmospheric salt infusions meant that little of nutritional value for plants was thought to reside in the soil itself, although writers were inconsistent on this point. Many authors recognized that the quality of the tilth was an important determinant for plant growth, above all its degree of fragmentation. The finer the tilth, the greater the surface area of soil exposed and greater its ability to absorb “air salts” and promote the growth of plants. The explanation for the action of animal dung was thus that, like yeast in dough, its fermentation produced air pockets that helped break down the soil. Jethro Tull could, controversially, go as far as arguing that dung was unnecessary if the soil was properly worked in his “horse-hoeing husbandry”, an idea that was partly justified by the theory that matter was infinitely divisible.44 But the tide of competitive experimentation made it clear, as well as necessary to argue, that, as Hale put it, “A soil may be render’d worse by bad management; as certainly as improved by good.” A providential view had been supplanted by one that insisted that a full understanding of nature’s secrets, rather than simple labour, was the key to raising yield.45

the “new husbandry” It was only later in the eighteenth century that the discourse of agronomy shifted towards the pattern already established in forestry, to become a generalized theory of the management of agrarian resources. Major steps in this direction were taken in England, but systematic refinement was done in Germany. None of these later agronomists waxed larger in their self-importance, or international influence, than the prolific Arthur Young. Young claimed in his Rural oeconomy of 1770 that not a single previous author had written one page of use to practical men armed with his new system of “general management”.46 Young’s German equivalent and follower was Albrecht Thaer, a Hanoverian doctor turned farmer who founded the Prussian agricultural academy. According to him, “the science of agriculture rests on experience”, as opposed to “simple tradition”, although this was hackneyed language in both Britain and Germany. Yet it was important to Thaer’s reputation to insist that

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J. Tull, Horse-hoeing husbandry (London,1732) Hale, A compleat body of husbandry, 84; see Schaffer, “Earth’s Fertility”, 133. A. D. Young, Rural oeconomy (London, 1770), 2–4. Young was an extraordinarily prolific author and by no means trod the same narrow line in all of his works. See G. E. Mingay, Arthur Young and His Times (London, 1975); J. G. Gazeley, The Life of Arthur Young 1741–1820 (Philadelphia, 1973).

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the combination of “accident and necessity” in his own experimental conduct had brought him success in discovering efficacious new crop rotations, and not reading English authors such as Young, of whom he was in fact a conscious imitator. In fact the virtues of experimentation had long been exhorted, but the new vogue made them central to a process of theoretical refinement. Both the prestige of experiment and confidence in the rewards of agronomic investigation went hand in hand with the rapid advances in chemistry.47 “Experimental” agriculture was built on a new theory of the soil, where the farmer had the power to set the quality of the soil rather than having to merely adapt to local edaphic conditions. This relied on maintaining a balance between the extent of meadow and pasture, and the extent of arable. Each harvest of cereal crops reduced soil fertility as the crop removed nutrients. Continued high yields thus rested on replacing these nutrients. Some manure could come from feeding livestock the straw of the previous harvest, but obviously this still involved net loss of “succulent juices” in the recycling process. The answer was to pasture livestock on meadows, transferring biomass onto the arable fields, and logically to optimize output one needed the correct ratio of meadow to arable. Establishing this ratio, and all the “proportions” derived from this, was the stated aim of Young at the very beginning of his Rural oeconomy of 1770, and “if any of the proportions . . . are broken, the whole chain is affected . . . so much does one part of a well managed farm depend on the other”.48 Getting it wrong would eventually cause soil exhaustion. There was nothing new in the idea of balancing livestock numbers and tillage to produce an optimum supply of manure, but Young was right to insist on the novelty of understanding cultivation as a closed system where manure was the critical vehicle for recycling nutrients. Thus what really marked Young and his successors out from predecessors was neither their practicality nor their experimentation, but a theory of the soil that viewed fertility as inhering in a substance that was transmitted through feed and animal dung. Other dressings of the soil, such as marl or lime, simply sought to optimize conditions for the uptake of this substance. This was a systematic model that, through experiment and calculation, could guarantee success. As much as experiment, farming was to become a matter of accounting, a training in which Young had probably acquired in a short and unhappy apprenticeship to a merchant in King’s Lynn: a farmer should be “very ready at figures”, and have

47

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Albrecht Thaer, The Principles of Agriculture, trans. W. Shaw (London, 1844), 3, 232–3. For an account of the interaction of chemistry and agriculture, see A. Clow and N. L. Clow, The Chemical Revolution: A Contribution to Social Technology (New York, 1952), 458–502. Young, Rural oeconomy, 12.


some knowledge of mechanics, geometry and “the application of mathematical studies”.49 Albrecht Thaer drew extensively on Young in the conduct of his “experiments”, and his hugely influential classic The Principles of Agriculture (1809–12). Thaer argued that “the produce generally depends more on the quantity of the manure than on the nature of the soil”, and poor land was commensurately a product not of poor soil but of “want of manure”. Naturally this required a correct proportioning of tillage and livestock, or, more precisely, tillage and fodder. Working from the principle that it was manure that recycled the necessary “nutritive juices” into the soil for crop growth, Thaer developed a form of accounting for this process based on “degrees” of fertility and advanced a model of the ideal proportions to be established between fodder input, animal numbers and agricultural output.50 Young and Thaer, the two most influential writers of their age (among very many) on agriculture in Britain and Germany thus established early in their careers a relatively “closed” system-like model of nutrient flows within the farm, mediated via animal dung. While they remained keen observers of wider farming practice and the importance of producing a good tilth and combating weeds, they argued that only in this way could yields be improved. Sustainability consisted of effective management of this cycle.

¨ the end of the isolated state: von thunen and von liebig It had long been argued that the state of tillage in a country was important for welfare, especially in the short run in preventing dearth and disorder. Yet unlike the case with trees, where from an early date wood supplies were perceived to be dwindling and where the resource suffered from an appreciable finitude, shortfalls in agricultural production were not linked to a deficient resource base. Only very gradually did “improvers” perceive that yield improvement could be seen as akin to expanding the national territory, while energy supplies or timber had long been linked to the fate of the state, and coal seams could be viewed as the equivalent of colonies (“England’s Peru”, or a “subterranean forest”.)51 Attempts to relate agricultural production to national capacity emerged most prominently in France with the Physiocrats, but it was in Germany that the “closed system” of farming as conceived from the 1760s was allied in a systematic way with the wider

49 50 51

Mingay, Arthur Young, 13. Thaer, Principles of Agriculture, 24, 130–33, 138–9, 141. R.-P. Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2001).

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world in which farms were embedded. This development took two very different courses, one a theory of the market, the other a theory of national ecology. Johann Gottlieb von Thünen managed a large estate in eastern Germany, and his classic work of the 1820s, “The Isolated State”, was above all an exercise in accounting and determining what kind of farming would turn a profit. He followed Thaer in developing crop and manure accounting, and absorbed critically the work of some of the new soil chemists, although this still formalized biological relationships into equations with rather vague elements such as the “Richness”, and “Quality” of the land. His major contribution was to analyse how agriculture in a market economy had to adapt to what the market could bear. Imagining a land that was an “isolated state” with invariant environmental conditions and one urban major centre, von Thünen laid the foundations of economic geography. What could be profitably produced at any given point in space was a function of price, transport costs and costs of production (wages, capital and rents), producing an idealized landscape of a set of concentric circles displaying different land uses laid outwards from the urban centre.52 The system of the farm remained ecologically closed and thus dependent on management of the nutrient cycle, but the balance of products that cycle was to generate was determined by the market. This model of sustainability closely reflected the arguments aired in the brief florescence of liberal forestry in Germany in the early nineteenth century, when figures such as Pfeil argued that the cutting cycle of stands of trees should be determined by a comparison between their growth rates, the value of the stock of trees and rental of the land, and prevailing interest rates.53 In practice, forestry practice could not be adjusted to the high variance in market indicators and the principles of sustainability in forestry remained vested in wood production, not revenue. For von Thünen, maintenance of household income was achieved by balancing local ecological with wider market considerations. Young and Thaer provided models of material flows based on the farm that could provide a template for both success and stability, but the flip side was that mismanagement could lead into a spiral of degradation. This abstracted formal model would be both dramatically expanded in scope by Justus von Liebig, chemist and admirer and follower of Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist who himself had been influenced as a young man by the prevalent cameralism

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J. G. von Thünen, Der isolierte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonmie (Rostock, 1842), 243, 49–56, 83–7, 123, 56, 71–80. J. von Liebig, Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie (Braunschweig, 1862), 135. H. Rubner, Forstgeschichte im Zeitalter der industriellen Revolution (Berlin, 1967), 126, 142.


and forest science.54 Liebig gave ecological substance and historical traction to the emerging model of sustainability, bringing a novel understanding of soil dynamics derived from agricultural studies together with the concern for the polity as a whole that had defined the wood-shortage debates. Early nineteenth-century chemists had developed an “organicist” theory of plant growth, arguing that it was living matter in the humus of the topsoil that was in turn absorbed by and fed growing plants, a kind of recycling of vitalism, a life force inhering in organic matter. Manure, of course, was the agent of transmission in this recycling.55 It was this that gave real substance to the ideas of Young. Liebig published the first edition of his Chemistry in 1840, responding to a request to write up an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Liverpool in 1837.56 In this and subsequent editions Liebig criticized the notion that the results from one farm could be universalized, as did critics of the “new husbandry”, a controversy that continued over the real value of “experimental farms”. Liebig argued in opposition to the “organicist” perspective that the fundamental roots of plant physiology were not some vitalist force inhering in organic matter, but the complex interactions of inorganic trace elements contained in the soil and atmosphere. This understanding of the chemical underpinnings of agricultural production also led Liebig to the conclusion that simple recycling of organic matter was insufficient to maintain soil fertility because each stage of processing involved irretrievable loss of elements, and thus led to long-term decline in yields.57 Liebig did not dismiss the recycling of manure, indeed he insisted on making it as efficient as possible. But he argued that the particular contribution this could make would vary greatly according to soil type; that inevitable wastage meant that additional supplies of elements had to be obtained from the atmosphere and processes of weathering of the land; and that in the face of a rising European population, alternative sources of nutrients had to be found if food supplies were to be kept in step with demand. In other words, he placed concerns of sustainability in a dynamic setting. In conditions of rapid urbanization this huge proportion of necessary elements was not being recycled within the system, but due to the construction of the water-closet and sewers, was instead discharged uselessly into the sea. Young had already lamented the loss of London’s “night

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W. H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge, 2002); also see dedication in Liebig, Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung. Thaer, Principles of Agriculture, 336; Liebig, Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung, 13–14, 137. Liebig, Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung, vii–viii. Ibid., 1–7, 13–5.

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soil” in 1799.58 Liebig saw this as no less than a process of “self-annihilation” (Selbstvernichtung), where the future of civilization rested upon the resolution of this “sewer question” (Kloakenfrage) and the return of urbanites’ ordure to the farmers’ fields.59 Partly due to some wildly inaccurate population estimates, Liebig interpreted the path of civilizations ever since the Greeks as being a story of slow, relentless overexploitation of the earth and consequent decadence and decline. “A people arises and develops in proportion to the fertility of the land, and with its exhaustion they disappear.” Only China and Japan represented an exception of steady growth because of their extreme success in recycling, through the removal of livestock husbandry and directly applying human faecal matter to the land. Europe, and especially England, were only able to sustain population expansion through a vampiric dependency on imports, especially of finite stocks of guano, but including the gruesome excavation of bones from battlefields and ossories.60 Thus in Liebig we find something like the modern conception of sustainability: that a society’s development is beholden to fundamental biological and chemical processes, but also that this was a complex dynamic system with feedback effects. He had turned the argument of an earlier English treatise on agricultural chemistry, that “Nature has fix’d bounds to fertility beyond which we cannot proceed, however prompted by avarice”, into a general developmental model. Indeed, that 1760 treatise was also prescient in its argument “chemistry may contribute more to our knowledge of soils, and their productions, by its several operations, than all the attempts hitherto made by practice and observation”.61 Taken up by Liebig, a new ethic emerged that knowledge of those fundamental biological and chemical processes, courtesy of the newly minted scientist, would dictate the ability of societies to endure.

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D. Woodward, “‘Gooding the Earth’: Manuring Practices in Britain 1500–1800”, in S. Foster and T. C. Smout, The History of Soils and Field Systems (Aberdeen, 1994), 106. Liebig, Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung, 128–9, 153. Ibid., 96–7, 108, 110–11, 120–29. Farmer, An essay on the theory of agriculture (London, 1760), 5, 47.



environmental, economic, and moral dimensions of sustainability in the petroleum industry in austrian galicia∗ alison frank Department of History, Harvard University E-mail: [email protected]

Fears about the sustainability of oil-rich communities and hopes that petroleum would fuel financial, social, and moral renewal have accompanied the oil industry since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century. With each successive ecological disaster caused by oil spills, debates over the industry’s ecological sustainability sharpen. Discussions about the geological sustainability of the petroleum industry intensify when oil supplies tighten, and dissipate when they increase. Although concerns about the moral viability of communities dependent on oil have become radically unfamiliar since the late nineteenth century, these, too, were once central to debates about the effects of oil on human society. In the nineteenth century, the progress that oil promised to bring was to be measured not only in material wealth, but in the attainment of social harmony and the attenuation of political strife. Hope for material and social progress fueled the economy of the Habsburg monarchy’s northeasternmost province, Galicia. Galicia was one of the first regions to develop an oil industry of global significance and one of the first to run out of commercially exploitable volumes of oil. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled in 1918, its oilfields became the subject of a bitter military dispute between the Republics of Poland and Western Ukraine. Only the former was to survive; the Austrian oil industry became the Polish oil industry. Poland’s political victory could not, however, prevent steady declines in oil production both relatively, as larger oilfields were found elsewhere, and absolutely, as local beds were exhausted. The Polish oil industry had become all but irrelevant by the ∗

The author would like to thank James Bergman, David Blackbourn, Walter Johnson, Mary Lewis, Emma Rothschild, and Anna Whittington for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

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outbreak of Second World War, and was virtually erased from public memory by the end of the twentieth century. In 1909, however, Galicia was the third-largest oil-producing region in the world (after the United States and the Russian Empire), and had been for most of the preceding half-century.1 Galicia’s oilfields inspired a vision of prosperity for the province and the empire that contrasted sharply with the poverty it required no imagination to see. In the absence of empirical evidence of success, that vision was sustained by an anticipated never-ending increase in the production of a natural resource that was not only nonrenewable, but, on a global scale, not even abundant. Many Galicians—entrepreneurs, engineers, journalists—agreed that the way to avoid a natural catastrophe was through technology, despite copious evidence that technology was wreaking havoc on the environment. The commitment to using petroleum as the vehicle for the transformation of the economy and society depended on rationalizing persistence despite signs of impending disaster, on willfully remaining blind to foreshadowed failure. That blindness was something more than the absence of sight; it was, rather, an active insistence on seeing what was not there. This is a story of political, economic, and ecological interests that conflict, but also a story about the power of optimism and the power of the desperation that comes from the absence of other options. In Galicia, it turned out, the question of sustainability was never limited to environmental dearth: it was an economic question, a political question, and, perhaps most importantly, a moral question.2 In the long nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was predominantly agricultural and infamously poor. At century’s end, over eighty percent of Galicians lived off the land—most of them on plots too small to support a family. Between 1875 and 1884, 23,642 farms were sold at auction, often to cover debt claims of fewer than twenty florins.3 Subsistence farming made peasants vulnerable to the slightest decrease in their paltry yields, which led to periodic famines (and the nickname Golicja i Głodomeria—based on the Polish words for “naked” (goły) and “hungry” (głodny)4 ). To escape the epigrammatic “Galician misery,” 1.1 million men and women emigrated from Galicia between 1

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4

The history of the Galician oil industry is discussed more fully in Alison Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Of course the economic and moral elements are linked: “Development is fundamentally an empowering process, and this power can be used to preserve and enrich the environment, and not only to decimate it.” Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), 249. ´ Jozef Buszko, Zum Wandel der Gesellschaftsstruktur in Galizien und in der Bukowina (Vienna: Verlag der o¨ sterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1978), 9. Karl Markus Gauß and Martin Pollack, Das reiche Land der armen Leute: Literarische Wanderungen durch Galizien (Vienna: Jugend & Volk Dachs Verlag, 1992), 18.

environmental, economic, and moral dimensions of sustainability

1870 and 1914, and of the eight million who remained, not even 100,000 were classified as working in industry (although the category of “industrial workers” included waiters and waitresses).5 The Austrian inspector of industry for Galicia reported in 1884, “there is not a single so-called industrial city in all of Galicia, and the few factories lie like oases scattered in a desert.”6 What industry did exist was often only one step removed from agricultural production: distilleries and breweries made vodka and beer out of grain, sugar refineries processed sugar beets, small factories produced simple farm equipment.7 The realization, in the 1850s, that petroleum was commercially valuable, and the belief that “Austria possesses in Galicia immeasurable quantities of oil,”8 gave rise to a host of new nicknames for the province and its oil regions: “Polish Baku,” “Eastern European Pennsylvania,” “Galician California,” and “Austrian El Dorado.” Despite illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease, oil industrialists proudly announced that this was not a poor land. Stanisław Szczepanowski, a pioneer of the Galician oil industry, declared Galicia’s nature “miraculous and rich,” but lacking “people who were able to make use of it.”9 After visiting Galicia in 1924, the novelist Joseph Roth commented, “Die Erde ist reich, die Bewohner sind arm”—“The earth is rich; the inhabitants are poor.”10 In the late nineteenth century, at the height of the oil boom, this proverbial richness of the soil was redefined to refer to the natural resources hidden below it, rather than the crops it could yield. The oil industry’s advocates concluded that the only way to improve the lives of the Galician population was through industrial development. In 1898, August Ritter von Gorayski, the president of the Galician Provincial Petroleum Association (himself a landowner and an aristocrat), warned, “our country, even given the greatest advances in [agriculture], must always lag behind if it fails to create any industry, through which undoubtedly the entire civilized world is morally and economically improved.” His colleague, Szczepanowski, called

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Galician misery: Stanisław Szczepanowski, Ne˛dza Galicyi w cyfrach i program energicznego rozwoju gospodarstwa krajowego (Lviv: by the author, 1888); emigration: Piotr Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 276; industrial workers: Wacław Saryusz-Zalewski, Dzieje przemysłu w b. Galicji 1804—1929 (Cracow: S. A. L. Zieleniewski; Fitzner-Gamper, 1930), 48 ff. Arnulf Nawratil, “Bericht u¨ ber den VII. Aufsichtsbezirk,” Bericht der k. k. GewerbeInspectoren u¨ ber ihre Amtsthätigkeit im Jahre 1884 (Vienna: k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1885), 238. Buszko, Zum Wandel der Gesellschaftsstruktur, 5. Eduard Schmidt, Die Erdöl-Reichthümer Galiziens: Eine technologisch-volkswirthschaftliche Studie (Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 1865), 4. Szczepanowski, Ne˛dza Galicyi, xii–xiii. Joseph Roth, “Reise durch Galizien,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 20 and 22 Nov. 1924.

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Galicia “a country where natural industry is lacking, where agriculture is not capable of developing as it has elsewhere, where finally the entire enlightened, intelligent class has been condemned to less-productive labor.” In this context, only the petroleum industry could “breed a truly ambitious and productive— instead of the heretofore disputant and criticizing—intelligentsia. The petroleum industry offers us an example of the harmonious cooperation of all classes, from which progress and development grow.”11 Szczepanowski insisted that the agrarian economy was responsible for the indolence of Galician magnates who did nothing to improve the world they condemned. Gorayski and Szczepanowski agreed that neither the Galician economy nor the society that depended on its vitality was sustainable in the absence of industrial development. The petroleum industry, therefore, was Galicia’s ticket to a prosperous and morally robust future—a future, moreover, that would be free of class conflict. What was particularly appealing—at least to Galician elites—about the version of social harmony that oil seemed to promise was that it did not come at the cost of a redistribution of land. On the contrary, the legal regime underpinning the Galician oil industry was based on a continually renewed commitment to private property, and thus to a form of industrial capitalism that promised enough wealth for all to benefit, albeit unevenly. In most states, the central government controls mineral rights, including those to oil, and only grants extraction privileges, or concessions, to individuals or corporations in return for considerable royalties. Even within Austria, most mineral rights were controlled by the state.12 Instead of basing oil ownership on the principle of “royalties,” however, Austrian oil ownership followed the “rule of capture,” derived from British game laws. According to this principle, the owner of oil was the person who could “capture” it by bringing it to the Earth’s surface within the boundaries of his or her own property. This property regime meant that only a modest amount of capital was needed to begin exploring for oil; it encouraged a proliferation of smaller, low-capital firms. At the same time, by hindering organization, it hampered industrialists’ ability to slow down production and prevent price collapse. After many failed attempts to bring petroleum within a legal framework that separated landownership from mineral rights, the central government in Vienna was ultimately unwilling to pay the political cost of defying the provincial Galician diet’s demand that property rights and rights to petroleum remain

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“Auserordentliche Generalversammlung des galiz. Landes Petroleum Vereines,” Naphta: Zeitschrift für die Petroleum-Industrie und Tiefbohrtechnik 7/1 (15 Jan. 1899), 4, 5. Gustav von Gränzenstein, Das allgemeine o¨sterreichische Berggesetz vom 23. Mai 1854 und die Verordnungen u¨ ber die Bergwerksabgaben vom 4. Oktober 1854 (Vienna: Friedrich Manz, 1855), 82.


inextricably linked.13 This was a purely political decision that had nothing to do with either the technological demands of petroleum extraction or the economic structures most favorable to the production of inexpensive fuel. On the contrary, it was a strategy designed to encourage Galicia’s landowning political elite to support the imperial government in Vienna. For those landowners, the primacy of private property ownership (not nationalism) was the first principle of politics. Hopes for the oil industry, therefore, were based on the notion that oil would create such a vast quantity of wealth that even those who only received the tiniest portion of it would be lifted out of poverty. After the initial opening of the oilfields ´ gusher in 1895, and then, in of Borysław in 1894, the explosion of the “Jakob” 1906 and 1907, the discovery of eruptive new wells such as “Wilno” and “Oil City” in the Borysław suburb of Tustanowice, Galician petroleum production was given a new boost. In 1904, Borysław alone produced two-thirds of Galicia’s total output of oil, and surpassed the entire demand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, leading Władysław Szajnocha, professor of geology at the University of Cracow, to proclaim, “A veritable flood of petroleum pours out of the local oil wells.”14 Galicia’s most famous well, “Oil-City,” alone produced over 750,000 barrels of oil in 1908. By 1907, Galician production had surpassed 7.5 million barrels, and the next year 15.75 million barrels.15 Now the hopes of Galicia’s many oil investors were justified; suspicions that the wealth of Galician soil had been underestimated and in reality was boundless seemed confirmed. Even territories that had been given up as exhausted seemed to hold new promise of endless riches. Galician oilmen had a vision of prosperity for themselves as individuals but also as the leaders of a mission—literally fueled by petroleum—to rejuvenate their homeland. Chemists, geologists, investors, and landowners referred to the happy coincidence that their product—lighting oil—would, in spreading light and illumination, also spread enlightenment. Enlightenment was more than a metaphor: it was a plan with concrete manifestations; it would, at long last, bring the populace into concomitance with their land and resources. In the

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The Austrian Civil Code (Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetz) of 1811 clarified the almost unrestricted rights of property owners to use—or not to use—the resources provided by their land: “the owner can, as a rule, arbitrarily use his property or leave it unused,” §362. As Daintith points out, the 1884 Imperial Mining Prerogative did attempt to make up for some of the worst abuses in the industry by introducing new regulations and supervising agencies. Terence Daintith, Finders Keepers? How the Law of Capture Shaped the World Oil Industry (Washington, DC and London: RFF Press, 2010). Ladislaus Szajnocha, Die Petroleumindustrie Galiziens, 2nd edn (Cracow: Verlag des Galizischen Landesausschusses, 1905), 20. “Enquête u¨ ber die Krise in der Mineralölindustrie,” MföA F. 664 Z. 1079 XIV 1910. Joseph ¨ Mendel and Robert Schwarz, eds., Internationale Petroleumstatistik, vol. 2, OsterreichUngarn (Vienna, Berlin and London: Verlag für Fachliteratur, 1912), 12–13.

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minds of some, it promised new educational and employment opportunities for Galicia’s impoverished peasant population. Oil could make a few lucky landowners and investors tremendously wealthy. But beyond that, it could create a more sustainable social foundation for an agricultural economy supported by the industry without which, oil advocates insisted, no society could prosper. In the minds of Catholic oil entrepreneurs, it would, moreover, be a society buoyed by widespread education, Catholic (Roman or Greek) piety and tolerance of “those citizens of the Mosaic confession who understand how to bring their own interests into alignment with those of the country.”16 Instead of condemning Galician Jews for their presumed commitment to profit, oil seemed to offer them a pathway into the social body. According to Szajnocha, petroleum could be credited with a dramatic improvement in Galicia’s human geography, through the enlightenment of one of Europe’s most “benighted” provinces: “inhospitable regions have become productive,” he claimed; “significant capital could be fruitfully invested and meaningful sums of money sprang forth from a mineral that, destined to radiate brightness, was able to bring light and wealth where there was only poverty.”17 Heinrich-Eduard Gintl, the central inspector of the Lviv–Czernowitz railway, said in an 1884 lecture, “Petroleum is a lighting material—it is primarily destined to spread ‘light.’”18 That was precisely the image that the Galician Provincial Petroleum Association, a trade association representing the province’s producers of crude oil, tried to disseminate. While producers lobbied for government support of a domestic industry facing competition from Romania and Russia, a newspaper friendly to the organization, Naphta, reported on the industry’s beneficial influence on Galician society. “And why should workers and entrepreneurs be dissatisfied? . . . The work is not difficult, the wages are relatively high (25 to 150 florins monthly), charitable institutions, schools, and churches are built at the entrepreneurs’ costs in the larger mining complexes.” This paternalism was not, however, selfless: “the entrepreneurs,” the article continued, are completely satisfied with the achievement and intelligence of the workers. It is a true point of pride for the industry that the totally impoverished villages of twenty years ago in whose vicinity crude oil mines are found, or in which drillmasters and workers grow up, now rank among the richest and most intelligent villages in the country.19

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S[tanisław] O[lszewski], obituary of Efroim Hersch Schreier, Naphta 6/2 (8 Feb. 1898). Szajnocha, Die Petroleumindustrie Galiziens, 4. Heinrich-Eduard Gintl, Die Concurrenzfähigkeit des galizischen Petroleums (Vienna: Spielhagen und Schurich, 1885), 27. “Ueber die oekonomische und volkswirthschaftliche Bedeutung der galizischen Rohoelindustrie,” Naphta 6/21 (15 Nov. 1898), 231.


The conviction that people absorbed certain characteristics from their natural environments was here turned on its head: the ingenuity of oilmen had transformed the landscape itself from idiotic to radiant. In addition to furnishing jobs and training for drillmasters, engineers, and sundry other technical laborers; funding schools, churches, and soup kitchens; making homes, streets, and railway stations light, safe, and hospitable through the long Carpathian winter, oil producers proclaimed, the oil industry brought advantages that radiated beyond provincial borders. Galician petroleum production furnishes an annual demand of 10,160,000 crowns in engines, pipes, drilling tools, and fuel; employs 60,000 people, and pays nearly 50 million crowns in direct and indirect taxes; contributes superlatively to the revenue of the state railways and employs the engine manufacturers and the chemical industry of the industrial provinces; and, as an eminent consumer of iron, also promotes industry.

Since Galician oil was critical not only to the provincial economy, but to the entire monarchy, the “promotion of domestic petroleum production lies in the interest of the state . . . It would be an economic crime to inhibit the natural development of an industry that draws its right to exist from an abundantly occurring valuable natural product.”20 Economic development was the next chapter in Galicia’s natural history. From the 1880s through the 1920s, oil derricks overtook trees and workers’ barracks replaced peasant huts. Far from discouraging visitors, the oil industry quickly became a tourist attraction: most guidebooks to the province included an entry on the oilfields, highlighting “the forest of derricks” and the railway station’s “one hundred daily train departures.” According to one 1914 guidebook, Borysław, a town with 15,000 residents but no recommendable hotel or restaurant, had been an “unknown and poor mountain village half a century earlier,” but was now a “heavily populated and, although unsightly, prosperous” town at the very epicenter of the oil-production industry. “Of particular interest,” the guidebook noted, “is the sight of the eruption of crude oil shooting up at the drilling of a bed, as well as the not infrequent conflagration of derricks and crude oil flowing out of the drill-holes (usually as a result of lightning).” A lucky visitor might catch sight of a blazing gusher like “Oil City,” which featured a “pillar of fire and smoke resembl[ing] a volcano” for four months in 1908.21

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“Sind die beabsichtigten Wirkungen der Zollerhöhung auf galizisches Rohöl eingetreten?” Naphta 9/10 (31 May 1901), 190–91. Mieczysław Orlowicz and Roman Kordys, Illustrierter Führer durch Galizien. Mit einem Anhang: Ost-Schlesien (Vienna and Leipzig, 1914), 243.

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The promise of a more sustainable society built on the foundation of a steadily growing, petroleum-fueled industrial sector had to overcome evidence that oil posed its own threat to Galicia’s social and natural environment. The oil industry posed two types of challenge to the health and sustainability of moral society in the region: natural catastrophes pitted man against the environment, but the nature of the enterprise itself turned the exploitation of the environment into an attack on the moral sustainability of local society. Sustainability was a question not only of duration, but of compatibility between certain forms of enterprise and a prosperous, healthy, and morally vibrant human society. A gusher, even if interesting, was also an ecological catastrophe. In fact, many of the metaphors used to praise petroleum’s beneficial influence had a sinister side: “floods” of petroleum were exciting to watch and rewarded the prospector with proof of success—but became catastrophic when they covered fields and coursed into rivers. Lighting fuels illuminated darkness, fueling hopes of enlightenment, but they also ignited fires, fueling fears of destruction of property from either arson or accident. Numerous “alarming complaints from the rural population in the region of Tustanowice about immense damages caused by the flowing of petroleum into the Ty´smienica River” brought Galician viceroy ´ Michał Bobrzynski to Borysław shortly after the opening of the “Oil City” well in June 1908. “Unfortunately,” he concluded, these complaints are all too grounded . . . The crude oil flowing into the Ty´smienica River is carried for miles by this river, which is, in turn, constantly polluted by waste and sewage from the refineries. It is deposited onto the fields by periodically occurring floods. These deposits have as an inevitable consequence the lasting deterioration—if not the destruction—of meadows and fields for miles, throughout the entire riparian region of the Ty´smienica River, and in the further reaches of the Dniestr.

Damage to rivers and waterways from petroleum-related pollution was nothing new, of course. In the early 1890s the Viceroy’s Office had been approached with complaints about oil pollution, from individual farmers and the Provincial Fishing Society, leading the mining inspector to order the cleansing of ponds “emitting suffocating odors” as well as the removal of oil and drilling ´ well grime from rivers.22 The reaction to the opening of the Anglobank’s Jakob in Schodnica in August 1895 combined concerns about human safety, pollution, ´ was Galicia’s most famous and most productive well to and inefficiency. Jakob date.23 Together with the neighboring well, Cäcilia, it produced 60,000 tons 22

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¨ Die Bergwerks-Inspection in Osterreich. Berichte der k. k. Bergbehörden u¨ ber ihre Thätigkeit im Jahre 1892 (Vienna, 1894), 176. ¨ Die Bergwerks-Inspection in Osterreich . . . im Jahre 1895 (Vienna, 1896), 381; Die o¨sterreichische-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild, vol. 11, Galizien (Vienna: k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1898), 856.


of oil in 1896—but it had had the potential to produce much more. No one could calculate how many tons had been lost when the gusher’s initial outburst flooded with oil a territory half a kilometer in diameter. Recalling the oil that had streamed into the Stryj River, Szajnocha called the loss of so much crude a ´ created also distressed “tragedy” for the producers.24 But the petroleum lake Jakob local farmers and women who used the Stryj’s water for cooking, drinking, and laundry, as well as fishermen and, presumably, not a few fish. The region was rich in natural mineral-water springs; the economy of the local community of Truskawiec depended on tourist traffic drawn to sample its “excellent sources of mineral water, for example the famous ‘naftusia’”25 (nafta was the Polish ´ the word for petroleum)—but in the aftermath of explosive gushers like Jakob, waters “reeked” of oil. “Borysław had many small streams, the tributaries of the Ty´smienica,” Leopold Held reminisced, but you “couldn’t take a refreshing swim in any of them. Their surface was covered with a film of oil leaking from broken pipes or from wells in the hills. Often, the oil completely covered the surface.”26 Beyond that, the film of petroleum that covered water and land created considerable danger of uncontrollable fires, making everyone in the region vulnerable to loss of life or property. The mining inspector noted the danger of a “general fire” throughout the town as “oil poured into streams, gutters, onto streets, etc. and in this manner came into proximity with various fires (steam boilers, smithies, private houses, etc.).” Despite the rhetoric of enlightenment as a metaphor for education and improvement, the mining inspector feared the dark side of the villagers’ proximity to oil. Human activity tended to increase rather than decrease the risk: “every residence” was turned into “a dangerous oil depot” as the region’s poverty induced residents to attempt to steal flowing oil on the cheap. Even after the oil was directed into an iron reservoir, “the gas pressure that collected in the reservoir tore its roof and lifted it into the air.”27 The mining inspector’s report reads like a catalogue of the many ways oil production threatened the lives and property of those in its immediate environment. It made agriculture in its immediate proximity impossible; it polluted waterways, killing fish and destroying the fields and meadows that they irrigated during periodic floods. It caused fires as standing oil was struck by lightning or ignited during recurrent worker disturbances. Gases caused explosions. The ubiquitous holes 24 25

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Szajnocha, Die Petroleumindustrie Galiziens, 19. ´ Tadeusz Porembalski, Wspomnienia nafciarza (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1978), 29. Leopold Held, “The Ty´smienica Still Flows,” translated by Inga Karliner, http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/Borislav/bor054.html. Berichte der k. k. Bergbehörden u¨ ber ihre Thätigkeit im Jahre 1895 bei Handhabung der Bergpolizei und Beaufsichtigung der Bergarbeiterverhältnisse (Vienna: k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1897), 370–71.

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dug in the ground throughout the oil basin were “the cause of many accidents. Even if an owner is so conscientious as to cover his shaft, the [wooden] cover is simply stolen overnight and not replaced.”28 (Residents of this coal-poor province relied on wood to heat their homes.) The holes and tunnels built to find it caused land to shift and homes to collapse, and made leisurely strolls through the oil district (not to mention wandering home in the dark after a night spent in the local tavern) perilous, if not suicidal. These calamities were grouped together in the minds of those disturbed by them under the general heading “natural disaster”;29 they were disasters caused by humans’ inability to control their environment. To right all these wrongs, what was needed was better, smarter industry—more infrastructure, more investment, more interference—and never less. The insistence that the industry’s solutions depended on more development, more technology—and more oil—was facilitated by a very muddy understanding of the implications of oil’s nonrenewability. Technological limitations made it very difficult to say with any precision how much oil there actually was in Galicia. Eduard Schmidt’s assertion that “Austria possesses in Galicia an immeasurable quantity of petroleum” was both literally true (it could not be measured) and wildly overoptimistic (it was not, in fact, limitless). And it was not quickly forgotten. In 1897, Polish geologist Rudolf Zuber estimated that the Galician oilfields contained over 361 million barrels of oil. In 1905, the founder of the Geology Department at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Władysław Szajnocha, referring to Zuber’s estimate, asserted that “this quantity, even if only a portion of it can be effectively extracted, will suffice for production for many years—during which time undoubtedly new terrains will be discovered, one after another into the future . . . One should not,” he continued, believe that we have uncovered all the petroleum outcroppings of Galicia’s whole Carpathian zone. On the contrary, deep in mountains of East Galicia—only accessible with great difficulty—there lie undoubtedly many hidden traces of petroleum awaiting exposure at the hands of a miner. We can calmly set these aside for the distant future, and content ourselves with the currently tapped fields.30

Szajnocha’s moral discourse suggested that through overcoming difficulty, oilmen could also resolve doubt. Geologists and chemists could not agree on the origins of oil, but their work could be marshaled to support confidence in the everlasting usefulness of the

28

29

30

Joseph Berlinerblau, Das Erdwachs. Ozokerit und Ceresin. Geschichte, Vorkommen, Gewinnung und Verarbeitung (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1897), 13. ´ Michał Bobrzynski, Z moich pamie˛tników (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Zakładu imienia ´ Ossolinskich, 1957), 46. Szajnocha, Die Petroleumindustrie Galiziens, 12.


industry for Galicians—if it could be regulated properly. Scientists knew that hydrocarbons could not be replenished naturally. When renowned Austrian geologist Hans von Höfer published Das Erdöl und seine Verwandten in 1888, he summarized the work of scores of geologists, chemists, and other scientists who had been debating the origins of petroleum for the preceding century. He presented his own conclusions drawn over the course of a decade of observation of the oil industries of North America and Austrian Galicia. Dismissing stories such as the one he heard from a Pennsylvania oilman who claimed that American petroleum was actually whale urine that had found its way from the Polar Basin to Pennsylvania through underground pathways, Höfer presaged the modern consensus that petroleum was created over the course of between 10 and 300 million years, as innumerable marine organisms died and their corpses sank one by one to the ocean floor.31 Over further millions of years, they were covered with layers of sediment and deprived of oxygen. The combination of immense pressure from sedimentary rock, heat created by that pressure, and the activity of anaerobic bacteria transformed this biomass into petroleum. Strictly speaking, the creation of petroleum is ongoing. But a large, commercially relevant oilfield takes millions of years to form. An individual drop of petroleum cannot be extracted—it has to find its way into an underground pool containing a lot of other drops—and that takes time, and luck. Producers can only get petroleum out of the earth economically where it has collected in enormous underground reservoirs. Fortunately for oil producers and the consumers who have come to depend on their success, gases push oil from its primary location, the place where it is formed, to secondary beds, bubbling and pressing against any weakness in the rock, sometimes even reaching the surface of the earth. Well before 1900, scientists knew that it took over ten million years for petroleum to be created, and they knew that it was, functionally, a nonrenewable resource. Not all scientists, however, accepted Höfer’s organic theory of oil’s origins in the early twentieth century. Attendees of the 1914 New York Meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers witnessed a rancorous debate between Höfer and the Canadian geologist and oilman Eugene Coste (1859–1940), a steadfast proponent of the inorganic origin hypothesis, which held that petroleum was “the product of volcanic solfataric emanation.”32 Both men used petroleum’s nonrenewable nature as an argument against their opponents’ proposition. Höfer said,

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Hans von Höfer, Das Erdöl und seine Verwandten. Geschichte, physikalische und chemische Beschaffenheit, Vorkommen, Ursprung, Auffindung und Gewinnung des Erdöles (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1888), v, 101. “Discussion,” Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers 48 (1915), 500.

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As a sincere friend of the petroleum industry, I am sorry that I must reject Mr. Coste’s emanation-theory; for, if it were true, we might expect our petroleum-supply to prove inexhaustible, new quantities being continually furnished by solfataric activity. Unfortunately, that is not the case.33

Coste countered that if petroleum was produced from dead sea creatures, Why is not this process in active operation in the world to-day? Why can we not abundantly verify it, and witness it in numerous cases in some of the millions of shallow bays of the sea teeming with life, where sands are being deposited to-day, and have been deposited in recent ages under similar conditions?34

One of the only notions on which the two could agree was that petroleum was nonrenewable. Any industry built around petroleum production is on a fundamental level unsustainable, as is any society built around its consumption. But there are different scales of unsustainability. Choices can shorten or lengthen the potential life of an industry—even one based on limited, nonrenewable resources. In Galicia, there were lengthy disputes about how to minimize waste. This likely would have involved heavy-handed government intervention in oil production— in the form, at a minimum, of limiting rights to extract oil to a smaller number of firms in order to prevent the frenzied production of neighbors competing for the same oilbeds. Such a practice would have addressed a fundamental characteristic of extraction within a capitalist system: that overaccumulation leads to falling rates of profit. The benefits of intervention were clear—but given the central administration’s reliance on the support and goodwill of landowners who were loath to see property rights infringed, the political will was absent. Although even the most enthusiastic Galician oilmen knew that the oilfields were finite, this had no practical implications as long as production’s anticipated end was sufficiently distant. Pennsylvania’s Oil Creek-centered petroleum industry had reached its heyday in the 1870s,35 and, in 1899, “the newest reports from the oil districts” revealed that production in the region was decreasing. Nevertheless, the Galician producers’ trade journal could reassure its readers: “that there are still immeasurable petroleum beds hidden within the soil of the relevant districts is above suspicion.”36 To voices expressing concern that Galician oil supplies might be decreasing, producer Albert Fauck responded,

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36

Hans von Höfer, “The Origin of Petroleum,” Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers 48 (1915), 491. “Discussion,” 496–7. Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 5. “Abnahme der amerikanischen Petroleumproduction,” Naphta 7/1 (15 Jan. 1899), 12.


Who would have thought, for example, that in Schodnica, where for fifteen years only small amounts of oil could be found, suddenly such enormous quantities would erupt? Or why did Borysław remain disregarded for petroleum production? Experience has taught us, that we are often surprised by great amounts of oil there where we least expect it.37

Only with hindsight is it apparent that 1908 was the peak of Galician production. Although Galician production dropped 58 percent from 1909 to 1911, hope that the Galician oil basin would, under the new Republic of Poland, surpass the production achieved under Austria–Hungary flourished into the 1930s. In the 1920s, a Polish geologist estimated that 210 million barrels of oil had been extracted from Polish soil, and that 840 to 1,120 million barrels remained. This estimate was quickly taken up by the Polish–American Chamber of Commerce as proof that, with only seven percent of its existing oil reserves exploited, the industry deserved considerable investment. At the same time, the New York-based Bankers Trust Company pointed out that Galicia still possessed the third-largest oil reserves in Europe, and that the Drohobycz refinery was the largest on the Continent. Even in the late 1930s, many continued to place their hopes on the potential for increased production in Galicia, now “Little Poland.” As in the earlier period of expansion, it was not only Poles who hoped to benefit from Poland’s natural resources; investors appeared from the West and the East, with plans based on varying predictions of voluntary cooperation from the Polish government. French companies’ investment in Galician oilfields continued to increase throughout the early 1920s. Göring gave a speech on 9 September 1939, as German troops headed southeast towards the Galician oilfields, in which he noted his intention to see what goods Poland had to offer—“the Poles have only exploited 10 percent of their ‘natural resources,’” he claimed, and, making special reference to Galicia’s oilfields, he added, “we will soon have an exploitation of 100 percent.”38 According to Alexander Nazaroff, even in the Second World War, “Soviet experts were unanimous in asserting that the recovery of oil could be substantially increased in . . . Galicia.”39 In the face of such stubborn optimism, it took decades before the suspicions of a few became the conviction of many: oil would not play a significant role in resuscitating the Polish economy, nor would it provide the pathway to economic development of the region. Polish, Ukrainian, French, German, and Soviet hopes were all to prove unsubstantiated, and by the last years of the Second World War, an American expert reporting to 37

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Albert Fauck, “Zur Lage der galizischen Naphta-Industrie,” Naphta 9/4 (28 Feb. 1901), 63; Stanisław Brzozowski, Ignacy Łukasiewicz (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Interpress, 1974), 125–6. ¨ Ein Erdölimperium als deutsches Kriegsziel (1938–1943) Dietrich Eichholtz, Krieg um Ol: (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006), 18. Alexander Nazaroff, “The Soviet Oil Industry,” Russian Review 1/1 (Nov. 1941), 82.

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the Petroleum Industry War Council asserted that “oil [was] truly ammunition in World War II,” and simultaneously dismissed Poland’s oil industry as insignificant and unworthy of attention. “Poland’s negligible oil industry,” he wrote, “enemy-occupied and Nazi-dominated, has doubtless been mulcted to the limit.”40 Szajnocha was wrong; there were no gigantic untapped deposits of oil in the Eastern Carpathians. Why did it take so long to notice a decline that, with hindsight, can clearly be seen to have begun in 1910? Drops in Galician production had been noted by contemporaries, but past experience had proven to the optimistic that downward trends were often reversible. After all, periodic declines were known not only in Galicia, but also in the incontestably thriving oil industry of the United States. A year or two of stagnating or declining production was not considered a sign of irreversible doom. Since 1910, Galician oil production had periodically fallen, then risen again—from 1921 to 1925 by as much as ten percent—giving industry experts cause to believe as late as 1928 that “the decline in production is thus not yet an unhesitating and hopeless decrease.” Even in a context where an industry was known to be unsustainable, it was not possible to identify at what point in the future it would cease to be viable. The end of the Galician oil industry seemed to lie in the future long after it lay in the past. Practically speaking, the knowledge that sources of petroleum were finite meant very little. Arthur McEvoy’s description of the “repetitive pattern of boom and bust” that characterized the California fisheries could just as easily describe the Galician oil industry, or any extractive industry, for that matter. Usually, after a few pioneers demonstrate a fishery’s profitability, capital and labor rush into it, and the harvest increases exponentially for a time. At some point, unable to bear the strain of exploitation indefinitely without sacrificing its ability to replenish itself, the resource begins to yield less and less to economic effort. As depletion erodes its productivity, a fishing industry may even improve its technical ability to find and catch fish, thereby sustaining profits for a time but drawing ever more effort into the harvest and ever more life out of the stock of fish. Ultimately, harvesting so depletes the resource as to cripple it.41

But fishermen could console themselves with the thought that, if left alone, eventually fishing stocks would be repleted—even in their own lifetimes. Oil supplies do not operate on a human timescale; nonetheless, oilmen seemed to think that, like fish, supplies could rise and fall, yet never disappear. 40

41

George A. Hill Jr, Trends in the Oil Industry (Including United States Foreign Oil Policy): As Presented to the Petroleum Industry War Council, January 12, 1944 (Washington, DC: Petroleum Industry War Council, 1944), 10. Arthur McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 6.


Time and time again, oilmen leapt from the particular to the general—any instance in which a region once presumed exhausted was granted a second life became proof that no evidence of exhaustion was conclusive. Even a minor discovery became a sign of the durability of the industry. Oil represented progress; its extraction, even on a small scale, sustained a narrative of progress based on the presumption of virtually unlimited supply. Stubborn optimism disabled the ecological critique, but the social critique persisted. The reporting of natural catastrophes and disasters in the industry suggested that the problem was not of a finite resource, or of irreversible environmental damage, but rather of a failure to promote human welfare. The failure of petroleum to bring prosperity to the province was a matter that even the most enthusiastic oilmen had to address. This failure, in their minds, seems to have had little to do with the renewability of petroleum reserves, and a lot to do with political will. But whose? An observer sent by the Ministry of Agriculture to report on the state of the industry in 1903 concluded that the chaos characteristic of the largest oilfields was caused by what he called “an entirely peculiar local lack of any public spirit [Gemeinsinn] as well as multiple other unseemlinesses of more or less local nature.” Galicians countered that the causes were beyond their control. Szczepanowski, for example, in a speech before the Galician Provincial Petroleum Association on 29 December 1898, blamed the inferiority of Galicia’s oil industry compared to America’s not on the difference in the quantity of oil involved, or even different cultural commitments to entrepreneurship, but rather on politics pure and simple: Our petroleum industry arose very early, two years earlier than in America, but nevertheless the American industry ascended to global significance . . . It was, however, absolutely not we who bear the blame, but only the provincial and imperial government, both of whom failed to provide the favorable conditions and circumstances in which the American petroleum industry came to life. These conditions include: communication and transportation, legal security, science, and credit.

The paucity of those conditions in Galicia meant a failure to fill the demand for 750 million florins’ worth of petroleum that the United States shipped to Austria and Germany in the 1860s and 1870s. “If only a portion of these riches had benefited our country, how differently its economic situation would have turned out. How much income for the population, what a boost to industry, how much wealth could have been created out of it!”42 His German colleague, Albert Fauck, agreed: “It has come to the point where the rich oil treasure of the country must remain locked in the bore holes. Galicia’s only valuable product is

42

“Auserordentliche Generalversammlung,” 2–3.

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devalued in an artificial and unnatural manner by bad laws.”43 Even in 1919, when Galician petroleum production had been steadily declining for a solid decade, the Polish delegation to Paris attributed the ultimate cause of the industry’s success or failure to politics—in this case, differences between Poland and Ukraine: The future development of the petroleum industry in the Carpathian region depends directly on the turn taken by political events and in particular on the decision to attribute the central part of the Carpathian region to one state or the other. If this region is attributed to Poland, the petroleum industry will develop normally as it has done until this time, but it is condemned to disappear completely if this territory becomes part of Ukraine.44

Although critics disagreed about whether over- or underregulated oil production was the problem, they agreed that a poorly functioning political system cost Galicia economic opportunities. But their criticism did not stop there. Perhaps more troubling, though more difficult to quantify, was the industry’s contribution to moral decay. In 1884, thanks to new mining regulations, a young technical chemist named Arnulf Nawratil (1853–1935) began annual inspections of industrial installations, plants, and factories throughout the provinces of Galicia and Bukovina. In the first year alone, he spent 139 days travelling to 301 factories and small businesses, 69 of them more than once.45 Nawratil’s reports represented a historical moment of moral environmentalism: Nawratil believed that the workers’ state of moral development was inseparable from their surroundings. Because their environment did not meet the minimum requirements of human decency, they lived and behaved like beasts. Through this connection between people’s moral capacities and their immediate household and workplace environments, the sustainability of the economies in which they participated was linked to the sustainability of human society. To Nawratil, morality was revealed by clothing, determined by sleeping arrangements. Nawratil did more than report on workers’ conditions, upon violations of safety regulations or legislation controlling employment practices: he condemned the dehumanization of oil workers who lived and worked in conditions that did not meet the minimal standards for sustainable human life. Workers in steady employment for one company were treated by their managers like “workhorses by a horse-keeper”: in exchange for food and housing, the workers labored in shafts supervised by the manager and paid him 10 percent of their wage; the remainder of their wage usually went to the manager’s wife, who held a license for food and

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Fauck, “Zur Lage der galizischen Naphta-Industrie,” 64. Délégation polonaise a` la Conférence de la Paix, Délégation e´ conomique, “L’industrie du pétrole en Galicie” (Paris, March 1919), 4. Nawratil, “Bericht u¨ ber den VII. Aufsichtsbezirk” (1885), 238.


drinks. Dependent on the couple for food, lodging, and the irresistible drink, the worker soon fell into debt that his wages would never cover: These petroleum slaves, wrapped in miserable rags, can be seen in droves in Borysław, and one must bemoan the fate of these people who work hard and in spite of not insignificant earnings, eke out a miserable existence while unprincipled speculators benefit from their labor.

Workers’ dehumanization stemmed not only from the managers’ abuse, but also from their physical surroundings. “One must only glance into a workers’ hostel to see in a crowded room sometimes sixty or seventy persons, without any distinction between the sexes, lying shoulder to shoulder, fully dressed, so closely together that they can’t turn from side to side,” wrote Nawratil, adding, “So can one measure the material and moral decay of the Borysław worker.”46 Workers themselves were complicit in their own demoralization, he further contended. When he claimed that “an overheated, cavelike bedroom, thickly fitted out with foul-smelling beds for the workers,” failed to meet “basic human needs,” Nawratil was told by the workers themselves that they were satisfied with their quarters, since “their comrades in other companies didn’t even have such sleeping quarters as these, and that they lived miles away, and only seldom were in a condition to go home.” Under such conditions, it was impossible for workers to thrive spiritually, morally, physically, or financially. Their “oppression” was physical: “they are poorly fed, are exposed to dangers of all kinds at work, and, thanks to their unsound way of life, exposed to all possible illnesses, and the demoralization among them is universal.” Worse still, because of that oppression, their humanity was in doubt: “This is really a rare type of depraved people, driven together from all corners of the globe, who can hardly be viewed and treated as human, and who, therefore, no one cares about.” Individual workers were fully interchangeable. Like commodities, they were completely fungible, and had no unique value as human beings: “this is the main point: the worker, just like a draft animal, only has value as long as he has the strength to work.” Nawratil’s outrage shows that the relative lack of concern with environmental degradation should not be interpreted as a lack of concern about sustainability: 46

Nawratil, “Bericht u¨ ber den IX. Aufsichtsbezirk” (1886), 386, 387. Nawratil’s report confirms the testimony of Edward Windakiewicz, who had been sent to the oilfields in the 1870s in order to prepare a government report that led to the reform of mining laws. One need only observe, he wrote, “the great number of thickly huddled barracks in every town, between which it is hardly possible to walk, and in them and between them such a large number of people, who do not possess the slightest notion of order or cleanliness, nor are they able to take themselves far away, in order to judge what kind of influence this ´ exerts on people’s health.” Edward Windakiewicz, Olej i Wosk Ziemny w Galicyi (Lwow: Nakładem Administracyi Gazety Lwowskiej, 1875), 20.

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the question of social sustainability was left at the heart of the problem. Social questions were treated not as stemming from industry, extraction, or even capitalism, but rather as the result of political failures. Failures, that is, not only of the state, but also of the peasants themselves, who were deemed incapable of articulating their needs in terms the state could address. An argument that had begun with the promise of enlightenment now circled back to the notion that enlightenment was impossible. Nawratil was not some hot-blooded socialist revolutionary; he was a chemist and a civil servant who believed firmly that the conditions in which workers could survive, prosper, and live like humans did not need to await a revolution, but rather only the actual enforcement of already existing legislation. Laws that would protect workers from these conditions existed, and the workers themselves, moreover, were partially responsible for the fact that they were not enforced. The peasant worker is compliant, obedient, satisfied with extremely modest aliment, views his employer as a benefactor, receives an often hard-earned wage with positive gratitude, and allows himself—if treated well—to be used for any purpose. Unfortunately the peasant worker is very uneducated, usually illiterate, and has little or no real knowledge of the laws or the rights those laws guarantee him, and has namely absolutely no idea where he can pursue his rights.

And it was not only ignorance that stood in the workers’ way—it was their own impatience with what they considered to be useless and even counterproductive rules that, although designed to guarantee their safety, seemed to be more like hindrances to the completion of their labor.47 Nawratil did not stand alone in his dismay at the workers’ lot. Even Naphta, a journal that faithfully represented the interests of oil producers themselves, noted that the oil workers’ moral well-being had not been promoted as thoroughly as the promise of paternalism had suggested: “The only fault one could perhaps find with the employers,” one author confessed in 1901, is that they have not used their united strength to create a cheap and healthy canteen, nor have they arranged for appropriate entertainment for the workers or properly supervised their spiritual life, which aside from moral advantages would bring material gain for both parties.48

Nor was this simply a matter of time: in the 1920s, Joseph Roth visited the oilfields and described them thus:

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Arnulf Nawratil, “Bericht u¨ ber den IX. Aufsichtsbezirk,” Bericht der k. k. GewerbeInspektoren u¨ ber ihre Amtsthätigkeit im Jahre 1885 (Vienna: k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1886), 243, 351–2, 371, 387. ¨ Marian Leopold, “Uber die Rohölgruben in Borysław,” Naphta 9/8 (30 April 1901), 148–9.


It seems as if these boards were not put together hastily by human hands, but rather as if the breath of human greed had accidentally lumped together accidental materials, and not a single one of these fugacious homes seems allotted to accommodate sleeping people, but rather to feverishly strengthen sleeplessness. The rancid odor of oil, a stinking miracle, drew them here.49

The “illumination” and “enlightenment” offered by oil came at a heavy price in Galicia. The production and distribution of oil led directly to pollution, property damage, injury, and death. Petroleum, it turned out, was no panacea for social ills: despite petroleum’s illuminating properties, the oil basin remained shrouded in darkness. “A radical reform must be carried out if Borysław is not to remain in a repulsive fog towards the end of the nineteenth century,” geology professor Rudolf Zuber warned. Zuber added that it was an established economic principle that every rationally run business requires a certain minimum of material and intellectual vigor to allow for both the profit of the entrepreneur and the safety of the worker—a level of vigor that exceeds the means of smaller oil companies. Many Galician oilmen had enough money to acquire a small terrain but not enough to provide the mine with good ventilation, drainage, light, or management. And it is exactly those people who daily abandon the lives of people working in such miserable and life-threatening dives who then raise the cry that hundreds of thousands of these people will lose their livelihoods if mining is carried out in an orderly fashion. It would be funny, if it did not conceal the most revolting perfidy.50

A firedamp explosion in the ozocerite mine in Borysław in 1902 caused eighteen deaths, either from fourth-degree burns; inhalation of poisonous gas; suffocation face-down in seeping petroleum; or the degeneration of heart, lung, and kidneys after a combination of burns and inhalation of gases.51 It would be tempting to see in the evidence of distress about the petroleum industry hints of growing suspicions that an economy based on the evergrowing dependence on the consumption and production of hydrocarbons was unsustainable. Galicians—whether directly or indirectly involved in the oil industry—did agree that it could not continue as it was. Rarely, however, was the limit to the industry’s sustainability perceived to derive from geological givens. Even in the case of so-called natural catastrophes (such as uncontrollable gushers, fires, and floods) that might seem to represent the problem of unsustainability,

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Joseph Roth, “Der Segen der Erde: Naphta, Kali, Gift,” in idem, Werke, ed. Hermana Kesten, vol. 3 (Cologne: Kiepenhauer and Witsch, 1976), 438. “Erdwachsgruben in Galizien,” Naphta 6/2 (8 Feb. 1898), 13–14. Johann Holobek, Die Schlagwetterexplosion in dem Erdwachsbergbaue “Gruppe I” in Borysław am 2. Juni 1902 (Vienna: Manzsche k. u. k. Hof- Verlags- und UniversitätsBuchhandlung, 1903), 24.

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the solution was always considered to be more industry, more exploitation of natural resources, never less. It was, after all, the smallest companies whose workers suffered under the worst conditions. Contemporary criticism of Galicia’s oil industry centered on cultural or moral problems on the one hand, and political problems on the other. The Galician oil industry shows the impossibility of separating geological questions about renewable resources, abundance, and exhaustion from economic questions about capital, investment, and industrial development; social questions about labor relations, public health and hierarchies of power; and cultural questions about morality and enlightenment. Long before the outbreak of the First World War, geologists, oilmen, and politicians in oilproducing countries recognized that in some meaningful sense, oil production in any given locale was unsustainable. And yet this realization had minimal, or fully inadequate, policy implications. And so if the Galician oil industry was unsustainable, it was not because the material on which it was based— petroleum—was nonrenewable. It was a political failure, compounded by moral weaknesses and economic underdevelopment. The commonly held belief that Galician society was not sustainable without petroleum made the unsustainability of the industry itself all too tempting to ignore. Galicians shared with their Pennsylvanian counterparts a blind optimism in the potential of petroleum to support their societies and economies into the distant future—a sentiment that historian Brian Black has called the “yearning for permanence in a temporal industry.”52 In the late nineteenth century, petroleum seemed to offer the solution to problems not only of an economic, but also of a political, cultural, and even moral nature. These problems were, not, however, seen to be primarily environmental—nor was there any real appreciation of how limited the capacity of a nonrenewable resource (and one very restricted in quantity) to provide lasting solutions to endemic poverty, structural inequality, and political corruption really was. On the contrary, Galicians maintained their hopes that petroleum would rescue them despite evidence that the oil industry could not last for long. Oil would bring them out of the past, and secure their place in the future. It was profound optimism that drove criticism of the “unsustainability” of the oil industry at the turn of the twentieth century. The solution to the challenges posed by perceived economic backwardness, moral degradation, political caprice, social division, or even geological limitation was not to abandon the oil industry, but rather to improve it with more technological and financial investment. This was true when the challenge was overproduction, pollution, fire; this was true when the challenge was accident, injury, death; and it was even true

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Black, Petrolia, 173.


when the challenge was underproduction, premature exhaustion. The failure of both critiques—the critique based on ecological sustainability and the critique based on social sustainability—rested on the idea that, since oil represented progress and enlightenment, the story would have to end with some sort of magnificent technological fix. Both critiques demanded solutions to pressing problems without challenging the underlying structures that characterized the world in which they lived.

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maintaining (environmental) capital intact∗ emma rothschild Department of History, Harvard University, and Joint Center for History and Economics E-mail: [email protected]

The idea of sustainability is an odd composite of imagination and accounting. Environmental history is a permissive historical subdiscipline, and this essay is about the environmental–economic–intellectual history of an environmental idea, sustainability, which is historical in the sense that it is very old, and historical, too, in the sense that it is an idea about history, or about imagining the future in relation to the past.1 One of the oddities of the last several decades is that these old ideas have been transformed into the most celebrated of all the dicta of environmental policy, or an aspiration of UN commissions, “strategy consultancies”, and very large government agencies (“sustainability is our ‘true north.’”)2 I will be concerned, within this long and intricate story, with the history of one particular simile or understanding of sustainability, in which nature, or the environment, is seen as being like a capital stock, and the responsibility of sustainability, in turn, is an injunction to maintain intact the value of an

∗

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2

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Department of Economics, University College London, in 1994, at the Center for History and Economics, Harvard University, in 2008, and at the Seminar on Measurement and Well-Being at the London School of Economics in 2010. I am most grateful to Tony Atkinson, Aditya Balasubramanian, David Blackbourn, Nancy Cartwright, Alison Frank, Walter Johnson, Dale Jorgenson, Tony La Vopa, Harriet Ritvo, Charles Rosenberg, Amartya Sen, Aubrey Silberston, Sverker Sörlin, Adrian Vermeule and Paul Warde for helpful discussions. Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, “The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-reading of the Field”, Environmental History 12/1 (Jan. 2007), 107–30. On the UN’s “Millennium Goal” number 7, “ENSURE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY”, see http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/environ.shtml; on “transformative business leadership on the sustainability agenda”, see http://www.sustainability.com; on the “goal of sustainability” as the true north of the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency, see http://www.epa.gov/sustainability; and on the EPA’s budget, see http://www.epa.gov/ocfo/budget/2011/2011bib.pdf, all accessed 2 Oct. 2010.

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“appropriately defined” stock of natural or environmental capital.3 Even this simile is not particularly new, and there is a wonderful conversation between a gnome and a sprite, in a dialogue published in 1827 by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, set in a future time when all men have died. The gnome wishes that one or two men might be reborn, just for the pleasure of observing them when they realize that everything was going on as before, “while they had believed that the entire world was made and kept alive for them alone”. Men “from time to time discovered some star or some planet”, the sprite says, and “immediately they made it figure in the inventory of their household property, because they imagined that the stars and the planets were lamps and candles, so to speak, placed up in the sky in order to illuminate their lordly homes”. But when the men are gone, “the rivers are not tired of flowing; and even though it no longer serves for navigation and traffic, the sea does not seem to have dried up”. “The stars and the planets have not stopped rising and setting”, says the gnome; “they are not in mourning” for men.4

capital and value The version of the old figure of speech with which I will be concerned is newer, and less lyrical. The modern political importance of the ideas of sustainability and sustainable development began, on a large scale, with the publication in 1987 of Our Common Future, the report of the Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by the Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, with its definition of sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.5 It is this objective which has been so widely interpreted as the injunction to maintain (environmental) capital intact. It is “a useful rule of thumb for policy”, in the economist Robert Solow’s words, to think of “an appropriately defined stock of capital—including the initial endowment of resources—[as] being maintained intact”, and of consumption “as the interest on that patrimony”.6 Sustainability, it is suggested, is an idea about capital, and

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Robert M. Solow, “On the Intergenerational Allocation of Natural Resources”, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 88/1 (March 1986), 141–9, 141. Giacomo Leopardi, “Dialogo di un folletto e di uno gnomo”, in idem, Operette Morali (Milan, 1976; first published 1827), 81–5. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford, 1987), 42. Solow, “On the Intergenerational Allocation of Natural Resources”, 141.

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two prominent economists have indeed referred to “Environmental Economics As Capital Theory”.7 The historical story I want to tell has to do with the mid-twentieth-century origins of these ideas, in the economic disputes of the 1930s and 1940s over “maintaining capital intact”. The disputes were of a fairly theoretical sort, and they had little to do with natural or environmental capital.8 They were widely described, in the post-war period, as “old-fashioned”, “abstruse”, “very difficult”, or “most controversial”.9 The route by which they came to influence the ideas and institutions of subsequent environmental policy was indirect. But the journey is of interest for intellectual and environmental history, as I will suggest. It is also a journey into some of the most profound political choices of the times, to do with the nature of (national or international) power, the relationship between economic theory and economic circumstances, and the politics of public information. The controversy over maintaining capital intact culminated in 1941 and 1942, and the protagonists were three English economists, A. C. Pigou, Friedrich Hayek (who had become a naturalized British subject in 1938) and John Hicks. It is only Hicks, of the three, who was in any respect prominent in later discussions of augmented or environmental accounts and sustainability, as the inventor, in 1939, of “Hicksian income”, identified as “the maximum amount that can be consumed while leaving capital intact”.10 Pigou was at the time “the dean of theoretical economics in the world today”, in the Chicago economist Frank

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Partha Dasgupta and Karl–Goran Mäler, Poverty, Institutions, and the Environmental– Resource Base (World Bank Environment Paper no. 9, The World Bank, 1994), 9. “The quality of the environment is part of our capital stock, just like bridges and buildings. There is every reason to treat the environment along with other capital as a relevant input in a firm’s production function.” Barry Nalebuff, “On a Clear Day, You Can See the Coase Theorem”, in Partha Dasgupta and Karl–Goran Mäler, eds., The Environment and Emerging Development Issues, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1997), 35–47, 38. A. C. Pigou, in 1935, considered the possibility of including “stores of coal, minerals, oil and so on that Nature has laid up” in estimates of national or social capital; Frank Knight speculated about the future circumstances that “coal is replaced by oil or by hydraulic power, not to mention wider possibilities of substitution”. A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Stationary States (London, 1935), 22; Frank H. Knight, “Some Issues in the Economics of Stationary States”, American Economic Review 26/3 (Sept. 1936), 393–411, 400–401. Solow, “On the Intergenerational Allocation of Natural Resources”, 149; G.K. Goundrey, “Economics and Conservation”, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 26/2 (May 1960), 319–25, 322; Richard Ruggles, “Concepts, Sources, and Methods of United States National Income Accounts”, Econometrica 20/3 (July 1952), 467–71, 469. William D. Nordhaus and Edward C. Kokkelenberg, eds., Nature’s Numbers: Expanding the U.S. National Economic Accounts to Include the Environment (Washington, DC, 1999), 183–4, 190.

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Knight’s description, although with an enduring aspiration, in his own selfdescription, to free himself from the “appearance of fine–drawn academic subtlety, by which the practical man is so apt to be repelled”; he was the leading figure in the economics of welfare, and of what was later described as “market failure”.11 Hayek, four years before the publication of The Road to Serfdom, was known, for the most part, as a pure theorist of capital, although disposed, as The Economist wrote in March 1941, to disputation with “his compeers—too many of whom, in Professor Hayek’s view, have committed an intellectual error, betrayed their duty, and even ‘menaced civilisation.’”12 The controversy of 1941–2 unfolded in the journal of the London School of Economics, Economica, which had at the time been evacuated from London to Cambridge; the cover bore the notice “War-Time Address: The Hostel, Peterhouse, Cambridge”. Hayek, who was the editor and principal contributor, was evacuated, too, in the odd episode in intellectual history in which Hayek and John Maynard Keynes served together as fire wardens, in long nights of conversation on the roof of King’s College Chapel.13 The particular controversy was concerned with “maintaining capital intact” in the limited sense of whether the income of an individual (or society) in a particular period should be thought of as net of the addition to or depletion of the individual’s (or society’s) wealth over the same period: of whether the individual had become “impoverished”. There was no explicit implication, as in later concepts of sustainable income, of evaluating the netness of income in relation to the possibility of future income, over a finite or an infinite posterity. The controversy was rather over how to think about and measure income in a particular period; and even, as one of Pigou’s earlier critics had objected, over the “somewhat curious” objective of “making real income correspond with income returnable for taxation, meaning of course under the laws of Great Britain at the time of writing”.14 Of the three protagonists in the controversy, Pigou was the closest to the modern conceptions which are embodied in the augmented or environmental

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A. C. Pigou, “A Parallel between Economic and Political Theory”, Economic Journal 12/46 (June 1902), 274–7, 277; Knight, “Some Issues in the Economics of Stationary States”, 393. The word “practical” appears in forty-eight of the eighty-two articles by Pigou in the JSTOR database. “Shorter Notices, ‘The Pure Theory of Capital’”, The Economist, 1 March 1941, 276. Cover page, Economica new ser., 8/31 (Aug. 1941); oral communication by the late Dr Larry Hayek, conference on The Road to Serfdom, Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, Cambridge, 2004; and see Melissa Lane, “Friedrich von Hayek and The Road to Serfdom: 1944–2004”, available at http://www-histecon.kings.cam.ac.uk/ events/hayek_report.pdf. Knight, “Some Issues in the Economics of Stationary States”, 402 n. 12.


accounts of the late twentieth century.15 He argued that “capital consists at any given moment of a definite inventory of physical things”, that the concept of maintaining capital intact was “needed” by “practical” men, and that capital was maintained intact over a period of time either when its “physical constituents [are] unaltered” or when any altered item was replaced by another item which was “worth” (“is expected to yield the same income as”) the same.16 Hayek denied that Pigou’s procedure could have “any practical value or any theoretical significance”. It was essential, in Hayek’s view, to get inside the mind of the entrepreneur. “No watching of the ‘quantity’ of his capital from the outside” would suffice: “In a changing world, where different people, and even the same people at different times, will possess different knowledge, there can be no objective standards” for judging the success of the entrepreneur in maintaining his “sources of income”.17 Hicks “came down mainly on Hayek’s side”, and argued that the principle of maintaining capital intact would lead to measurements which were “internally inconsistent”, because “the beginning-value and the end-value were arrived at on a different basis of knowledge”. But Hicks thought that Hayek’s theory was not “usable in practice”. He also surmised that Pigou and Hayek were thinking about different things: that only Pigou, at least, was concerned with net social income, or the income of the society as a whole, and its measurement “as a means of comparing economic welfare in different periods”. He conceded later that “statisticians, asked to measure National Capital”, had continued to rely on “volume” or “Materialist” conceptions: “it is a major complication, which oppresses the statistician . . . that the expectations of individuals are not harmonious”. The place of “value” measures, he concluded, was in “theoretical analysis”.18 The 1941–2 debate was not resolved in any sort of consensus. Of the three very large issues raised in the course of the controversy—having to do with the heterogeneity of objects of value, the “inside” nature or insideness of values, and the identity of the valuers (whoever it was that was doing the evaluation, and for what reason)—it was only the first that was of some continuing interest to economists. Thirty years later John Hicks wrote that the debates of the period 15

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On augmented accounts see Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, Nature’s Numbers, 183, 185, 188, 190. A. C. Pigou, “Maintaining Capital Intact”, Economica new ser., 8/31 (Aug. 1941), 271–5. F. A. v. Hayek, “Maintaining Capital Intact: A Reply”, Economica new ser., 8/31 (Aug. 1941), 276–80. J. R. Hicks, “Maintaining Capital Intact: A Further Suggestion”, Economica new ser., 9/32 (May 1942), 174–9; idem, “Capital Controversies: Ancient and Modern”, American Economic Review 64/2 (May 1974), 307–16, 309, 315 n. 14; idem, Capital and Time: A Neo-Austrian Theory (Oxford, 1987), 163.

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“have never been wholly stilled”; “much of the main modern controversy about capital”, he said, “is just the old controversy in a new guise”.19 Neither Hayek nor Pigou returned directly to the original dispute. Pigou remained committed to the notion of an “aggregate volume of productive resources”, notably in his work on real income comparisons. For Hayek, the idea of “inside knowledge” was of central importance in the development, later in the 1940s, of a subjective theory of value, and of his theory of knowledge in society. In a very sweeping panorama of the intellectual history of twentieth-century economics, it as though two imposing processions encountered each other, briefly, and passed on.

reminders of old ideas It was these old ideas of maintaining capital intact that were rediscovered, in different form, in the 1970s. The Yale economists William Nordhaus and James Tobin, in 1972, introduced the idea of a “sustainable MEW”, or “measure of economic welfare”, in their outline of a revision of national-income accounts, Is Growth Obsolete?, addressed to “both growth men and antigrowth men”. In it, they added estimates of the “disamenities of urban life”, “regrettables” such as national defence, and the services of stocks of consumer capital, to the conventional calculation of net national product as “the amount of consumption that leaves the capital stock ‘intact.’”20 The economist Martin Weitzman, in 1976, included natural resources in the capital stock; “pools of exhaustible natural resources ought to qualify as capital”.21 Robert M. Solow, in a lecture given in Uppsala in 1984 that is the most celebrated source, among writings by economists, of the idea of sustainable development, concluded that “allowable consumption” could be interpreted as “the interest on an initial patrimony or resource endowment”, or on “an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources”. It was “a reminder of the old-fashioned obligation to ‘maintain capital intact.’”22 The idea of a stock of environmental–natural capital was embodied, over the following decades, in a practical enterprise of constructing augmented or satellite national accounts. This was a “parallel effort among economists”, in the expression of a report called Nature’s Numbers, prepared for the US

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John Hicks, Classics and Moderns (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 96–7. William Nordhaus and James Tobin, Is Growth Obsolete?, in National Bureau of Economic Research, Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect, Economic Growth, Fiftieth Anniversary Colloquium (New York, 1972), 24, 34. Martin L. Weitzman, “On the Welfare Significance of National Product in a Dynamic Economy”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 90/1 (Feb. 1976), 156–62, 157. Solow, “On the Intergenerational Allocation of Natural Resources”, 149.


National Research Council in 1999, to develop “measures of national income and output that take notions of sustainability into account”, in particular by arriving at an “augmented” or “broader definition of ‘capital,’” or of the “stocks of capital and other dynamic features that affect production”. The estimate of national capital was to be “corrected”, in these measures, by including human capital (or the capital embodied in individuals), government capital, the stock of research and development, and “natural capital such as forests, mineral resources, and environmental resources”.23 The “correct measure” was itself “rooted in traditional capital theory”.24 Capital accounts in general, and the accounts for augmented or natural capital in particular, became, in the course of the 1990s, one of the enduring preoccupations of national (and international) statistical offices, and one of the ways in which even high or abstract economic theory was incorporated in the measurement of ordinary life. The implementation of the successive systems of accounts produced by the UN Statistical Office thus came to involve the finest details of national life.25 The Australian National Accounts, for example, provided an elaborate illustration of the revision of capital accounts, in the treatment of activities from “speculative construction” to “rockets, missiles, warheads”, and from “historic monuments” of “special value” (“‘special’ in this case referring to cultural, historical, religious and archaeological significance”) to “purchased goodwill” and “internally generated non-produced intangibles”.26 An investigation of stocks of natural or environmental capital commissioned on behalf of the Department of Economic Affairs of Namibia was an even more vivid illustration of the new universe of numbers. There was an estimate of the stocks of hake, horse mackerel and pilchard. There were “physical accounts for land”, or the prospect of physical accounts, but no “monetary accounts”, or valuations, because “no market prices exist for the very large portions of the land that are subject to traditional communal tenure regimes”. There were estimates of the stocks of diamonds, uranium and gold, and the dispiriting conclusion that

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Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, Nature’s Numbers, 183, 185, 188, 190. John M. Hartwick, “Natural Resources, National Accounting and Economic Depreciation”, Journal of Public Economics 43 (Dec. 1990), 291–304, 301. On the UN System of National Accounts of 1993 and the System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting of 2002, see Searchable Archive of Publications on Environmental–Economic Accounting, available at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/ envaccounting/ceea/archive/Introduction.asp; and Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting 2003 (SEEA 2003), available at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/ envaccounting/seea.asp. Canberra Group on Capital Stock Statistics—November 1999 meeting, unpaginated, available at http://www.oecd.org/document/49/0,3343,en_2825_500246_1876337_ 1_1_1_1,00.html.

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the “mineral assets” of Namibia had lost “55 percent of their asset value from 1980 to 2000”.27 The economists’ ideas of sustainability were rediscovered, too, or reinvented, in the new environmental policies of the period following the presentation of the Brundtland Report at the UN Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. “Sustainable development” and “sustainability” became the names, or organizing principles, of a new transnational and incipiently post-national venture, part public, part private; the most successful of all the new dicta, the “big, impractical words”, in Daniel Rodgers’s description, which became so practicable, or practisable, in the late twentieth-century expansion of commissions, institutes, newsletters, prizes, agencies, foundations, consultancies and expert committees. “Human development”, “common security”, “human security”, “sustainable development”—of all these “UN words” and global phrases, “sustainability” was by far the most visible, mentioned, in October 2010, in 36,900,000 websites, with an additional 21,400,000 for “sustainable development”.28 Sustainable development even came to be known, from time to time, by the alias “Brundtland–Solow”, as in “sustainability a` la Brundtland–Solow”, or the “Brundtland–Solow standard”, or even “the BS standard”.29 But the large aspirations of the new institutions were very different indeed, by the late twentieth century, from the economists’ ideas of the 1980s (or the 1940s). Sustainability had become a maxim of policy, or an exhortation. The UN’s official website in respect of the Rio Conference explained its objectives in imposing terms: “the Summit’s message is that nothing less than a transformation of our attitudes and behaviour would bring about the necessary changes”.30 There were “96 Indicators of Sustainable Development”, described as “tools to communicate ideas, thoughts and values”, to be used for “both communicating with and raising

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Glenn–Marie Lange, “National Wealth, Natural Capital and Sustainable Development in Namibia”, DEA research discussion paper no. 56, Feb. 2003, Windhoek, Namibia, 6–8, 10; available at http://www.met.gov.na/publications/research/RDP56.pdf. Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 7; Google search, 2 Oct. 2010. On “UN words” see Emma Rothschild, “The Archives of Universal History”, Journal of World History 19/3 (Sept. 2008), 375–401. Amartya Sen, “Why We Should Preserve the Spotted Owl”, London Review of Books 26/3 (5 Feb. 2004); Gilles Paquet, “The Governance of Sustainability: A Social Learning Approach”, undated, available at http://www.invenire.ca/Res_papers/Governance_ of_sustainability.pdf, accessed on Oct. 24, 2008. See http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html, accessed 29 Oct. 2008.


the awareness of the public”.31 “Changing behaviour is a cross cutting theme”, the British government’s Department of Environment said of its own policies for sustainable development.32 “As far as I can tell”, Robert Solow lamented in 1992, “discussion of sustainability has been mainly an occasion for the expression of emotions and attitudes”.33

economic ideas and intermediate maxims The old-fashioned ideas of keeping capital intact had large and unexpected political consequences, in these respects, in late twentieth-century environmental policy. The destiny of Pigou’s, Hayek’s and Hicks’s theory is an interesting illustration, in turn, of the arcs of ideas by which the high economic thought of eminent theorists is transposed into the “medium” thought of applied economists, statisticians, development experts and public officials, and into the “low” economic thought of the public whom the officials seek to influence (the 58,000,000 people or so, counting one person per website, who are interested in sustainability and sustainable development.) It is an illustration, too, of the distances over which ideas travel, in time and space: from the pure theory of capital, to “Brundtland–Solow”, the UN System of Statistical Accounts, and the evaluation of Namibian pilchards.34 “The practical value of the science of political economy . . . lies in its ‘middle principles’ [or] intermediate maxims”, the economic commentator Walter Bagehot wrote in 1860, in an obituary of his father-in-law, the founder of The Economist.35 A generation later, the profession of economics had become a large and practical enterprise. Arthur Hadley, the Yale law professor and president of the American Economic Association, wrote in his turn-of-the-century address, in 1899, that “at no previous period has popular interest in the subject been so widespread”; “in education, in journalism, or in finance, the trained economist

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United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, Indicators of Sustainable Development: Guidelines and Methodologies, 3rd edn (New York, 2007), 3, 9, 40. See http://www.defra.gov.uk/sustainable/government/what/index.htm, accessed 19 Dec. 2009. Robert M. Solow, An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability (Washington, DC, 1992), 14. See Emma Rothschild, “Arcs of Ideas: International History and Intellectual History”, in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Oliver Janz, eds., Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen, 2006), 217–26. Walter Bagehot, “Memoir of the Right Honourable James Wilson”, The Economist, 17 Nov. 1860, 1287–1300, 1289, original emphasis.

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to-day finds a great and growing demand for his services”.36 For Pigou, after another generation, “economic argument [was] coming continually to play a larger and larger part in partisan political debate”, to the extent, by 1935, that economic theorists were “in continual danger” of “attempts at exploitation”.37 The history of ideas about environmental capital is in this sense a history of the many lives of economists in the twentieth century, and of the many destinies of their ideas. There was an orderly process, in principle, by which the theoretical or abstract ideas of the most eminent economists—“heroically theoretical”, in an early twentieth-century expression—were cast into the ether of intellectual life, and were exploited there by economists of different sorts, in different circumstances; the theorists themselves were not, in this view of the intellectual division of labour, the sources of popular ideas.38 All the protagonists in the capital-theory disputes of the 1930s and 1940s were intensely conscious of these transformations of ideas, or of the complicated, changing relationships between economic theory and economic policy, and between their own theories and their observations of the world.39 “In a rough general way the concept ‘maintaining capital intact’ is easy to grasp”, Pigou wrote in 1941. He ended with a passage of spectacularly mixed metaphors, in respect of the correspondence between the ideas of economic theorists and the “practical use” of economic distinctions: We do not want to spend our lives in squaring the circle . . . [We cannot] evolve concepts which are perfectly clean cut. There are bound to be rough edges . . . [We] have tried our hand at smoothing these down . . . We have not, I suggest, failed so grievously that others, instead of giving our baby another wash, should empty both it and the bath away.40

The ideas of economists were expected to correspond, in an approximate way, with the ideas of the “plain man”, and with the ideas embodied in public laws and institutions (including the tax code).41 Ideas about the income of individuals were expected to correspond with ideas of the income of societies, or countries. The ideas of plain or ordinary men were at the same time both influenced by and an influence on public institutions; they were even influenced by the ideas of 36

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Arthur T. Hadley, “The Relation between Economics and Politics”, Yale Law Journal 8/4 (Jan. 1899), 194–206, 194–5. A. C. Pigou, Economics in Practice: Six Lectures on Current Issues (London, 1935), 8–9. J. B. Clark, “The Future of Economic Theory”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 13/1 (Oct. 1898), 1–14, 9. As Frank Knight observed, “the relationship of theory to action is perhaps peculiarly obscure” in respect of the theory of capital and interest. F. H. Knight, “Professor Mises and the Theory of Capital”, Economica new ser., 8/32 (Nov. 1941), 409–27, 410. Pigou, “Maintaining Capital Intact”, 275. A. C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 3rd edn (Cambridge, 1928), lxviii.


economists. The economists’ own ideas were influenced by their observations of a real economic (and institutional) world which changed continuously over time. The objectives of public institutions also changed over time, with the evolution of political and economic circumstances. So did the ways in which economists expressed their ideas, over the course of their lifetimes and ways of life. Even the loftiest of economic intellectuals were participants in public life. Pigou described Keynes, censoriously, as “one whose vividness of phrase has made him a valued contributor to the Daily Mail”, and confessed that he had himself written an article in the Sunday Express.42 The idea of maintaining capital intact was a particularly transitory and transitional objective. Pigou had initially, in his writings on capital, proceeded from an idea of business income, or of the income of an individual entrepreneur, as conceived from the point of view of the “income tax authorities”. This was even his own point of view, to the extent that he had first come into public prominence, during the First World War, as a commentator on the principles of income tax, and had subsequently served as a member of a Royal Commission on Income Tax. But his preoccupations had clearly evolved, with the depression of the 1930s and the exigencies of the Second World War, to a concern by 1941–2, as Hicks discerned, with net social income, or the income of nations, and its measurement “as a means of comparing economic welfare in different periods”.43 The evaluation of national or social income was Hicks’s concern as well, in the frightening wartime years during which the modern British, American and “international” (or UN) systems of national accounts were developed; as Hicks wrote in 1942, “comparing economic welfare is not the only purpose (nowadays, alas! it is not even the main purpose) of measuring the National Income”.44 It was the wartime and post-war system of national or social accounts that evolved, in turn, into the extended accounts of the late twentieth century. The idea of Hicksian income, or income that leaves capital intact, was consolidated, in the new systems of national accounts of the 1940s, as a description of social as well as individual income, and a generalization of business income to the national income of the society. For the authors of Nature’s Numbers, in 1999, Hicksian income was the “standard definition of NNP [net national product] used in the national accounts of virtually all nations today”.45 It was this definition that was extended, in the 1970s and 1980s, to include human, natural and environmental capital, and consolidated in new and augmented accounts. 42

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A. C. Pigou, “Mr. J. M. Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, Economica new ser., 3/10 (May 1936), 115–32, 119. Hicks, “Maintaining capital intact”, 179. Ibid., 179. Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, Nature’s Numbers, 183, 190.

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The relationship between economic ideas and their eventual “exploitation” in policy was indirect, for the economists of the 1970s and 1980s, as it had been for Pigou in 1935. The idea of sustainable welfare, like the earlier ideas of the capital theorists, was in this spirit assertively impractical; Nordhaus and Tobin spoke of “heroic aggregation”, and Weitzman of “extreme abstraction”; “we abstract heroically”.46 The ideas were thrown out, as it were, into arcs of influence. The implicit depiction of the procedures of social or national accounting, as in the wartime and post-war controversies over capital, was of an orderly sequence of economists, applied economists and statisticians. Even Hicks referred to a statistician who “is asked to measure National Capital” by an unidentified interlocutor, and by whom measurements are “turned out”, “for the use of applied economists”. The authors of Nature’s Numbers identified the object of their augmented accounts as something different from and more indistinct than policy: “scorekeeping or management”.47 “One has to decide—whoever ‘one’ is—whether later generations are entitled to a higher standard of living”, Robert Solow wrote in the Uppsala article about the appropriately defined stock of capital, and concluded, poignantly, that “there is something to be said for rules of thumb, for shorthand ways of taking care of interests that might otherwise be neglected”.48

a political history of economic ideas The history of the long and indirect journey from Pigou and Hicks to the websites of the UN Division for Sustainable Development is a political story, in a number of respects. The simile of nature as capital, or of environmental capital, is itself political, in a rather obvious way. It is an interesting illustration of the audacity of the economic imagination: of the extent to which serious men and women, who influenced the policy of Namibia, or of the West Virginia coal industry, were able to conceive of themselves, and of others, as living in a world of capital stocks; in which everything is capital. In the summary of the authors of Nature’s Numbers, “consumption is produced by a large number of different kinds of capital goods”.49 “The extreme abstraction [is made] that all sources of economic growth have been identified and attributed to one or another form of capital, broadly defined”, Weitzman wrote in 1976, of his own variation of

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Weitzman, “On the Welfare Significance of National Product in a Dynamic Economy”, 156–7; Nordhaus and Tobin, Is Growth Obsolete?, 14. Hicks, Capital and Time, 163; Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, Nature’s Numbers. Solow, “On the Intergenerational Allocation of Natural Resources”, 141, 148. Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, Nature’s Numbers, 188.


a “capital theory of value”.50 An environmentalist study called Nature’s Services spoke of “the goods and services flowing from natural ecosystems”, which “are greatly undervalued by society”.51 To be valued, in these views, is to be something like a thing: to be the sort of thing that is owned, or persists over time, or is itself something by which other things are produced. Social relations between men, as Karl Marx wrote in the first chapter of Capital, assumed “the fantastic form of a relation between things”.52 The twentieth century, too, was a capital century. But the political history of the idea of environmental capital did not correspond in any straightforward way, all the same, to a division between right and left, in economic thought, or between “classical”, “neo-classical” and other economists. Pigou was the anti-hero of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the living representation of the “classical theory of unemployment”, with its implication that unemployment is caused by “frictional resistances [to] appropriate wage adjustments”.53 He was an even more anti-heroic figure in Knight’s, Hayek’s and later R. H. Coase’s critiques of the economics of welfare, with its excessive confidence in the wisdom of government, and its excessive anxiety over “market failure”. He was the representation, in particular, of the “fallacy of social cost”, or of the conception of the state as an entity intervening to increase national welfare, or national efficiency, rather than to “define and protect property rights, enforce contract and prevent . . . collusion and monopoly, the antithesis of competition”.54 He was too confident in the efficiency of competition for Keynes, and too unsolicitous of competition for Knight. He was too modest and too grandiose in respect of the state. These were the large, implicit and unresolved questions of the disputes over capital of 1941–2, and they returned in different form in the late twentiethcentury discussions of national or environmental capital. The question of the

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Weitzman, “On the Welfare Significance of National Product in a Dynamic Economy”, 156–7; idem, “Shiftable versus Non–shiftable Capital: A Synthesis”, Econometrica 39/3 (May 1971), 511–28, 516. Gretchen C. Daily, Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (Washington, DC, 1997), 2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, vol. 1 (London, 1970; first published 1887), 72. “It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything, tingeing all other colours and modifying their special features ... Capital is the economic power that dominates everything in bourgeois society.” “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy”, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York, 1978), 146–7. J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York, 1964; first published 1936), 278–9. F. H. Knight, “Some Fallacies in the Interpretation of Social Cost”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 38/4 (Aug. 1924), 582–606, 606.

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heterogeneity of objects of value had virtually vanished, by the 1990s, from theories of conventional, or manufactured capital.55 But the objects which would be likely to enter into a stock of natural-cum-manufactured capital were vastly more disparate in a physical sense, and in the sense of their expected persistence over future time (from genetically engineering bacilli to uranium deposits). They were more disparate, too, in the sorts of property rights with which they were associated, or in the modes in which they (or their services) were owned. They were owned (or valued) in one society, and of interest in other societies. “If factors of production are thought of as rights”, as in the expression of R. H. Coase, then the property rights in pilchards and unproved diamond reserves, in the Namibian desert and the Uluru rock, were heterogeneous indeed – heterogeneous, in particular, in their proximity to near-market substitutes, and to the possibility of being evaluated on the basis of market or “shadow prices”.56 It was “society”, in Pigou’s and Hicks’s conceptions of 1941–2, which had an interest in the evaluation of “net social income”, and of national or social capital. It was society, too, which had the responsibility for the exercise of valuation or measurement: for identifying the disparate objects of value, or capital-like things, and for deciding on how they should be valued. For the authors of Nature’s Numbers, the procedure would be discreet and unobtrusive. It would be a “monitoring of physical flows and valuation”, within “existing regulatory analysis and enforcement”, just as the measurement of economic flows is dependent on existing tax administration, including customs and excise enforcement. It would rely on “the market’s estimate” of the future, rather than on the calculations of “a dream team of world-class researchers”.57 But the exercise would be undertaken, all the same, on behalf of “society”. It would be paid for by “society”, or by the state, or even, in the case of the capital-like things which were heterogeneous in the sense of being owned in one society and of interest in other societies,

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If the services of heterogeneous capital goods are aggregated on the basis of the “cost of capital”, then the cost incorporates expectations about the future. See Dale W. Jorgenson, “Information Technology and the U.S. Economy”, American Economic Review 91/1 (March 2001), 1–32. R. H. Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost”, Journal of Law and Economics 3 (Oct. 1960), 1–44, 44; and see R. H. Coase and R. F. Fowler, “The Pig-Cycle in Great Britain: An Explanation”, Economica new ser., 4/13 (Feb. 1937), 55–82, 80. “Imagine for a moment that a dream team of world-class researchers is asked to analyze the important question of the impact on future living standards of the exhaustion of finite petroleum stocks”. The report’s conclusion was that in spite of a “large budget”, and a “massive, dynamic, computable” model, the “dream research team” would be less credible than “the market’s estimate”. Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, Nature’s Numbers, 194, 196.


by an international organization, or an international society, “at the global level”.58 Hayek’s second objection to Pigou, to do with the insideness of values, raised more profound difficulties. Hayek’s evocation of a “changing world, where different people, and even the same people at different times, will possess different knowledge”, was an anticipation of his celebrated denunciation, also in Economica, a few months later, of the “scientism” which seeks to look at societies “from the outside”, and to exclude “our knowledge of the inside of these social complexes”, of “what things mean to the acting men”, or of “the intentions of the acting individuals”. “The blind transfer of the striving for quantitative measurements”, he wrote, had led to “assignments of numerical values which are absolutely meaningless”.59 It was an anticipation, too, of Hayek’s eulogy to the dispersed or disparate knowledge, the local knowledge of millions of individuals, in opposition to the systemic knowledge of experts. The dominion of “suitably chosen experts” was itself a despotism.60 The enterprise of valuing environmental or natural capital was unavoidably, in these terms, an exercise in looking at society, or the universe, from the outside. The procedure for evaluating environmental capital would begin, in principle, with an approximation to what the economist Irving Fisher described as an “instantaneous photograph of wealth”, of long-lived and fleeting things, things which were living and things which had never lived, owned and unowned things, mines and mountains and the sap of Amazonian trees and the “infinite number of species of animals which have never been seen or known by men” (this was the expression of the sprite, in Leopardi’s dialogue of 1827).61 The economists and others who were engaged in the evaluation—we might call them a virtual “Bureau of Environmental Value”—would be practical individuals. They would wish to include, in the photograph, only the things which contributed to production, or which were likely to contribute to production in the future; they would also seek to include, in this photograph of things which were uneconomic—in the sense that either the things or the services of the things were unowned, or difficult to 58

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On the environment and property rights which are of interest in more than one nation, see Nalebuff, “On a Clear Day, You Can See the Coase Theorem”, 35, 44–6. Hayek, “Maintaining Capital Intact: A Reply”, 279; idem, “Scientism and the Study of Society”, Economica new series, 9/35 (Aug. 1942), 268–9; idem “Scientism and the Study of Society, Part II”, Economica new series, 10/37 (Feb. 1943), 34–63, 40–41, 47, 57; “Scientism and the Study of Society, Part III”, Economica new series, 11/41 (Feb. 1944), 27–39, 31. F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, American Economic Review 35/4 (Sept. 1945), 519–30, 521. It would “reveal, in addition to the durable wealth . . . trainloads of meat, eggs and milk in transit . . . Even the supplies on the table of a man bolting his dinner would find a place”. Irving Fisher, “Senses of ‘Capital’”, Economic Journal 7/26 (June 1897), 199–213, 19.

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own—only the things which were almost economic, or which had almost-market substitutes; they would exclude things that contributed to consumption, or wellbeing, without contributing to the production of well-being. (Mineral deposits, for example, were “instrumental productive capacity”, in Solow’s distinction, while “natural beauty . . . [was] more a question of direct consumption”.62 ) When the Bureau had decided on its retouched photograph, its inventory of physical stocks and flows, it would have to produce a second instantaneous photograph, of the values of all the things, a photograph with price labels stuck all over it.63 But this procedure, or this sequence of representations, would always, in Hayek’s terms, be a view from outside. It raises the political and epistemological questions with which Hayek was later so vexed, about the foundations of social knowledge, and the despotism of experts. It also raises, in a new form, the capitaltheoretic questions about expectations of 1941–2. The values of individuals change over time, and with new information. They are based, often, on false information. They may be based, too, on information which would be thought of by experts as frivolous. There is unanticipated technical change, or there are unanticipated changes in values; the publication of the Bureau’s own reports is among the events which affect expectations of future production. The preferences of individuals include preferences over the sorts of natural things to be included in the Bureau’s inventory, and the sorts of procedures by which they are to be evaluated. The third objection to Pigou, or Hicks’s objection about the identity of the valuers, and the “purpose for which the definition [or the valuation] is wanted”, was the most pointed of all, in relation to environmental capital.64 Pigou’s initial interest in maintaining capital intact had to do with the concept of income, and income tax. It was not entirely clear what Hayek’s interest was — some sort of self-evaluation, perhaps, on the part of a group of businessmen, concerned to judge whether one of their members “has done his best”, or “as well in this effort as he might have done”.65 But Pigou’s interest had clearly evolved by 1941–2, as Hicks discerned, to a concern with net social income, or the income of nations. The evaluation of national or social income was Hicks’s concern as well, in the 62 63

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Solow, “On the Intergenerational Allocation of Natural Resources”. As in Hegel’s description of the “museum” of science: “What results from this method of labelling all that is in heaven and earth . . . is nothing less than ‘a report as clear as noonday’ on the universe as an organism, viz. a synoptic table like a skeleton with scraps of paper stuck all over it, or like the rows of closed and labelled boxes in a grocer’s stall”. G.W.F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford, 1977), 31. “It is not profitable to embark on the fine analysis of a definition unless we have decided on the purpose for which the definition is wanted.” Hicks, “Maintaining Capital Intact: A Further Suggestion”, 175. Hayek, “Maintaining Capital Intact: A Reply”, 279.


wartime years during which the modern “international” systems of national accounts were developed. It is Pigou’s interests in net social income which have survived, for the most part, in the late twentieth-century environmental-cum-economic accounts. The “purpose for which” the accounts were wanted was to serve as a reminder of the future, or a way of remembering about resources — for “scorekeeping or management”. But the question of who it is is who was to do the evaluating, and the purpose for which the evaluation was wanted, was of political importance, even in the administrative universe of the Bureau of Environmental Value. Capital-like things were bundles of property rights, in the description of Pigou’s critics, and the “satellite accounts” of the Bureau were likely to be of the greatest importance for the expectations of the owners of these heterogeneous things, and these heterogeneous bundles. Penalty taxes, as James Buchanan pointed out in a commentary on Coase, were changes in property rights.66 They might even (to use Paul Samuelson’s language, in relation to the services of capital goods), be “‘suspected’ in advance”, thereby inducing “anguish and revaluations” on the part of the owners of mountains, fishing vessels and undersea diamonds.67 So there was a need, even in the neo-Pigovian system, for a political economy of environmental valuation, in the limited sense of late twentieth-century economics, of uncovering the secret self-interest of public officials, and of the enterprises with interests in influencing the officials’ “scorekeeping”. There was a need, too, for a theory of the state, in Buchanan’s expression, and even for a theory of international society.68 The descriptions of government in the earliest summaries of the UK and US accounts systems established in the 1940s were almost comically unselfconscious about the political process; the state was a “simple extension of individual households” which undertakes “agency activities for the body of consumers as a whole”, or an agency which provides output “on behalf of the community as a whole, which it has been found better to secure collectively rather than individually”.69 But the work of the Bureau of Environmental Value, with its scorekeeping (or exhortation) and its management (or regulation), would not be entirely modest. It would not be a “coercive legal device for directing self-interest into social channels”, perhaps, as in the expression

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James Buchanan, “The Coase Theorem and the Theory of the State”, Natural Resources Journal 13/4 (Oct. 1973), 579–94. Paul A. Samuelson, “The Evaluation of ‘Social Income’: Capital Formation and Wealth”, in The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 292–324, 303. Buchanan, “The Coase Theorem and the Theory of the State”, 579. Richard Stone, The Role of Measurement in Economics (Cambridge, 1951), 43, 56; US Department of Commerce, National Income (Washington, DC, 1954), 38.

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of Pigou’s that his critics so disliked. But it would be a “method of social control”, in Hayek’s own expression, or a series of public numbers, “inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do”.70

history and imagination To return, in conclusion, to the varieties of environmental and intellectual history, I hope I have been able to show that at least some of the controversies in the history of economic thought, and even in the “highest” or most abstract economic thought, are of interest in relation to the history of the environment, and that the economic theory of capital is intertwined in elaborate and to some extent counterintuitive ways with political ideas about the state. It has been a history of the destinies of intellectuals (or economists), and also of the destinies of ideas; of the changing relationships in which the high economic thought of theorists is influenced by, as well as influencing, the medium or intermediate economic thought of tax specialists and directors of statistical offices, and the low economic thought of the many more millions of people who are interested in sustainability and sustainable development. Environmental history is the history of the entities and ideas that are everywhere, and all around: all around human individuals, in particular. It is not a history of something like a layer of wool, which surrounds the earth. It is a history, rather, of the relationships between people and things, which are in part relationships of ideas. The history of environmental policy is, as Charles Rosenberg has said of the history of health policy, a neglected and promising area for research.71 It is connected, in the story with which I have been concerned, to another neglected area—that of the history of national and international economic statistics, or accounts, statistical systems which were invented, in their contemporary form, amidst the maximally national purposes of the 1940s, and which have been adapted, intermittently, to the circumstances of transnational politics and transnational exchanges. It is also connected to the amazing late twentieth-century story of the new transnational age of words, or numbers; of non-governmental organizations, expert committees, “UN words”, sustainability indicators and Namibia’s or Australia’s augmented capital accounts; of “big, impractical, words”, and also big, impractical, international numbers.

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Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 129; F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1972; first published 1944), 75; Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, 527. Charles E. Rosenberg, Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now (Baltimore, 2007), 186.


I would even like to suggest that these historical stories can illuminate our own (our 58,000,000 million own) environmental ideas. The idea of environmental capital has in the economists’ stories been identified as a “reminder”, a “score”, or a “rule of thumb”. It is a reminder, in particular, of the future, and of the unsold (or the unsaleable.) There is something odd, of course, about the conception that in order to remind people of something, or of its value, one should describe it as being like a capital asset. As one of the theorists of environmental capital concluded in 2007, “the macroeconomic history of nations looks very different when Nature is included as a capital asset in production”.72 It would be a history, at least, with very little space for the imagination of a different and distant future.73 There is something odd, too, about the ingenuous descriptions which economists, at least since Pigou, have given of the relationship between economic theory, the expanding industry of applied economics and economic consultancies, and economic (or environmental) policy. But the reminder of the unreproducibility of resources constituted by environmental-cum-economic accounts, and by the large round numbers of “Green NNP”, has at the same time been a powerful impetus to environmental protection and conservation. The US Department of Commerce’s integrated environmental accounts were suspended in legislation introduced, in 1994, by Congressman Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia, who in his own description “advocates a ‘common–sense’ approach to environmental regulations that impact coal [and] opposes politically driven air requirements”.74 The enterprise of maintaining (environmental) capital intact is a Pigovian and dirigiste enterprise, which is susceptible of Hayekian (or libertarian) apprehensions. It is a “liberal” and a “conservative” cause.75 It is an objective to be attained through information, regulation, taxation, or the politics of

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Partha Dasgupta, “Nature and the Economy”, Journal of Applied Ecology 44/3 (June 2007), 475–87, 487. On the politics of energy and climate change, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009), 197–222; and Timothy Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy”, Economy and Society 38/3 (Aug. 2009), 399–432. CONFERENCE REPORT ON 4603 (House of Representatives—August 16, 1994), TITLE II—DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, Amendment No. 69, sponsored by Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (Dem., W.Va): “The conferees understand that there has been considerable debate over the years as to the objectivity, methodology, and applicability of ‘Integrated Environmental–Economic Accounting’ or ‘Green GDP’ . . . The conferees expect BEA to suspend development of Phase II of this initiative.” Library of Congress, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi–bin/query/F?r103:1:./temp/∼r103YsjkSe:e116248; and see http://www.house.gov/mollohan/bio.htm, accessed 30 Oct. 2008. On liberalism and conservatism in the economic thought of the 1930s and 1940s see Angus Burgin, “The Radical Conservatism of Frank H. Knight”, MIH 6/3 (Nov. 2009), 513–38.

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environmental numbers. It seeks to convince (or to “nudge”) with numbers.76 It is a governance, like so much of environmental policy, of “suitably chosen experts”. But it is a profoundly un-Hayekian enterprise, too, in the sense that the individual knowledge which Hayek opposed to the centralized and systemic knowledge of the state was knowledge of the local and fleeting, and the knowledge which is so important in environmental politics is also individual knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of immense systems and the infinite future. The story, in the end, has been about the different ways in which different kinds of individuals, economists and non-economists, Namibians and English and Austrians, individuals in the past and the future individuals they imagined, assigned names and numbers and property rights to different kinds of things. It is inspired, in this respect, by one of the greatest works of environmental history, for the different ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century individuals thought about the world of things are as diverse, now, as the ways of buying and selling and gathering and naming which William Cronon described in Changes in the Land: a world which was widened by Cronon to include “rocks, trees, and soil; plants and animals, both wild and domestic; insects; and even invisible . . . microorganisms”, and which is also, now, a worldwide world.77

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On the “libertarian paternalism” of the nudge, in which the efficient operation of institutions designed by well-informed “choice architects” is propitious “not for bigger government, just for better governance”, and in which “it helps to think about the environment as the outcome of a global choice architecture system”, see Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (New Haven, 2008), 11–14, 185. The sinister-sounding Bureau of Environmental Value would be more libertarian and less paternalistic, in these terms, to the extent that it disclosed the information on the basis of which it arrived at its large green numbers. John Demos, “Foreword”, in William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, rev. edn (New York, 2003), xiii.



the subject and the work of difference: gender, sexuality, and intellectual history sandrine sanos Department of Humanities, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi E-mail: [email protected]

Tracie Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006) In her epilogue, Tracie Matysik argues that “questions of universalism, difference, and morality beyond the law have returned with a new force” (256). Similarly, in hers, Judith Surkis shows how the recent virulent controversies around the headscarf in republican French schools and their attendant legislation have a genealogy in the vibrant fin de siècle debates on pedagogy, secularism, and citizenship (243–8). Few would argue with Surkis and Matysik’s contention that contemporary debates on universalism, citizenship, and secularism which haunt Western liberal democracies have a historical past, yet few have explored this past in such an illuminating manner. By reflecting on these issues, both studies illustrate how intellectual history, far from being the abstract and arcane sub-field of history it is still considered by some critics, has contemporary purchase and speaks to a present that must be thought historically. These authors show how (sexual) difference constituted a central term in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century definition of the nature and social expression of the subject. Surkis and Matysik’s studies have much in common, despite their different national contexts in France and German-speaking Europe.1 Both engage the question of the subject and explore a range of intellectual projects devoted

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Both Surkis and Matysik were trained at Cornell University under the aegis of Dominick LaCapra. Along with another recent alumna, Camille Robcis, their work exemplifies a new generation of intellectual historians committed to bringing together the insights of feminist theory, gender, and intellectual history. See, for instance, Camille Robcis, “French

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to the definition of a (French) moral or (German) ethical subject and its relationship with the social, the state, and the world at large in global and imperial contexts. They engage the terms of these debates on morality, secularism, and citizenship in order to illuminate how the boundaries between public and private and the relationship between the state and the (often presumed masculine) individual were delineated, contested, and reworked. Such commonality is not only evident in their object of study, but in the ways in which they approach their subject. They mine a familiar terrain but, by considering the logic of gender and sexuality, they shed light on issues otherwise too often left unacknowledged. As the last two decades of feminist and gender history has shown, gender and sexuality are privileged sites of meaning for the definition of social life. Both Matysik and Surkis exemplify how, in the words of one historian, the “richly theorized and reflexive feminist historiography, understood as a critical rethinking of historical discourse more generally,” works against the grain of modern European intellectual history by engaging more specifically the questions that pertain to the enduring concern of modernity, namely that of subject, difference, and otherness.2 Gender and sexuality are not just objects of thought but categories of difference whose very logic structured and enabled the production of political meaning. Both historians take seriously the argument made by some psychoanalytic-informed feminist theorists on “the entanglement of sex with the question of being,” since, as Sigmund Freud first theorized, “sex is not a predicate of the subject, it predicates that there is a subject,” and thus organizes the meaning of difference.3 Building upon the work of Joan W. Scott and Carolyn Dean, Surkis argues that “sexuality operated . . . as a powerful site through which individuals could be articulated to the social order, and not simply as a force to be ‘repressed’” (188).4 Here, Surkis’s indebtedness to Michel Foucault is evident in the ways she conceives of sexuality as the site where anxieties about proper masculine subjects’ obsession were driven by a desire for normative regulation made necessary by the very instability and fragility of such norms. Similarly, Matysik argues that for a number of ethics reformers in late nineteenthcentury Central Europe, “sexuality [constituted] the site at which ethics reform

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Sexual Politics from Human Rights to the Anthropological Function of the Law”, French Historical Studies 33 (Winter 2010), 129–56. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow, “Introduction: On Fidelity and Diversity”, in idem, eds., Manifestos for History (New York, 2007), 2. Joan Copjec, “The Fable of the Stork and Other False Sexual Stories”, Differences 21 (Spring 2010), 68, 65. See Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley, 2000).

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must operate” (114). Taking seriously how the subject was conceived (or assumed) as gendered and how difference inflected understandings of autonomy, agency, and selfhood has allowed rethinking of the traditional matter of intellectual history.5

∗∗∗ Surkis explores how French republican citizenship was defined through normative visions of masculinity that were “at once powerful and insecure”, and which were premised upon notions of an autonomous and independent subject that was problematic and needed both disciplining and regulation in order to be realized and to serve the state and the nation. She examines the classical “liberal paradox” that Dean and others have explored (4). After the French Revolution’s inauguration of equal and autonomous citizens, “the status of the ‘social,’ which is to say the modalities and norms regulating the relations between individuals, emerged as an ongoing problem in the nineteenth century” (127). Surkis explores how, from the late 1880s onwards, as the Third Republic emerged from the 1870– 71 Franco-Prussian war and engaged in a series of political reforms centered on education and secularization, the social was defined by a number of prominent critics, reformers, and intellectuals as a site to be properly regulated in order for republican citizenship to flourish. Citizenship was grounded in education and hygiene, which were conceived as moral problems with immediate political import. Morality was a matter of politics and, for many of the men steeped in the neo-Kantianism dominating late nineteenth-century French public thought, reform was urgently needed. Moral reform thus became a pressing issue because the “socialization of [male] citizens” was required for the success of a republican nation. Revisiting familiar texts, Surkis “highlights how gender and sexual norms were implicated in these visions” (71). She argues that debates and theorizations of the social were premised upon a “conjugal heterosexuality” considered as “matrix” and “crucible of sociality” (9, 11). In effect, Surkis shows how republican citizenship was articulated by policing and regulating the content and borders of masculinity and how marriage became a marker of modernity. Modernity presumed the disciplining of bodies (of women and colonial subjects as well as of men) in different ways and with different effects. As a result, “The heterosexual masculinity of the citizen, and the specter of its failure, was a structuring assumption of [conservative and progressive] arguments” (103). But, importantly, these normative constructions were not self-evident and required thinking 5

For an instance of this productive engagement, see Judith Surkis’s comment on the occasion of an MIH forum on Jerrold Seigel’s Idea of the Self, in MIH 3 (2006), 315–22.

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through the particular problems posed by modern life and the ways in which the relationship between public and private, state and family, right and duty were to be articulated. Surkis argues that, for late nineteenth-century reformers and thinkers, “Masculinity, like citizenship, required schooling” (15). Efforts to reform republican citizens were located especially in pedagogy debates on the role and nature of education. According to Surkis, these efforts centered around conceiving a “liberal discipline, which sought to foster subjects who were capable of moral self-regulation” (26). While philosopher and primary education director Ferdinand Buisson called for the recognition of “maternal love” as a counterpoint to paternal authority that would help develop young boys’ desire to learn in republican schools, his fellow neo-Kantian reformer Henri Marion celebrated conjugal love as the most desirable force to counter the potentially perverse excesses and deviations of adolescence. For him, “the proper administration of passions was central to social order,” and adolescence a universal experience that must be harnessed and redirected (44). For both men, reflecting on the relationship between reason and affect led them to “the complementary logic of conjugality” as a central expression of the blending of reason and affect into ethics (51). Additionally, a number of novelists, thinkers, and social scientists expressed profound concern with the supposedly deleterious effects of the quintessential republican institution, the secondary school (lycée), in its design to mold and train the state’s elites. Arguments centered on the lycée’s failure to produce young men—citizens—perfectly adapted to the demands of modern life and the requirements of the state, a problem made urgent by the democratization of education. In contrast to primary schools, critics claimed that these relied too much on reason, authority, and “excessive discipline” and worried that the secondary schools produced citizens characterized by both “individualism and alienation.” At schools—especially internats and boarding schools—boys were unmoored from the nurturing influence of family life (in which mothers held a central role) only to be socialized in a space at once harsh and promiscuous that abolished social and sexual boundaries (71). Schools’ authoritarianism encouraged feminization and an excess of docility, in short a perverse masculinity at odds with the ideal self-reliant and autonomous citizen. While conservatives like Maurice Barrès emphasized the need for male citizens to be rooted in the family, for him a site of tradition and culture, other republican critics affirmed the need for the lycées to be transformative so as to avoid the production of “implicitly perverse subjects who were both incapable of self-government and ill-adapted to social order” (83). The heterosexual conjugal family acted as civilizational tool and ideal. These debates, Surkis demonstrates, did not just focus on the form of education but also on its content, and its relationship with state, democracy,


and family (74). What was at stake was the nature of the moral subject and its foundation for a viable polity. Echoing Foucault, Surkis highlights how the four figures of the “repressed student, the unemployed bachelier, the unmarried man, and the childless bureaucrat” functioned as metonym for one problem, namely the presumed failure of the state to produce citizens (71). After 1890, debates questioned the nature of the knowledge disseminated in lycées. While some focused on the lack of meritocracy of secondary schools, others like novelist and education journalist Henry Béranger fictionalized the dangers of an excess of intelligence and knowledge over the regulating forces of “intuition” and love” (109). Discussions focused on a new figure, that of the civil servant now populating the corridors of the state. These men were failed instances of productive masculinity because subjected to the “moral degradation” that came from “monotonous tasks [and] meager salar[ies]” that left them unable to care for those dependent on them. According to critics, demographers, and pro-natalists, this was a public and social issue because this proletarianized class of bureaucrats could not assume the virile masculinity of republican citizenship since they were forced to “remain single, childless, or trapped a in loveless marriage” and were excessively individualistic. Instead, many argued, a strong nation demanded the “socialization of men’s instincts” (112, 116). Marriage alone could help the socialization of these deficient men into properly masculine citizens. The conjugal bourgeois heterosexual family was thus enshrined at the heart of the social because it alone, through marriage, could bind the public and private and help ward off instances of failed masculinity represented by the devirilized functionary, or the “overeducated, underemployed bachelor” (121). The conjugal metaphor appears ubiquitous in late nineteenth-century republican thought and, indeed, conjugal heterosexuality also figured prominently in the thought of sociologist Emile Durkheim (127). Here, Surkis fruitfully highlights the manner in which his vision of the social and his engagement in the questions of suicide, incest, and anomie were both premised and dependent upon a gendered and sexualized vision of the individual. Unlike some of the ethics reformers that Matysik examines, that vision of the masculine self, however, did not necessarily imply the recognition of a feminine subject but instead worked to elide femininity and women. As is well known, Durkheim conceived the (masculine) individual as inextricably bound by the social and articulated “a morality . . . rooted in a specific social milieu” (128). Like other republican pedagogues and reformers, he focused on men’s unwillingness to marry and father but proposed a different version of the male citizen that ultimately, according to Surkis, made heterosexual conjugality a central tenet for his vision of the social. Durkheim argued that those men who remained bachelors, unmarried, and childless were more susceptible to modern despair— and ultimately suicide—because they were not bound by the ties of dependency

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which would enable them to flourish socially. While critical of the patriarchal and what he identified as “primitive” models of sociality, he nonetheless saw the modern family as essential for male citizenship. Thus only the familial and the domestic expressed in the ideal of companionate marriage would prevent “egotism and anomie” (130). Durkheim concluded that familial and conjugal binding, as well as a sexual division of labor, allowed “solidarity” to complete and perfect the individual (145). This gendered and sexed vision of the subject enabled Durkheim to solve the regulatory dilemma at the heart of the republican project, and to simultaneously refuse the role of biology and nature, instead affirming the grounding of the subject in the social. It ultimately motivated his embrace of the state’s regulatory role in the “delineation and enforcement of domestic morality” (140). Surkis’s analysis of Durkheim’s theorization of the (gendered) subject and the social is especially provocative when she turns to his articulation of the role of desire for the modern male individual and of the sacred, incest, and kinship. She shows how Durkheim reformulated the grounds of morality by affirming the presumed heterosexuality of the male subject and valuing the generative nature of conjugal heterosexuality which, alone, could best found a productive moral and social order. Indeed, “For Durkheim, the modern male individual was fundamentally a subject of desire,” but that desire could not be left unfettered and instead must be properly harnessed in order to help generate citizens who flourished in modern society (160). In his early twentiethcentury lectures on moral education, Durkheim argued that desire and instinct needed to be regulated. Surkis illuminates how Durkheim thus turned to incest in order to affirm the inherently social value of these norms. For him, the incest taboo “instituted and recognized [the moral] order, and the gender and sexual relations it implied, as a socially desirable norm” (168). But in order to insist that kinship was a necessary social construct, rather than a natural form of social organization, Durkheim had to rely upon an essentialization of heterosexuality which founded his vision of the social. Same-sex desire was thus completely erased: “As an exemplary moral (as opposed to natural) rule, the prohibition of incest, as theorized by Durkheim, simultaneously instituted gender difference and the social organization of heterosexuality as constitutive of sociality itself ” (173). Heterosexuality and the gendered organization of social life thus became “sacred social principle[s]” at the heart of his vision of modern ethics (174). Sex (between men and women) fostered socialization. Surkis thus shows how Durkheim constructed conjugality as a moral ideal that confirmed men’s masculinity, socialized them, and allowed them to be autonomous because dependent on women now relegated to the private, the domestic, and the familial. For many republican reformers, sex determined the boundaries of the political.


∗∗∗ While French republican thinkers and reformers theorized the role of morality within citizenship, ethics Ethik rather than morality Sittlichkeit became a dominant concern in the same period for German and Central European intellectuals and activists. Matysik examines the debates that emerged within and in response to the ethics reform movement, a loose and heterogeneous collection of critics, philosophers, intellectuals, scientists, and activists in German-speaking Europe who saw ethics not as an arcane philosophical concern (though it was sometimes criticized by contemporaries on those grounds) but as allowing raising “more generally the question of just what —if anything—constituted the grounds of the moral subject” (170). In posing this question, they attempted to define the individual and its relationship with the community, and helped elucidate how the—moral, political, national—community should be conceived. These debates emerged as the urgent response to a rapidly changing social context characterized by urbanization, industrialization, and increasing nationalism, while traversing many of the pressing issues which consumed contemporaries, from secularism to global activism, political organization, and legal reform. Matysik highlights how these men and women conceived of ethics as “a privileged category of social organization and reform,” thus engaging the very meaning of liberalism and universalism (2). In chapters organized according to controversies and debates rather than strict chronology, Matysik focuses on the small but influential Deutsche Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur founded in October 1892 (25). It was mostly centered in Berlin, though it reached other German-speaking and European cities, and was liberal, secular, and universalist in orientation. By examining the writings of its founding members—Georg von Gizicki, Wilhelm Foerster, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Lilly Kretschmann, among others—and the pages of its biweekly newspaper Ethische Kultur, Matysik chronicles “how the idea of ethics functioned as a historically contingent site of contestation” for broad political and social issues (5). However, Matysik shows how discussions did not necessarily focus on the “regulatory dilemma” that preoccupied French republican reformers, but insistently tackled the issue of the subject’s moral nature and autonomy and thus called into question the philosophical frameworks that these—Kantian, Nietzschean, Hegelian, Spinozist—critics appealed to in trying to map the best conditions for a modern ethics. From Tönnies’s Kantian challenge to a Nietzschean ethics to discussions that tested the limits of theorizations of universal community, or the 1904–5 Foerster—Staudinger controversy regarding the role of reason in providing moral guidelines for the autonomous subject, questions of community, secularism, religion, and education consumed the ethics reform movement from the 1890s onwards, in keeping with the members’ commitment to “matters of humanity” (17). Because these debates posed the question of the relationship between public

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and private, as well as individual and community, sexuality and femininity figured prominently, for they were a privileged site of contest for theorizations of the subject that challenged the limits of the autonomous and liberal individual. Sexuality was thus a central term of these debates, inflecting and reshaping some of the positions that various participants held, especially as the organization radicalized and responded to evolving challenges. From the outset, questions of gender and sexuality had infused its concerns over reform but these, Matysik shows, did not necessarily unfold in ways some might assume. Already in 1896, the Deutsche Gesellschaft had debated monogamous marriage and reflected upon “reproduction, contraception, and regulation.” One of its founding members, Wilhelm Foerster, argued for the damaging effects on women of the “sexual slavery of marriage” (103). The exchanges between the organization and noted reformer Helene Stöcker’s League for the Protection of Mothers would again bring this question to the fore. Stöcker had been an ardent advocate of a “new ethics” where she “used ethics as a means to contest the ways in which the private and intimate were opposed to and cut off from the public and politics” (56). Stöcker argued that, for a proper moral subject to become a citizen, the double standard of morality (Doppelmoral) that prevailed must be challenged and a distinctly feminine moral subjecthood must be acknowledged. More radical than the German women’s movement that had influenced her, Stöcker turned to the Nietzschean’s injunction to “learn to love first” as a means to reevaluate a feminine moral subject that, she argued, was “synthetic” and did not separate public from private, nor sexuality from love (68– 9). In fact, the feminine subject must be recognized as sexually differentiated and citizenship must incorporate the “freedom to pursue one’s private desires” (70). Like others in the period, Stöcker challenged the model of the liberal subject, instead emphasizing “a political model that accounts for desiring feminine subjects” and thus refuted the gender complementarity at the heart of bourgeois liberal definitions of citizenship (84, 90). Stöcker’s reformist model resonated amidst the ranks of the Deutsche Gesellschaft especially in the early twentieth century. Sexuality shored up issues of self, morality, and Christianity. The question of ‘sexual liberation’ required a sustained engagement with the philosophical frameworks that framed many of these critics’ positions: while Stöcker and Bruno Mayer emphasized a Nietzschean vision of the subject, others, like Foerster and Staudinger, evoked a Kantian subject even as they parted ways on the consequences of this position (106). For instance, Foerster, who had “criticized sexual liberation only as the utmost example of modern individualism and its na¨ıve reliance on the rational self,” theorized the relationship between sexuality and moral autonomy, which seemed the most urgent problem, since it spoke to religion and ethics. For him, the question was how to master physical drives


(109). Marital monogamy and Christianity would thus help in producing a moral subject who would function in the social unfettered by drives. Secularists like Meyer, on the other hand, argued that “only sexual liberation would allow individuals to realize the kind of autonomy necessary for independent moral decision” (113). Ultimately, though, what matters in these positions, Matysik insists, is their logic and the lack of consensus around these issues. Similarly, sexuality informed and undergirded the international debates that infused the ethics reform movement’s global efforts, for it engaged questions of culture, nation, race, biology, and “universal humanity” (117). Some, like Freud and the Prague philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, turned to sexual ethics in the early twentieth century because it offered a way to think about the nature of the individual and the relationship of morality and the social. “Sexual ethics” allowed Ehrenfels to refine a Darwinian and racialist model of European humanity. In order to counter prevailing degeneration, the threat of an “Asian invasion,” and to win a global contest for supremacy, only a refusal of the Doppelmoral—as feminists, Stöcker, and Meyer had argued—and of the constraints of heterosexual monogamy would help foster national “virility” (122– 3). Still, unlike Stöcker, Ehrenfels did not call for a reconsideration of the feminine subject but instead offered a critique of a “masculine” Doppelmoral, advocating polygyny and reaffirming the need for masculine emancipation from conservative sexual mores and the need for female chastity. In this, Matysik argues, Ehrenfels was symptomatic both of a larger European racial discourse and of the prevalence of ethics in Central European intellectual and political circles as “the language with which to ground and justify reform” (126). On the other hand, Freud, who had approved of Stöcker’s reform attempts, engaged Ehrenfels and, like him, “began to understand ethics as a necessary site of conflict for the sexual subject” (129). Matysik shows how this concern infused some of his writings from 1908 to 1912 and allowed him to claim that the social could only be understood if individual desires were recognized. Freud’s articulation of ethics was thus infused with a belief that desire was marked with ambivalence and hostility and must be acknowledged in any theorization of the moral subject (133–4). Matysik concludes that while “Stöcker had understood sexual liberation as a means for the autonomous subject to realize his or her own ethical potential[,] Freud, in contrast, found sexual desire and moral regulation to be complementary components of the autonomous subject” (138). Some of these discussions came to a head around the 1909 government proposal for the rewriting of the Criminal Code’s paragraph 175, criminalizing female homosexuality. By the fin de siècle, female homosexuality had become a favorite though still marginal topic of sexology and psychoanalysis. The controversy around the proposal for paragraph 250 during World War I highlights the challenges and limits of visions of the female homosexual, and therefore of

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the foundations of the modern sexual subject. According to Matysik, this heated debate is an especially crucial moment in the ongoing ethics reform debate for it revealed the different logics at work around this legislative attempt as well as the assumption that the moral subject was indeed sexual in nature. While state proponents of the law reflected upon the issue of equality before the law and the “relationship between law, state interest, and public and private morality,” the definitional uncertainty of the category of the female homosexual opened up a space for protesters to argue against the law’s regulatory drive (159). Some, such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Heinrich Winzer, invoked the emancipatory power of science to argue that the purpose of the law was to correct, not mirror, the prejudices of public opinion on morality and sexuality (162–3). At stake in these debates was the nature of the individual: did the person possess a “sexual essence” or could one “assert a distinction between individuals and their acts” (165)? German feminists, however, did little to protest the law. Even Stöcker voiced a rather muted protest, emphasizing that love was “normal” when heterosexual, but still pointed out that all women would therefore fall under the purview of this legislation and suffer because of the difficulties of distinguishing between the practices of heterosexual and homosexual women (166). Ultimately, for many, heterosexuality was reaffirmed as the grounds for the social.

∗∗∗ These works highlight the different manner in which French and German reformers and thinkers defined subject formation, the nature of the individual, and its relationship with the social and the state. They thus interrogate the “uneasy relationship” that morality has held with the political and how it infused nineteenth-century definitions of the “social.”6 Despite my emphasis on their common critical outlook, the two books nevertheless differ somewhat in orientation for they address their field’s respective methodological concerns. For Surkis, World War I is a horizon, while it implies rupture in Matysik’s account. The end of the ethics movement came as a consequence of the war, yet Matysik skillfully traces its legacy for the psychoanalytic movement’s interwar investigation of the “gendered moral subject,” most notably in the work of Lou-Andreas Salomé and her theorization of narcissism, ambivalence, and otherness (223, 224). Matysik’s chapter on these interwar sequels is especially engaging for it reveals the trajectory of an idea—a gendered moral subject— in “unlikely” places. In turning to different sites, these books thus exemplify the productive paths opened in the wake of feminist and gender history, while offering 6

On morality and the political see Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton, 2001), 30.


the “reformulation” for “critical and self-questioning” intellectual history that practitioners like Dominick LaCapra have called for.7 In fact, one might argue that in many ways, Matysik and Surkis illustrate the kind of “critical history” whose “object . . . is the present though its materials come from the archives of the past” and whose “aim is . . . to illuminate those blindspots,” as Joan W. Scott has recently described it.8 Both works offer reflexive histories that show how “theory” can be productive in infusing familiar questions with a renewed force and, as Jacques Rancière has famously noted, in “finding an enigma in what seems to be commonsense.”9 To be sure, the fin de siècle has been richly mined, in a rich historiography with which Matysik and Surkis engage. Yet both manage to reveal the era’s “strangeness” and, in the process, show us how intellectual history might be rejuvenated. The (gendered) trope of youth and vitality suggests an exhausted body, and the fate of intellectual history has been a recurring source of “anxiety” and “unease.” These works, however, suggest not an exhausted body—intellectual history—but instead a reinvestment from within in the critical operations of intellectual history that manifests itself not only in the choice of object—how sexuality and sexual difference figured in fin de siècle debates—but also in the manner in which these objects are interrogated. While Matysik does not focus on individuals or ideas but offers an “intellectual history of a public discussion that was made up of conflicts and contradictions that revolved around the shared theme of ethics,” Surkis’s theoretically sophisticated blending of intellectual and cultural history calls upon historians to refute the logic of “crisis” that too often dominates accounts of late nineteenth-century France, and of its debates on gender, citizenship, and republicanism (10). Rather than presuming the stability of norms and ideals, Surkis begins from the assumption that these are “contingent,” and that historians must therefore pay closer attention to the “precariousness that constituted the force of masculinity as a norm” (12). These studies are therefore symptomatic of the ways consideration of sexual difference, gender, and sexuality might work firmly within the conventions of intellectual history while simultaneously extending and reworking its methods, objects, and assumptions. In different ways, Matysik and Surkis illustrate how a serious consideration of “theory” might productively help in this endeavor. This kind of critical work is especially important at a time when “theory” seems to be in retreat, and its alleged demise has been both celebrated and nostalgically

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A project begun in the 1980s, which he reiterates in a recent essay: Dominick LaCapra, “Tropisms of Intellectual History”, Rethinking History 8 (Dec. 2004), 511, 512. Joan W. Scott, “History-Writing as Critique”, in Jenkins, Morgan, and Munslow, Manifestos for History, 35. Jacques Rancière, L’inconscient esthétique (Paris, 2001), 11.

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bemoaned.10 Surkis’s Sexing the Citizen is a Foucauldian project examining the subject as the site where both emancipation and regulation are justified and articulated. For, according to her, paying attention to the instability of categories of meaning and the work of difference in establishing meaning allows us to explore how “the instabilities that haunt such socially constituted categories are not, of necessity, delegitimating” (8). This rigorous attention to difference rejects the simple “binary between history and theory” that still afflicts historical debates.11 It is precisely the provocative insights of Surkis’s work that have led one historian to scapegoat it for “reek[ing] of sophisticated theories about sexual instability and a certain postmodern fluidity.”12 Such reactions testify to the rigorous work she has undertaken (all the while anachronistically echoing the oppositions that have in the last decade pitted proponents of social history against those of cultural history, and empiricists against post-structuralists, even among feminist historians). Surkis demonstrates how a rich and theoretically sophisticated lens might help revisit the familiar and question its assumptions. She also shows what might be gained once the tools of intellectual history are applied to a wider range of sources and topics. In the last part of her book, she turns her attention to how “hygienic reform” over questions of venereal disease and prostitution in the metropole and the colonies—conceived as “experimental spaces” for reform— reveals contemporaries’ obsession with “how best to moralize and socialize men within the secularized framework of republican politics” (225, 187). Managing the contradictions of regulation reformulated the notion of reform and rights while revealing how “hygiene was a flexible principle that at once constructed and reproduced sexual, racial, and class differences between subjects” (224). Marking out difference between subjects was precisely the work done by French republican thinkers’ entanglement with sexual difference and sexuality as they mapped out a desirable masculine citizenship. While Surkis illuminates how norms are contingent and meaning unstable, Matysik’s interrogation of a specific historical problem—the relationship of morality, subjectivity, and politics—is sustained by a theoretical engagement free of any narrow dogmatism. She explains she takes her cue from Foucault, 10

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On this point see Scott, “History-Writing as Critique”, 19–38. It is clear that “theory” and its uses still preoccupy many historians and critics. See, for instance, the recent collection Jenkins, Morgan, and Munslow, Manifestos for History, and the latest twentiethanniversary issue of Differences 21 (Spring 2010): “What’s the Difference? The Question of Theory.” Carolyn Dean offers a brief rendering of that “binary” and the ways it has framed the reception of LaCapra’s work as well as forms of intellectual history, “Intellectual History and the Prominence of ‘Things that Matter’,” Rethinking History 8 (Dec. 2004), 537–47. Karen Offen, H-France Forum 2/1 (Winter 2007), http://www.h-france.net/forum/ forumvol2/OffenOnSurkis1.html (italics added). Italics are mine.


Jacques Lacan, and feminist theory, and masterfully brings together the insights of German women’s history, feminist theory, and the recent literature on cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. She carefully attends to the contingency of debates, definitions, and discussions in order to “reconstruct the fin-de-siècle debates on subject-formation,” thus focusing not just on the centrality of sex and gender to fin de siècle definitions of the subject, but also on how they came about, and the complicated routes they took (7). Matysik’s last chapter ˇ zek’s reading of Otto Weininger and (brief) discussion of philosopher Slavoj Ziˇ especially highlight how a theoretical outlook (here inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, Luce Irigaray, and others) sheds new light on familiar issues. Though one might regret that, in her indebtedness to all critical theories, Matysik may not have teased out further how these helped her historicize ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics (7, 253–7). Ultimately, while Matysik’s work fits more recognizably within the conventions of intellectual history, it offers a different and compelling understanding of the subject, that is at once more complex and sensitive to the different influences that came to bear upon it. Both these authors interrogate how social life was given value—and according to what criteria—at a moment when those meanings, norms, and ideals were being challenged and redefined. Thus the “social,” that nineteenth-century obsession, is revealed in these works not as a “neutral and vacant backdrop” but, in the words of feminist scholar Denise Riley, a “strange phenomenon” that delineated the bounds and nature of the political through categories of difference.13 Taking seriously sexual difference as object and lens to bear upon analyses of the subject, ethics, and citizenship allows Surkis and Matysik to illuminate the historicity of morality, the state, and regulation. These scholars clearly demonstrate how theorizing the subject in this manner changes the “canon as much as the objects of historical investigation” and offer a sharp and provocative engagement with the historical vagaries of the individual, the self, and subjecthood.14

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Denise Riley, “‘The Social’, ‘Woman’, and Sociological Feminism,” in “Am I that Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (London, 1988), 49. Dominick LaCapra, “Resisting Apocalypse and Rethinking History,” in Jenkins, Morgan, and Munslow, Manifestos for History, 161.

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german post-darwinian biology reassessed frederick gregory Department of History, University of Florida, E-mail: [email protected]

Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) It is hard to imagine two more engaging and thoroughly researched works on German science than the two here under review. This is especially rewarding because in the period covered—the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth—it is often the physical sciences that command the attention of historians. This was the time when Helmholtz was at the peak of his profession and Einstein was emerging onto the scene. Richards and Nyhart are among those historians of science who are reexamining assumptions about the sciences of life in Germany from the beginning of the nineteenth century on. In particular, as scholars of Germany they refuse to concede to any other country or individual (including Darwin) the undisputed center of attention where biological science and even the subject of evolution are concerned. Both works are much more than straightforward narrative histories. Nyhart and Richards have each taken on difficult historiographical challenges in the course of presenting the results of their research. Nyhart’s study is social/cultural history at its best. She wants to show how the construction of a modern vision of nature was affected by the emergence of modern society. In particular, she wants to show how the anxieties that accompanied increased urbanization, industrialization, and urban poverty gave rise to reforms that took place not only in the political and social realms, but also in the very conception of nature. In affinity with the desire for political and social unity there arose a new biological perspective in which the watchword for understanding nature was community. This was not a conception in which the fate of the individual, fending for himself in a blind struggle of all against all, took 227

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center stage. Nature’s communities might well involve predators and prey, but the focus was on how members were ultimately dependent on each other and on the physical conditions of their existence. This nascent ecological outlook would grow and one day give rise to the scientific discipline of ecology, but not before it had been carefully nurtured by its creators. Where did this new emphasis come from? Nyhart has left no stone unturned in her investigation of the sources of the biological perspective. With one notable exception she did not find these sources in traditional academe; rather, she discovered that they were to be found among men (there is passing mention of but one woman) who worked in museums, in zoos, and in the public schools. In each case it was reformers who pushed the new conception. Taxidermists and zoo enthusiasts unhappy with the status of praxis in natural history began testing the limits of new possibilities. Innovative displays of animal groups in the wild eventually worked well in museums, themselves the object of fundamental reforms in which both engaging the mass public and promoting scientific research were joined together as vital aspects of the museum’s new mission. Zoo reformers portrayed living natural history as an extension of the museum, while school reformers developed a new curriculum based on the community concept. Nyhart provides an impressive treatment of each of these institutions in nineteenthcentury Germany; indeed, her work is a must-read for historians who specialize in these areas. In each case there was a direct avenue of influence that led beyond the general public to various professional circles, in the end including academics. Nyhart notes that the time and place in which the biological perspective emerged was fraught with social change that was often perceived to be out of control. She focuses on northwest Germany, the perhaps unexpected geographical locus from which much of the biological perspective became known. Nyhart feels obligated to explain why the northwest figured so prominently, even though it is less the geographic location than the rapidly changing social structure of German cities she wishes to cite as a motivating factor in the appearance of the biological perspective. Her explanation is that the overlapping of the personal and professional networks exploited by the central figures of her account happened to be strong in the north. This adventitious explanation of why the northwest was key is not convincing. She would do better simply to accept that many of the main actors in the story worked in northwest Germany and leave it at that. As noted, it is the changing social structure that is more important to her and in this regard cities like Kiel, which plays a prominent role, was like many others in Germany at the time. In the countryside traditional dress and other symbols of the old ways were fast disappearing. In Kiel urban growth was out of control, producing dislocation among the rapidly growing population and putting pressure on infrastructure and public institutions. It is not surprising that in this context there were those who asked if there was a natural order of society

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from which modern society was straying. If we look to nature, what does it tell us about what is permanent and lasting? Friedrich Junge, a school director in Kiel and author of an influential book on biological communities (The Village Pond, 1885), explained that studying these communities was important for children because it helped them to answer basic questions: what is my place in society? Where do I fit in? Junge pointed out that communities existed on many levels, wherever the individual, through working to maintain himself, also contributed to the health of the larger unit. A household was a community, as was a city. The state was a more complex community, but it still involved the rendering of service and the dependence of the individual. Nyhart points out that in the 1880s and 1890s schoolteachers wanted especially to cultivate a sense of patriotism and Germanness in students because Germany was a new nation. Not only so, but the new German Empire was being threatened by socialism and it was important to teachers to counter antistate activities. What is involved here, Nyhart notes, is the question of German identity in the aftermath of unification. When Germans asked such questions they tended not to get the answer made famous by Herbert Spencer in England. Nature’s lesson was not that only the fit survive, that we let things be and refrain from assisting the weak. But that does not mean that all Germans writing about nature during the last half of the nineteenth century came to see it as community. Writing in the latter decades of the century, for example, the extremely popular scientific materialist Ludwig Büchner rejected the idea that we should regard humans as part of nature. True, he was thinking primarily about evolution, a subject avoided when possible in the latter half of the nineteenth century by many of Nyhart’s Germans. Büchner conceded that humans had evolved from more primitive forms, but in his mind the farther we distance ourselves from nature and acknowledge that we are not like animals, the more authentically human we become. He was in effect saying that humans must take responsibility for the future direction of evolution, not for the sake of nature, but for that of humans. Nature was still the Other, alien and foreign to humans and definitely not a conception that joined humans and animals together. This attitude represents an alternative to the biological perspective Nyhart depicts as emerging during the same years. Nyhart does not deal much with religion, leaving the reader with questions about how exactly we are to understand its place in the minds of the creators of the biological perspective. She is clear that the emphasis on community could be seen to reinforce a conservative political approach to understanding the responsibilities of citizenship. In answer to the query, “Who am I in all the diversity I see in nature?”, she quotes Junge to reply, “You are a link in the whole, you receive and give, you are dependent and have an effect” (178). That indeed could be understood to mean that we are all part of a natural system in which we are called on to play our part without trying to upset the natural balance. But how do we

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then differentiate humankind’s place in the grand scheme from the message being touted by Ernst Haeckel, who proposed in 1877 that evolution be substituted for religious instruction in the schools? Junge’s own school superintendent opposed his book, The Village Pond, because he believed it could lead to pantheism and atheism. Haeckel’s public promotion of his evolutionary world view led in 1882 to the banning of biology from the secondary-school curriculum in Prussia. We can clearly see why the founders of the biological perspective chose publicly not to associate with Haeckel or his monistic view, but did they privately embrace it? We suspect so. For his part, Richards has taken on a different and difficult challenge. Picking up from where he left off in his magisterial Romantic Conception of Life (2002), Richards wants to explore how the emotional inner biography of an individual helps us understand his significance. If Richards wanted to suggest merely that knowing something of Haeckel’s inner biography helps us understand him, we could easily agree. But he wants more. He wants to assert that knowing the inner biography helps us better understand not only Haeckel, but also to some extent his work. Richards has set out in this volume to reconsider the place of Haeckel in the history of science and in the history of Western culture. One of his goals is to raise Haeckel’s scientific stature in the annals of science from that of an unorthodox Darwinian to a sophisticated defender of Darwin’s theory, to replace Haeckel’s image as a mere popularizer with that of a scientific and even artistic genius. Since 2005 three other works have addressed the glaring lack of biographical material on Haeckel: Mario Di Gregorio’s From Here to Eternity: Ernst Haeckel and Scientific Faith (2005), Bernhard Kleeberg’s Theophysis: Ernst Haeckels Philosophie des Naturganzen (2005), and Olaf Breidbach’s Visions of Nature: The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel (2006). In addition, Sander Gliboff’s recent book on German evolutionary thought, H.G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German Darwinism (2008), also reevaluates Haeckel’s scientific achievements, including his understanding of evolution. Unlike these other works, Richards’s is a psychological study of Haeckel and his work. I have referred to Richards’s “psychological method” because what is important to him is Haeckel’s inner life. This is not psychoanalytic history in the vogue of Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther (1958) or Frank Manuel’s Portrait of Isaac Newton (1968). Richards wishes to become so knowledgeable about the details of Haeckel’s life that he acquires an intimate personal acquaintance with him. This, he hopes, will enable him to give an account of Haeckel’s life and work on more than one level. He will draw on the extensive repository of knowledge he has acquired to provide rational explanations of Haeckel’s achievements and activities based on the usual kind of evidence we demand of historical scholarship. There is much of that in this work. But Richards’s immersion in Haeckel’s life also provides a


foundation on which Richards bases personal judgments about the emotional motivations that undeniably played a part in decisions that made Haeckel who he was. Is such a goal feasible? If not it is not because Richards has failed to do his homework. No one has examined the historical record more thoroughly than he has, on the level of both primary and secondary sources. But can one become so familiar with the life of a historical figure that he can claim to know what makes that person tick? Can an appeal to one’s understanding of another’s emotional makeup possess explanatory power? That decision will have to be made by each reader, but in the end the decision will, at least in part, involve nonrational criteria similar to those Richards uses when giving us his judgment about Haeckel’s inner life. Richards is confident that his efforts to get to know Haeckel have allowed him to glean new insights. The common depiction of Haeckel as a mere popularizer, for example, misses the mark, according to Richards, because it fails to appreciate both the quality of his scientific work and the import of his representation of science. Richards takes us carefully through Haeckel’s scientific work to show us exactly how first-rate it was. For example, in just the first few years of his career he did pioneering work on protists, identifying them as a separate kingdom; he discovered and described myriads of marine species that continue to be associated with his name; he named and practiced the new science of ecology; and he was the first to argue systematically that metazoans come from single-celled creatures by aggregation and then the division of labor. But Richards in no way wants to undervalue the impact Haeckel had through his popular writings; indeed, according to Richards, it is to Haeckel that we are indebted for the joining of materialistic metaphysics with evolution. He informs us that before World War I more people learned about evolutionary theory through Haeckel’s works than through any other source. Since Haeckel’s materialistic and monistic version of evolution, which was perceived as nontheistic and even atheistic, became highly visible in the late nineteenth century, Richards is willing to conclude that this unrequired, or, in his word, nonessential, association between evolution and irreligion may well not have been made had Haeckel not lived. In popular culture Darwin has become the symbol of science against religion. Richards suggests that that role is more appropriately Haeckel’s. This is an interesting claim because, as Richards points out, the representation of evolution, especially in the twentieth century, has been that it entails atheism, or at least that linking it to a religious view is inappropriate. As the century wore on the association spread beyond evolution to all science: science itself was more and more seen to be atheistic. Successes in theoretical physics, especially with respect to attempts to unify nature’s fundamental forces, buttressed the idea that there

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was no intrinsic purpose evident in the universe, that the more we learn about it the more it seems that it is not governed, as physicist Steven Weinberg would have it, by any principle in which morality or human life or love or justice play any special role. And physicists themselves have credited Darwin’s idea of natural selection as the real source of this conclusion. Leonard Susskind credits Darwin and Wallace with really beginning modern cosmology because they were the first to provide explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents. But in Richards’s view, and that of many other historians and evolutionary scientists, the conclusion need not be drawn that Darwinian evolution entails an atheistic view. Tacking atheism onto neo-Darwinian evolution is in the end not required by the theory. But make no mistake here. Richards does think that there are aspects of science that are essential. He rejects the claim of some social historians that what we think of as defining features of evolutionary science (or any science) are not necessary features, but historically contingent trappings. For Richards, had Darwin not lived someone else would have come up with descent with modification and natural selection. These were not arbitrary or replaceable concepts. But he does not feel, as do so many neo-Darwinians today, that embracing the theory of evolution by natural selection means that one cannot embrace a religious view of the world. There are plenty of examples among modern evolutionists of thinkers who call themselves both Darwinian evolutionists and theists. Why, then, do they appear to be in the minority? Where did the widespread impression that being a Darwinian evolutionist means you are also an atheist come from? For Richards it is the polarizing impact of Ernst Haeckel. “Had Haeckel not lived, evolutionary theory would have turned a less strident face to the general public” (15). Richards brings his usual thoroughness and exquisite prose to his depiction of Haeckel’s life. His interpretation of the man turns on his seeing him as a Romantic, of course in the German sense. This is both the good news and the bad news. Richards is without question one of the country’s leading authorities on German Romanticism, especially as it manifested itself among natural philosophers of the first half of the century. He has the tools by which to examine the degree to which Haeckel was subject to the influence of German Romantic thought. By the same token, we must acknowledge that his claim to have found resonances of German Romanticism in Charles Darwin (by way of Alexander von Humboldt) have been criticized by those who find the notion unacceptable, even preposterous. But even these critics might not balk at Haeckel as a Romantic since many of them do not regard him as a genuine Darwinian to start with. Not surprisingly, it is far easier to show the romantic roots of Haeckel’s outlook than Darwin’s. Not only did Humboldt provide inspiration, so also did Johann von Goethe, whom, according to Richards, Haeckel always had by his side. It was Goethe’s scientific or poetic works he quoted at the beginning of every one of the


thirty chapters of the General Morphology (1866). And it was Goethe whom he credited as the source of his monism, the world view on which much of Haeckel’s fame rests. But of course it is not merely that he read and quoted these authors. It is more that he saw nature as they did, a unity that linked together every aspect of reality so completely that this unity itself could replace the God of his youth. And so Haeckel’s outlook is not pure materialism—monism joins matter and mind together into a fundamental unity the earlier German Romantics called the Absolute. Schelling was not alone in cherishing the works of Spinoza, for whom the unity of mind and matter was captured in his concept of substance. For Haeckel a universe that was devoid of purpose was impossible. He could not be content that all the purpose that exists comes from us humans. The riddle of the universe in part is that the cosmos is a meaningful place. We can surrender ourselves to it and rest content that we are part of a larger drama, though certainly not one directed by a transcendent Creator. The source of creation is not transcendent, but immanent, the Deus sive natura of Spinoza. Haeckel drew on the Romantic premise, originally derived from Kant’s thought, that we catch glimpses of the sublime in aesthetic judgments. Monism, he said, was the purest kind of monotheism. And yet Haeckel’s denunciation of formal religion, with its personal God, was so vicious that he was widely denounced as an atheist. He could not abide the intolerance of dogma, the refusal to be open to the possibility of new truth. Richards chronicles his struggles not only against religious fanatics, but also against many others who wanted to discredit him. Richards believes that early in his career the rapturously emotional love he shared with Anna, first as his fiancée and then as his wife, staved off the pull of materialism that came from his study of science. When she died on his thirtieth birthday after less than two years of blissful marriage, Haeckel came close to suicide himself. With nothing to restrain him, he abandoned all hesitation to leave behind the conventional, as he later said, dualistic understanding of reality and embraced the Romantic pantheism that would motivate and sustain him from then on under the name of monism. In a biographical note written a decade after the tragedy in Jena, Haeckel confirmed that the death of his wife “destroyed with one blow all the remains of my earlier dualistic worldview” (Richards, 107). Of course Richards would not contend that Haeckel’s inner convictions are the sole reason he turned to monism. As already indicated, his preparation for this move ran deep into his intellectual past. But Richards is clear that Haeckel’s mature intellect, including the specific scientific ideas he created, cannot be explained simply by referring to those whose works he had read. “The strategy of causally linking the theories of a scientist not only to the ideas supplied by predecessors and contemporaries but also to the deeper forces of the self is born of

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a historiographic conviction” (9). He cites the Spanish novelist, poet, playwright, and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who in 1913 lamented that most histories of philosophy presented various systems of thought as if they grew out of one another spontaneously. The philosophers themselves were mere pretexts. “The inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized,” continues Unamuno, “occupies a secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that explains for us most things” (Richards, 10). For Richards, as for Unamuno, the explanatory force of inner biography completes and subsumes the causal efficacy of logic. His defense of this historiographic conviction is eloquent: Ideas that are logically or semantically fit to be cause and effect of one another must yet be brought into proximity and charged with causal energy through hopes and fears, desires and sufferings. Without the infusions of personality, ideas floating through the mind of a scientist will remain limp and anemic, poor effete creatures that evanesce away. (10)

Given the tragic trajectory of Haeckel’s life, he was a subject ripe for Richards to attempt to make his case. How, specifically, does Richards argue that Haeckel’s inner biography helps us understand not merely Haeckel the man, but also his work? To make this claim he first assumes that the metaphysical trappings that accompanied Haeckel’s science are not extraneous to Haeckel’s science. Although no specific metaphysical belief is required by Darwinian science, monism does help to define Haeckel’s work in science. The trajectory of his life in science was profoundly affected by the loss of Anna. Although Richards does not say so in so many words, I have no doubt that he would agree that, had Anna lived, Haeckel’s place in the history of science would be quite different from the distorted one that has been depicted in the past and even from the corrected one presented in Richards’s book. Because Anna died Haeckel surrendered himself to research in materialistic science; indeed, he lost himself in it in part to deaden the pain of his enormous loss. But although he now had reason to accept that nature is governed by principles in which morality or human life or love or justice play no special role, he still could not deny his romantic self. Richards puts it eloquently in a revealing passage: The metaphysics that underlay Haeckel’s biology was well-suited to the science of the late nineteenth century and, I think, to that of our own time. It also allowed Haeckel to believe that the force of a once-living soul might be brought back into the beating heart of nature, since the conservation laws indicated that neither force nor matter could be destroyed. Anna would not die forever. (128)

Let me suggest that both of the authors under review here have something in common beyond their devotion to the history of German biological science in the nineteenth century. What I have in mind is their wish to address themes


much larger than the ostensible subjects of their studies. In Nyhart’s case the theme is implicit, not one she explicitly acknowledges as even present, let alone intended. That is the depiction, to borrow Erazim Kohak’s term, of a moral sense of nature. There is something “right” about the biological perspective in the minds of those who promulgated it. Perhaps this is because for these Germans the emerging modern understanding of nature always included humans—they were not excluded as they were in the early American ecological movement. Community in nature, then, carried a message for us, and that message had to do with our place in the grand scheme of things. If a historian’s choice of subject matter reveals something about the historian herself, if it is true that a historian cannot spend an extended amount of time with her subject, in Nyhart’s case over a decade, without some measure of identification, then we suspect she will not be unhappy that I read her book to have raised this larger, to be sure, controversial issue. Richards is quite explicit about the big picture with which his study of Haeckel has become entangled. While the very title gives away that Haeckel’s life is being portrayed as tragic, Richards wants us to see this as indicative of much more than the plight of one man. Near the end of his book Richards again cites Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, whose author spoke of “the tragic history of human thought” itself. Our tragedy lies in our inability to resolve the struggle between “reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality,” on the one hand, and “life bent on vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires” on the other (453). Our longing for immortality and union with the eternal divine cannot conquer the skepticism of reason, but neither can science quash our wish for a morally meaningful universe. Neither can vanquish the other, so we are caught forever, tragically trying in vain to resolve the irresolvable contradiction. His powerful utilization of Unamuno’s sentiment makes it clear that Richards himself endorses it. One bonus Richards gives us is a thoughtful appendix in which he assesses “The Moral Grammar of Narratives in the History of Biology.” Here he concludes that a historian’s narrative must make moral assessments, “not only in respect of the times in which the subject of the history operated but in respect of the historian’s own standards.” His ultimate purpose here is first to examine the subject thoroughly in general terms so that he can reasonably evaluate the ways Haeckel has been morally judged over the years, both with respect to individual episodes from his life (e.g. the alleged fraudulent manipulation of images to support his recapitulation theory) and to more general questions about his status as a scientist and as a proto-Nazi. Here Richards’s training in philosophy contributes constructively to his analysis, producing an essay well worth reading on its own.

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The appendix treats the question of moral judgment of historical figures in a general sense. With regard to the specific condemnation of Haeckel as a proto-Nazi, Richards vehemently rejects the characterization, passed along by numerous scholars, of Haeckel as an anti-Semite whose racist ideas paved the way for fascism. He concedes that Haeckel, Darwin, and most other nineteenthcentury scientists were racist in their depiction of human races in an ascending hierarchy. But he notes with satisfaction that Haeckel placed Semites at the pinnacle of his tree of human progress and that Nazi functionaries relatively quickly rejected an early attempt to claim Haeckel as a hero. Richards cites Haeckel’s positive valuation of Jews as important elements of German culture (from a discussion Haeckel held in the 1890s with an Austrian novelist on the phenomenon of anti-Semitism), and discredits evidence used by those who have tried to use Haeckel’s alleged membership in the right-wing Bavarian Thule Society (later instrumental in the rise of the Nazi German Workers’ Party). There was an Ernst Häckel who belonged, but he was a painter and not the professor from Jena. There are many particulars in both books that I have not discussed, particulars that show the depth of the authors’ research and their command of the subject matter. From the grand issues I have touched on, however, it should be clear that I regard both authors to have succeeded admirably in giving us wonderfully informative and provocative works that will long stand the test of time.

Modern Intellectual History, 8, 1 (2011), pp. 237–251 doi:10.1017/S147924431100014X


historicizing american travel, at home and abroad leslie butler Department of History, Dartmouth College E-mail: [email protected]

Judith Hamera and Alfred Bendixen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Mark Rennella, The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel. A Trip to Cuba appeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Dana’s story of his “vacation voyage,” To Cuba and Back. These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military “filibusters.” Howe’s narrative demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. “I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,” she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 “sprightly” pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of “foreign” institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores.1

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Julia Ward Howe, A Trip to Cuba (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), 3. Richard Henry Dana, To Cuba and Beyond: A Vacation Voyage (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1859), 245. Two separate reviews of A Trip to Cuba described it as “sprightly.” For a list of books of

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Yet for all this book had to say about Cuba, it revealed far more about Julia Ward Howe. Readers could glimpse the witty conversationalist and the sensitive poet, as well as the entitled middle-class American whose exasperation at Cuban service occasionally punctuated her account. They could also come away from the book with a sense of Howe’s political and social commitments, especially her emerging support for women’s rights and her opposition to slavery. Howe was, in fact, traveling with two prominent Boston abolitionists: her husband, the famed reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, and the ailing Unitarian-Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker, who was seeking respite from the tuberculosis that would shortly kill him. So certain was Howe’s sense of herself and her audience as “orthodox” antislavery on “this mighty question” that she allowed herself a startling degree of candor on the subject of race and labor, “one heretical whisper,” as she put it, “very small and low.” She recorded her shock at the contrast between the “negro of the North” (an “ideal negro . . . refined by white culture, elevated by white blood”) and the “negro among negroes” (a “coarse, grinning, flat-footed, thick-skulled creature . . . lazy as the laziest of brutes”), whom she encountered in the West Indies. Confronting what she perceived to be the free Afro-Caribbean’s refusal to work, Howe posed the “unwelcome question” whether “compulsory labor may be better than none.”2 Howe’s text embodies many of the difficulties associated with the travel narrative, which perhaps more than most literary genres calls out for historical analysis. We can note the way Howe created her literary persona “Hulia” to present comic, urbane, and often condescending commentary on the places and people of Cuba. We can observe the way her narrative followed or departed from earlier entries in the genre or how it presented a distinctively feminine perspective on the travel adventure. But fully understanding this book, especially its unsettling comments on compulsory labor, requires more comprehensive contextualization. We must know something, for example, about the limitations of northern antislavery opinion, about middle-class American views of labor, about the economic framework that informed British and American views of Caribbean emancipation, and about US relations with its Caribbean neighbors in the 1850s. And we must be able to situate her book in the broader cultural and intellectual contexts from which it emerged and into which it entered. Her comments drew a sharp rebuke from William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, which no doubt recognized the similarity between her commentary and Thomas

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foreign travel, see Harold F. Smith, American Travellers Abroad: A Bibliography of Accounts Published before 1900, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999). Howe, A Trip to Cuba, 12–13. Howe here was characterizing the free blacks she encountered in Nassau, where her ship stopped on the way to Havana. But she made similar comments about black Cubans in later chapters of the volume.

historicizing american travel

Carlyle’s dyspeptic “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Such circuits of influence and response suggest some interesting lines of analysis for the intellectual historian. Did Howe’s journey to the Caribbean induce her to accept ideas that were swirling around but were either too inflammatory or toxic to be domesticated in Boston? Did her abolitionist traveling companions draw similar conclusions? Did they discuss the issue on the trip? Can we read her printed musings on the possible necessity of coerced labor as an instance of fringe ideas working their way into the mainstream?3 As both the experience of travel and the narratives it has produced have been historically conditioned, so historical analysis is necessary to recover, explain, and interpret them. Yet historians seem largely to have ceded travel studies to literary and cultural scholars, who often employ historicist methods but who operate under a different set of assumptions and with different ultimate questions in mind. Historians have long used travel narratives as historical documents, but with few exceptions they have not developed larger thematic ways of understanding the history of travel. The two very different volumes under consideration here provoke some meditation on disciplinary distinctions while urging us to think about the literary and historical significance of travel in American culture. The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing presents the big picture and the long view, with commissioned essays ranging from the seventeenth century to the present and encompassing travel in specific domestic sites and international regions. The authors, nearly all from English departments, focus largely on travel accounts that appeared in some published form. By contrast, Mark Rennella’s The Boston Cosmopolitans offers an extended analysis of one specific group of travelers in one specific time period. Here the focus moves beyond literary texts to examine how travel helped shape the work of a handful of artists and intellectuals who in turn left their mark on the culture of Boston and the United States. Read together, they suggest that while literary scholars have done much to help us read travel texts—to see the ideological, cultural, and rhetorical work these texts perform—there is still much for intellectual and cultural historians to do in exploring the precise difference that travel has made in the thought and culture of specific individuals or eras.

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For emancipation as a test of British economic predictions see Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1928 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). On the way British emancipation figured specifically into slavery debates in the United States see Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA, 2009).

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The introduction and thirteen essays in the Cambridge volume highlight the difficulties and complexities that accompany attempts to define the travel narrative. Thwarting any tidy sense of genre, travel writing can resemble ethnography, nature writing, literary criticism, adventure tales, promotional literature, personal narrative, or spiritual quest. It can confuse perception and reality, or desire and description. In this way it shares some generic difficulties, say the editors Judith Hamera and Alfred Bendixen, with autobiography, “another nonfiction genre that we are only now learning how to read” (2). Further, as with Howe’s Cuba narrative, travel writing always reveals at least two subjects: the place it describes and the perceiving self authoring that description. Because this is a volume of American travel writing, Hamera and Bendixen call attention to how the United States represents a third subject that usually looms somewhere above or beneath the surface. American travel writing, whether it explores domestic or foreign spaces, has been a tool of “self- and national fashioning”; it has in various ways “defined, reflected, or constructed American identity” (1). To impose some order on the “complex, fluid, multiple-layered nature” of American travel writing, the editors have divided the Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing into three sections: “Confronting the American Landscape,” which includes two framing chapters as well as individual essays on Niagara, the Mississippi, and the Southwest; “Americans Abroad,” which explores American encounters in Europe, the Holy Land, Latin America, and the Pacific islands; and “Social Scenes and American Sites,” which, somewhat less coherently, brings together chapters on African Americans, women, and late twentieth-century writers (3). Unsurprisingly, given the centrality of travel and travel writing to American literary history, most of the nation’s best-known authors make appearances, sometimes multiple ones. Yet interspersed with such usual suspects as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and other literary figures are considerations of the natural histories of William Bartram and Timothy Flint, the journals of Lewis and Clark, the narratives of Equiano and Harriet Jacobs, and the diaries of westering women. The focus nonetheless remains, with few exceptions, on literary nonfiction rather than on broadly cultural texts; there are, for example, no commercial guidebooks, encyclopedias, adventure stories, or National Geographic-like magazines. The essays all demonstrate that, whether they wrote about Taos, Italy, or the Amazon, American travel writers rarely encountered their destinations as innocent terra incognita. Instead, prior associations, projections, fears, and fantasies created a kind of cultural baggage that accompanied and could easily outweigh the traveler’s literal luggage. Building on the work of Mary Louise Pratt’s 1992 Imperial Eyes, which demonstrated how nineteenth-century travel writing


functioned within the larger ideological apparatus of European empire, Terry Caesar’s essay on South America and Christopher McBride’s on the “Pacific and beyond” examine how American travelers gave expression to desires of national domination and racial superiority in their accounts of contact with foreign places and peoples. Sometimes writers saw what they wanted to see, but other times they saw what they had been primed to see by writers before them. Christopher Mulvey’s chapter chronicles the difficulty of viewing the Niagara Falls with fresh eyes, and Thomas Ruys Smith’s holds in tension the “two rivers”—one real, one imaginary—that constantly surface in writings about the Mississippi. The power of projection over description emerges even more starkly in writing on Jerusalem, where, as Hilton Obenzinger shows, the sacred land’s role in biblical history and millennial prophecy completely overwhelmed the mundane and quotidian realities of the physical place for many writers. The first section of the book details just how central the American landscape has been to American authors. Jefferson patiently enumerated Virginia’s rivers, Cooper set his novels in the forests of upstate New York, the Transcendentalists searched for spiritual meaning in the New England woods, and Mark Twain gave iconic meaning to the Mississippi River. Focusing on “origins,” Philip Gould examines several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English texts that described North America and were “written and published for metropolitan readers” with various economic, scientific, or spiritual interests in the continent. His discussion brings together the disparate narratives of William Penn, William Byrd, John Bartram, Mary Rowlandson, and John Woolman, among others, as early works that helped give shape to the hodgepodge genre of American travel writing. The four remaining essays in this first section uncover the different political, commercial, aesthetic, and ethnographic imperatives that combined to link domestic travel writing to American national identity. Three iconic sites garner separate chapters that track changes in meaning over time. If the Niagara had been transformed, by the mid-nineteenth century, as Christopher Mulvey demonstrates, from a site of aspiring development into a mandatory stop on the sublime-tourism circuit, Thomas Ruys Smith shows how the Mississippi became the symbol of a whole series of national associations, including the American frontier, American slavery, and the American dream of escape. The Southwest, as Martin Padget shows, drew the varied attention of explorers, ethnographers, tourists, and expatriates who reveled in the “exoticism” of the region’s environment and peoples. Finally, William W. Stowe examines a handful of travelers who used the American landscape to forge personal and national identities and to capture its scientific and metaphysical meanings. He plays with Emerson’s claims in Nature that while a given individual might own this or that plot of land, those of poetic sensibility alone enjoyed “property in the horizon,”

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as their integrative vision “created meaningful landscapes from the welter of facts and impressions that make up the American scene” (27). If the physical and figurative exploration of American spaces has been a crucial source of Americans’ self-conception, an equally powerful source has been the encounter with foreign lands, for “American identity,” as the editors assert, “is defined by contact with other people and other places” (5). More than any other place, Europe, and especially England, attracted the attention of nineteenth-century travel writers and, accordingly, European travel writing receives treatment in two separate essays. Alfred Bendixen explores how early American writers found European travel at once “attractive and dangerous” (103). This contradictory and ambivalent stance toward Europe marked the works of most writers, from Royall Tyler to Mark Twain. Bendixen offers a compelling discussion of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book, reading its focus on “ruined castles” and other evidence of historical decay as part of a larger meditation on mutability. Such a theme appealed to American travelers because it could establish their refined sensibilities but also assure them that America’s achievements were still to come. Apart from Cooper, Emerson, and Hawthorne, Bendixen also draws our attention to lesser-known writers such as Henry T. Tuckerman (“largely and unjustly forgotten”) and James Jackson Jarves (“probably the finest American travel writer of the mid-nineteenth century”), as well as the enslaved African American David F. Dorr, whose “completely unconventional” 1858 A Colored Man round the World combined attacks on racial injustice with observations on the “exotic and erotic” in France and the Middle East (111, 115, 121). If, in the first six decades of the nineteenth century, writing about Europe betrayed the tension of balancing cultural appreciation with democratic affirmation, that nationalistic anxiety eased in the decades after the Civil War. William Merrill Decker’s essay moves from the postbellum era to our own day and identifies how the changing nature of the Euro-American relationship gave rise to new discursive frameworks within which American travelers wrote. Gilded Age aesthetes like Henry James and Edith Wharton—distinguishing themselves from what Wharton called the “tourists and Baedekers” increasingly taking advantage of less expensive, quicker steamship travel to Europe—reveled in the “visual consumption of beauty” largely free of the anxiety many of their predecessors exhibited. Jack London’s work of “literary sociology” People of the Abyss (1903), an exploration of the squalor and wretchedness of London’s East End, garners one brief paragraph, but makes the reader long for fuller treatment of the reformer’s version of the Grand Tour, which took Americans to Dickensian slums and models of Victorian uplift such as Toynbee Hall. The twentieth-century world wars lent new structures to American ways of seeing Europe, transforming the continent from the “site of a museum past” to a “field of carnage” in the American imagination. Likewise postwar American


travelers could no longer remain the “innocents” of Twain’s day, but might find themselves cast as “saviors” or, later, as “inadvertent emissaries of a hegemonic power” (127). Decker offers here a compelling juxtaposition of the ecstatic Henry Miller and the academic F. O. Matthiessen who, for all their “temperamental contrast,” shared a Whitmanesque vision of democratic brotherhood as America’s possible contribution to the world (137). In post-Cold War memoirs, as well as novels, Europe assumed new form as the site of Jewish historical memory and ethnic conflict. While European travel drew out nationalist ambivalence in the nineteenth century, travel to other parts of the world was structured by different historical and cultural dynamics and accordingly elicited a different set of responses. In his fascinating essay on “America in the Holy Land, Israel, and Palestine,” Hilton Obenzinger reveals the direct national stake many religious travelers felt in the Holy Land. Linking the fate of Israel with that of the New Israel in North America, these ministers and other writers sought typological reassurance in Jewish restoration. Yet the nonbiblical historical reality of the place often disconcerted white Protestant Americans who found themselves uneasy in the face of a whole variety of Others: Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Arab, Muslim. The “disgust” conveyed in George William Curtis’s response of 1852 was typical: If Jerusalem were nearer Europe or America, it would be different, at least it would be more decent, from the higher character of the population. But going up to Jerusalem as the holiest city of the purest faith, you are disappointed . . . as you would be upon approaching a banquet of wit and beauty, to find it a festival of idiots and the insane. (152)

The unequal relationship of the US with its neighbors in Latin and South America and with the Pacific islands it would eventually occupy gave a distinctive ideological caste to narratives produced from travel to those sites. Christopher McBride’s essay “America in the Larger World: Beyond the Pacific Coast” argues that South Pacific writings by Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London demonstrate the “power travel literature has to reflect and influence American culture,” by, for example, asserting a “literary colonization” of the Hawaiian Islands before the commercial and geopolitical one (174). According to McBride, “imperialism”— a process more taken for granted than defined here—allowed “the nation,” presumably through its writers, to articulate anxieties about racial difference safely “on foreign soil, away from the attendant cultural difficulties that would arise in works set at home.” This argument might work better if Twain had not tackled questions of race as well as American imperial power directly in his domestic writings (177). McBride makes the volume’s only detour into the Caribbean, through a reading of Richard Henry Dana’s 1859 To Cuba and Back,

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and here betrays an unfortunate tendency toward oversimplification. McBride laments the clear racism that marked Dana’s treatment of all sectors of the Cuban population and faults him for failing to use the opportunity to espouse his supposed antislavery principles. Yet McBride’s facile reading neglects the critical thrust of Dana’s commentary on the greater freedom enjoyed by free blacks in Cuba than in the United States. It also misses Dana’s unmistakeably pointed claim (the year before the Republican Party’s first national victory) that the slave in Cuba “benefits from the division in power and property between the two rival and even hostile races of whites, the Creoles and the Spaniards,” only one of which held slaves.4 Ignorance and condescension have marked American attitudes toward Latin America in general, and the relations between the United States and its southern neighbors have been structured by strong commercial, imperial, and tourist imperatives. Yet Terry Caesar’s essay “South of the Border: American Travel Writing in Latin America” explores how the very force of those structuring imperatives could generate a compelling counterforce in the desire and willingness on the part of recent writers directly to engage, challenge, and play with “the discursive circumstances” in which they find themselves. Tracing American journeys outside Europe gives texture and dimension to what has, since at least the novels of Henry James, been a familiar Euro-American narrative. Yet one wonders how the editors decided which parts of the world merited inclusion. There is no discussion here of Asia: not of China, Japan, India, or Vietnam. Perhaps this omission reflects a reluctance to take the narratives of missionaries and soldiers seriously as travel writings, though such sources would undoubtedly yield instructive insights into the very question of national identity with which the authors are fundamentally concerned. Several essays examine African American travelers, who in many ways elucidate the larger American narrative but in others require special treatment. As Virginia Whatley Smith explains, African American travel writing originated from a unique experience: the dehumanizing captivity and involuntary migration of enslaved Africans. Thus the first African American travel narratives were also slave narratives, which were often, as Smith writes, “sociopolitically motivated on behalf of the collective for racial uplift rather than for mere individualized, European-type, leisure class entertainment” (197). Smith draws perhaps too

4

Dana, To Cuba and Beyond, 245. Dana’s narrative is also interesting for the way it grappled with the epistemological questions that dogged all travelers into slave societies: first, how to balance an account of the laws regarding slavery with a description of actual practice, and second, how to sort one’s way through the contrasting anecdotes that bombarded the traveler, of “injustice, cruelty, and licentiousness,” on the one side, and of “justice, kindness, and mutual attachment” on the other; 257.


sharp a distinction on this point and neglects the elevating project of national self-culture on which many white travelers studiously embarked. Yet the distinctiveness of the African American experience continued to mark the travel writings of even those who traveled without coercion and in relative comfort. This dynamic emerges most clearly in texts about Africa, in which writers from Alexander Crummel to W. E. B. Du Bois grapple with complex feelings of loss, rupture, and homecoming. The nature of the home black writers left behind also shaped their travel narratives. Traveling to Moscow in the heady days of the 1920s and early 1930s, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes offered stinging commentary on Jim Crow America by emphasizing the comparatively warm welcome black travelers might find in red Russia. Even when African Americans traveled to Europe, their historical situation differed widely enough from white readers to produce fresh, at times jarring, insights. James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son used his travel in Paris and Switzerland to stage his powerful meditation on race, national identity, and history. Decker’s brief discussion of Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” with its poignant exploration of the gargoyles at Chartres Cathedral, makes clear that Europe did not mean one thing to all Americans. Yet what about travel at home? Though the burdens of American history haunt the national landscape—the route to Canada, the border between slavery and freedom, the slave market that was New Orleans—African American journeys through the American countryside receive curiously little attention throughout the volume. Women’s travel writing appears sporadically across the essays, but it too receives treatment in its own separate essay. Susan L. Roberson begins by highlighting the greater mobility traditionally afforded (white) men in American history and the way that gender difference has shaped travel writing: “our heroes,” she writes, “are the explorers and restless souls whose tales of new lands, adventures, freedom and opportunity form a part of the national myth” (214). Yet just like their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, women have emigrated, fled captivity, moved west, and made the Grand Tour. Their writing does, however, bear some telling differences from men’s narratives, according to Roberson. These include descriptions of their efforts to preserve domestic order amidst the chaos of travel and greater attention to the domestic scenes (homes, child-rearing, food, and sexual arrangements) they witnessed on their journeys. The sexual vulnerability of women travelers also stands out. As one twentiethcentury anthology summed it up, “A man alone is a man alone; a woman alone is odd at best, easy prey at worst” (223). Indeed, “the majority of women who wrote up their travel accounts,” Roberson writes, did not travel alone but, like Julia Ward Howe, in the company of others, “most often their husbands” (224). Divisions along class lines were marked. Overwhelmingly, it was educated middleclass traveling women, such as Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Margaret

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Fuller, notwithstanding the latter’s frequent impoverishment in Italy, who wrote professionally for publication. Further, women outside the confining privileges of middle-class respectability were always at greater risk not just of being sexually assaulted but of being sexually demonized as well. The final essay in the book, “Driving That Highway to Consciousness: Late Twentieth-Century American Travel Literature,” brings the story up to our own day, as the communal travel of wagons, coaches, boats, trains, and buses of yore gave way to the “solitary euphoria” of automobile travel. Deborah Paes de Barros considers how this technological transformation reinforced but also facilitated a cultural one: the aesthetic longing for self-expression. In the work of writers as varied as Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, and William Least HeatMoon, travel literature became explicitly the literature of self-discovery, although with a hallucinogenic high jinks and consciousness-probing as far removed from Thoreau’s experiential spiritual seeking as Route 66 was from Walden. Does airplane travel in the twenty-first century—with its heterogeneous social encounters and its physical and psychic discomfort—return us to a mode of travel more closely resembling that of the nineteenth century? The topic awaits a future historian. The thread that connects all these essays is an insistence on a crucial connection between travel and identity in all its manifestations. Travel writers are said to perform their identities according to the obvious social categories of class, race, and gender, but also in terms of other less-familiar classifications such as the “gentleman scientist,” the “authentic” shanty-boater, or the third-generation Holocaust survivor. The heaviest emphasis falls on questions of national identity: who is and what does it mean to be an American. The contours of the connection between travel and identity are never precisely drawn; at different points travel writing appears to discover, enable, construct, constitute, resist, or police the boundaries of “Americanness.” The imprecision stems as much from the shifting meaning of that very category over time as from the inexact nature of literary interpretation. Other compelling themes emerge across the volume, including the way travel writing has provided a platform for cultural criticism, a medium that enabled “authors to articulate a set of literary values and aspirations,” in Alfred Bendixen’s words (109). These aspirations varied by author and time period. When Washington Irving praised American visitors to Westminster Abbey for the greater reverence they showed memorials to poets than to military heroes, or when Henry Tuckerman imagined Italy as a poetic escape from the prosaic reality of America, they registered their anxieties about a national culture overly dedicated to the pursuit of material gain. The Paris expatriates and, later, Henry Miller used their descriptions of bohemian or erotic European life to reject the conformity and narrow-mindedness they saw afflicting America in the interwar years.


An intensely popular genre, especially in the nineteenth century, where it became nearly compulsory for all aspiring authors, travel writing often confronted the would-be chronicler with a self-conscious anxiety of influence. Because the genre was so well established and the familiar travel routes so well paved, writers strained for freshness and originality. Cliché and conventionality ran rampant. Longfellow modeled his 1835 Outre-Mer on Irving’s The Sketch Book, and the “self-consciously literary and artificial” book, according to Bendixen, revealed none of the liveliness and warmth of Longfellow’s less-studied letters home (110). The problem actually preceded the writing, as travelers struggled to see a place afresh with their own eyes. The “vast library” of earlier books, as Obenzinger shows in his essay on the Holy Land, created a “thick textual lens” through which even the clearest-eyed traveler had difficulty seeing. Mulvey shows how Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James strained against literary convention and cliché in their writings about Niagara. Yet the very pervasiveness and familiarity of convention gave twentieth-century writers an attractive rhetorical structure against which they could counterpose their own, as Caesar’s essay on South America demonstrates. Mark Twain tackled the issue of literary convention head-on in his 1869 The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress, “perhaps the most popular travel book in American literature,” according to Obenzinger (146). Mocking the whole “business of sight-seeing,” including travel guides, Twain claimed to be able to predict precisely what his fellow tourists in Europe and the Holy Land would say at any given site because he had the books from which they would “‘smouch’ their ideas.” Thus Twain’s iconoclastic narrative depended for its very power on his readers’ familiarity with earlier accounts, without which his deflating comments would lack punch. One of the ironies of Twain’s success lay in the power of his text to shape subsequent American responses to the places he described. When President Grant traveled to the Holy Land in 1877–9, for example, he brought with him a Bible, a standard guide, and a copy of The Innocents Abroad. Like other Americans, Obenzinger claims, Grant came to visit certain sites because they had been the scenes of humorous Twain passages. The iconoclasm of Twain’s account became a new version of conventionalism. Collectively, the Cambridge essays offer a variety of nuanced readings and move beyond the at times overly stark ideological treatments of travel writing associated with postcolonial studies. But what is missing, or, better put, how might this volume have differed if its contributors had been historians? The most noticeable absence is any discussion of the publication history of the various texts or of the literary market for travel writing overall. The volume would have benefited from at least one essay detailing the basic facts of authorship, readership, and publication for travel writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Further, our understanding of individual travel narratives—and particularly how

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or even whether these texts helped construct or perform American identity— would have been enormously enhanced by some attention to how these texts were read and received by critics and ordinary readers alike. To return briefly to the case of Julia Ward Howe, any tendency we might have to treat her condescension toward her Cuban hosts as a stand-in for a general American attitude of national or racial superiority might be checked by reading the reviews. The Dial, for example, faulted her for “failing to get beyond the surly phase of a Cuban visit,” while Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine praised the book but observed that “its author sometimes views Cuban manners and customs through the spectacles of her national prejudice.” It is hard to know what larger cultural claims we can make for a text without some of this broader contextual work, which is ultimately also a problem for the second book under review.5 If Bendixen and Decker agree that American writing about Europe in the late nineteenth century “reflected a greater cosmopolitanism, a greater openness to the possibility of foreign influence” (124), the story Mark Rennella tells in The Boston Cosmopolitans confirms this thesis. His book centers on a handful of writers and artists—all born in the generation before the Civil War—who, Rennella claims, translated their extensive international travel into an open, cosmopolitan frame of mind. Where the essays in the Cambridge volume insist that American travel writing shapes American identity, Rennella’s book seeks to venture beyond the search for identity. He attempts to trace out the precise impact travel had on the work and thought of his figures. He seeks, first, to determine what travel meant to the “the Boston Cosmopolitans,” and, second, to document how they in turn influenced the larger culture of Boston and the United States. His focus thus extends from travel accounts (both published and private) to the novels, paintings, sculptures, and architecture that travelers went on to create. The “Boston cosmopolitans” included, most centrally, the novelists William Dean Howells and Henry James, the philosopher William James, the painters John La Farge and Lilla Cabot Perry, the sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens, the architects Charles Follen McKim and H. H. Richardson, and the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. That they were a cosmopolitan and well-traveled set of individuals can hardly be disputed. Many made multiple international trips; some, such as Henry James and Lilla Cabot Perry, lived abroad for extended stretches of times. Almost all learned to speak and write foreign languages. Rennella further presents some evidence that they embraced both international travel and foreign cultures with a genuine openness and interest not always found among other American travelers, both before and after them. Cabot Perry urged her daughter, when she traveled, to “try to plunge into the inner life of the

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The Dial (April 1860), 263; Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine (May 1860), 469.


country” (120), and this is exactly what Howells and James appear to have done in their Italian travel writings, Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Hours (1909), which reveled in the cultural, social, and even linguistic nuance of the place. Wishing to avoid exactly the sort of overinfluence that Twain’s book mocked, La Farge refused to read travel narratives of Japan before traveling there so that he might see the country and its culture with fresh eyes. While the name “Boston Cosmopolitans” may seem slightly misleading, as some of them only spent minimal time in the city, Rennella contends that the private travel experience of these figures culminated in the public spaces of Boston: the Shaw Memorial by Saint Gaudens, Trinity Church by Richardson (with interior contributions by La Farge), the Boston Public Library by McKim, and the evolving art collection that became the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In the second half of the book, Rennella reads these sites for the traces they bear of the Cosmopolitans’ travel-nurtured aesthetic. This is an original and exciting claim. In theory it moves beyond the literary conventions, tropes, and rhetorical gestures that are the subject of so much literature-studies scholarship to ask about the larger historical significance of travel. Rennella proffers an answer to that question by linking the perspectivebroadening, horizon-expanding experience of travel—of seeing different places and embracing different cultures—to cosmopolitanism. This term he initially defines, generally enough, as “the disposition to see one’s native culture as just one branch of human culture in general” (2), but it gathers greater and more specific ideological weight as the book progresses. Thus at different points, cosmopolitanism comes to mean a critical stance toward American culture (Norton, the Jameses), an embrace of collaboration (Saint Gaudens, Richardson, McKim), a cultural eclecticism (Saint Gaudens, La Farge), an effort to transcend divisions of race (William James, Saint Gaudens) and class (McKim), open-ended aesthetic meaning (McKim, Gardner), and a commitment to the solidarity of humanity (Howells). The problem here is that these uses of “cosmopolitanism” continually outstrip the evidence presented and, as a result, appear more the product of Rennella’s own twenty-first-century vision than of his nineteenthand early twentieth-century figures’ experience. Indeed by the end of the book, cosmopolitanism seems like nothing more than a synonym for any progressive tendency of which Rennella approves. To demonstrate the historical meanings of cosmopolitanism requires more careful and sustained empirical research than Rennella provides, as other recent works on the phenomenon demonstrate. Under the pressure of this sustained, historical inquiry, late nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism might appear less attractive than Rennella’s version. Mona Domosh and Kristin Hoganson, for example, have recently demonstrated how cosmopolitanism can serve the interests of American corporations or middle-class consumers as much as

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progressive artists.6 Especially for a dissertation-turned-first-book, the research in The Boston Cosmopolitans seems surprisingly thin in places. For example, Rennella offers an intriguing reading of La Farge’s An Artist’s Letters from Japan (1897), in which he claims that the artist taught his readers crucial lessons about the relationship between universalism and particularism and the inadequacy of translation. Yet Rennella presents no evidence beyond his own reading of this text to demonstrate either La Farge’s intent or his audience’s response. Discussions of the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC and the Shaw Memorial in Boston suffer from a similar dearth of primary-source evidence. What did the artists think about their works? How did reviewers, newspapers, and other commentators at the time respond to them? Was the cosmopolitan message these works sought to disseminate—and which Rennella claims was the impact his figures had on their culture—received or understood? When Rennella actually presents the kind of evidence that might answer these questions, the results are highly suggestive, as can be seen in his discussion of the newspaper response to the opening of the Boston Public Library, which supports his point about its democratic openness. But without this kind of empirical and contextual work, Rennella’s understanding of cosmopolitanism comes across as highly subjective, a problem aggravated in the Afterword, where he attempts to draw out the relevance of turn-of-the-last-century cosmopolitanism for our own turn-of-thecentury moment. Further, he asserts more than demonstrates a connection between this cosmopolitanism and travel. For some figures the connection seems rather clear, and Rennella patiently shows us the impact travel had on the perspective and cultural assumptions of Norton, Howells, James, and Cabot Perry. Yet, for many other figures, he provides almost no biographical or intellectual context, which not only renders these figures vague and disembodied as historical actors, but also weakens the book’s overall premise. So, for example, we learn next to nothing about the travel experience of Saint Gaudens, Richardson, Gardner, or McKim, even as their works are asked to carry the heaviest weight of the argument about the cultural impact of travel. They are the ones, Rennella claims, whose work brought back to Boston not simply “the physical artifacts and a heightened appreciation of foreign cultures” but “an enthusiastic desire to share the sense of wonder and discovery that they had felt on the [sic] own journeys abroad” (170).

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Mona Domosh, American Commodities in a Global Age (New York: Routledge, 2006); Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). For another study of late nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism, see Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).


Since we learn almost nothing about those journeys abroad, this is a difficult claim to assess. What at first seems like a curious imbalance in the book, where Charles Eliot Norton’s 1873 return home earns a chapter all to itself but Isabella Stewart Gardner’s travels receive barely a mention, becomes, on further reflection, an indication of how Rennella’s book often conflates the two distinct topics of travel and cosmopolitanism. Not all travelers drew cosmopolitan lessons from their journeys, and surely it was possible for a cosmopolitan to become so without ever traveling. Beyond that, some of the most original interpretations in Rennella’s book have to do with the intellectual impact of travel but not with cosmopolitanism, as when he examines Howells’s thematic emphasis, in both novels and plays, on the “liminal space” of a domestic railway car. Here the focus is on the serendipity and creative dislocation that any kind of travel can engender, whether it occurs in Schenectady or Switzerland. Had Rennella committed to this line of inquiry, instead of imposing an at times awkward and tendentious conception of cosmopolitanism onto his findings, The Boston Cosmopolitans might have pointed intellectual historians in fresh directions and encouraged them to grapple with the historical significance of travel as other historians have begun to do.7 If literary scholars have demonstrated how travel, in Susan Roberson’s words, “transforms the journeying self, unsettling a static identity with movement through space and contact with different people and places” (221), historians might further investigate what intellectual difference travel made. Frederick Douglass in Ireland, Jane Addams at a bullfight in Spain, Progressive housing reformers in Birmingham, James Baldwin in Paris, Julia Ward Howe in the Caribbean: evidence of the significance of travel for American writers, artists, and intellectuals is everywhere. In his effort to show more fully how a group of late nineteenth-century Bostonians sought to translate into works of art “the findings they made during their travels”—findings that included an appreciation of different lifestyles, the aesthetic pleasure of disorientation, an interest in history, and a critical perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of their home country—Rennella surveys a new terrain just waiting for historians to map, explore, and narrate.

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See, for example, Christopher Endy’s effort to include the examination of travel as a relevant aspect of diplomatic history in Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

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ayn rand and american conservatism in the cold war era patrick allitt Department of History, Emory University E-mail: [email protected]

Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Nan Talese/ Doubleday, 2009) An American conservative movement developed rapidly after World War II. It brought together intellectuals and politicians opposed to the New Deal in domestic policy and Soviet communism in foreign policy. The movement’s first presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost the election of 1964 but its second, Ronald Reagan, won the election of 1980. It has remained an influential force in American life up to the present, despite strong internal contradictions, which include disagreements about centralized power, about religion, about tradition, about elites, and about the free market. To some of the movement’s early luminaries, such as Russell Kirk, free-market capitalism was the antithesis of conservatism since it required perpetual innovation and the sweeping away of traditional forms. To others, such as Ayn Rand, capitalism was the heart and soul of conservatism because it alone preserved the dignity and freedom of the individual. Rand (1905–82) published two massive novels of ideas, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), perpetual best sellers that have introduced hundreds of thousands of Americans to free-market conservatism. They illustrate her belief that great entrepreneurial individualists are the motors of human progress, whose destiny is to struggle against mediocrities and collectivists: to benefit a mankind that resists, despises, and persecutes them. Rand had no patience with cultural traditionalists like Kirk and was a defiant atheist. Her besetting faults of egotism and intolerance prevented her from playing a constructive role in the conservative movement, a role that her popularity certainly warranted. Two new biographies attempt to explain her quirky brilliance. Jennifer Burns places Rand in the context of American intellectual 253

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history while Anne Heller, in a less scholarly idiom, explores the Russian and Jewish elements of her character and work. Rand (née Alissa Rosenbaum) was born in Russia in 1905, the daughter of a prosperous Jewish shopkeeper in St Petersburg. She was twelve when the Russian Revolution began and her family—unmistakably bourgeois—suffered ruin at the hands of the Bolsheviks. She hated the Revolution and everything it stood for. As an adolescent she loved, by contrast, the image of the West that she found in books and movies. She fled to America in 1926, inventing her new name en route. A chance meeting with Cecil B. De Mille in Hollywood led to a job in the movie studios, as an extra and script assistant. Assimilating and learning English as rapidly as possible, she met and soon married another film extra, Frank O’Connor. His presence by her side for the next halfcentury, unambitious, domestic, conciliatory, and a cuckold, stood in striking contrast to Rand the writer’s Nietzschean ideal of Man as fearless swashbuckling entrepreneur. We the Living (1936), her first novel, fictionalized her family’s shattering experiences in Revolutionary Russia and condemned Marxism. She published it in the midst of the “Red Decade” of the 1930s, however, when New York’s literary establishment was sympathetic as never before or since to communism. Rand realized that she was at odds with most of the city’s prominent writers, who either ignored the book or reviewed it harshly. Anthem, a dystopian fantasy that she wrote in 1937, could not even find an American publisher for ten years, though it would later sell millions of copies during the Cold War and become a minor anticommunist classic. Undeterred, Rand began work on The Fountainhead (1943), her big novel about an architectural genius. She wrote the bulk of it in 1942 in a blaze of creative energy, fueled by Benzedrine and other amphetamines. Howard Roark, the book’s modern-architect hero (loosely modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright), refuses to compromise with the tradition-bound “second-raters” who surround him, in a world contaminated by collectivism. He would rather hew rocks in a quarry than sacrifice his artistic integrity. When beautiful Dominique Francon sees him doing just that the two of them exchange smoldering looks, and before long he’s breaking into her bedroom to ravish her. Dominique, a fiery thoroughbred, loves finding the man who can master her. When Roark designs a public-housing project, he exacts a promise that his exquisitely unified design will not be modified in any way. When he finds that it has been changed by faithless collaborators he dynamites it, goes on trial, and justifies his act to a sympathetic jury that acquits him. When The Fountainhead came out, word-of-mouth publicity more than compensated for bad reviews and it sold strongly, with as many readers being titillated by the sex scene—daring for its time—as by Rand’s advocacy of individualistic capitalism.

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In the ensuing years Rand hammered out the principles of her philosophical system, Objectivism, and eventually anthologized them in an array of shorter works, For the New Intellectual (1961), The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966). Her system’s central insights were: that the world progresses through the brilliant work of creative individualists, that capitalism alone can unlock their potential, and that selfishness is a virtue. She regarded altruism as a destructive force, since it encouraged individuals to live for the benefit of others rather than for themselves: it corrupted givers and receivers alike. As in her novels, she emphasized the corrosive power of envy, arguing that collectivism of all kinds was really the institutionalization of envy. It led to the expropriation of the deserving by the undeserving and, over the long term, to economic stagnation and political tyranny. She saw free-market exchanges as the model for all other forms of human interaction. Individuals participate voluntarily and rationally. The law should do no more than ensure that contracts are honored, and the functions of government should be kept to an absolute minimum. The initiation of violence and the preemptive use of force are never justifiable. To Rand, however, taxation is itself a form of coercion, because it is imposed by governments that possess a monopoly of force and threaten to use it against those who will not pay. The greater the taxation, the greater the violence implicitly visited on citizens. When in 1960 the Democratic Party offered housing, jobs, and education as rights she retorted, “At whose expense?” In her view, such promises threatened citizens’ rights rather than enhancing them. Real rights must not impose burdensome duties on others. Burns and Heller both note that Rand, having no children, spent little time in the company of people who cannot possibly make rational market decisions. They suggest that the internal rigor of her system breaks down when it encounters the complex social structure of the outside world, which is made up not just of autonomous individuals but of families. A gripping storyteller who backed up her fictions with a comprehensive philosophy was nevertheless attractive. In the 1940s and 1950s a movement began to form around Rand. Its founders were a young Canadian couple, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, who created an institute to popularize Objectivism. New York devotees gathered to hear Branden lecturing on Rand’s philosophy. He distributed tape-recorded versions to enthusiasts in other cities. Rand and Branden selected the most talented and devoted of her disciples to attend meetings of an inner circle. Among these insiders was the young Alan Greenspan, subsequently chairman of the Federal Reserve, who remained throughout his career one of her most loyal supporters. Everyone who met her agrees that Rand was a magnetic personality with a laser stare, a pulverizingly logical approach to conversation, and a charismatic sense of her own superiority. She thought of herself as the embodiment of rationality

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but had plenty of eccentricities, such as a love for jewelry in the shape of dollar signs, a long cigarette holder, and a dramatic black cape. In 1955 she announced that she and Branden, who was more than twenty years her junior, were not mere intellectual partners but must become lovers too. Poor mild Frank O’Connor, Rand’s husband, was now obliged to leave his apartment two afternoons each week so that Ayn and Branden could have uninterrupted sessions of sex and philosophy in the nuptial bed. Both husbands and both wives then met to hold rational discussions of the situation—as superior beings they were expected to rise above the objections of conventional morality. Most members of the Objectivist group, even those in the inner circle, knew nothing about this affair until decades later. It is difficult not to look upon Branden himself as a scoundrel. On the basis of Rand’s theories about emotion and personality he ran his own variant of psychotherapy. Objectivist aspirants were expected to submit to, and pay for, intensive sessions on his couch, but with this difference: he would then tell Rand and the inner circle what they had confessed, with the result that emotional blackmail thickened the already turbid atmosphere of the Objectivists’ cult-like world (by now many of them were living in the same building at 120 East Thirtyfourth Street). When he finally broke with Rand and his long-suffering wife to marry a third woman, Rand slapped him, delivered a furious harangue, and told him that he deserved to be impotent for the next twenty years (Burns, 241). Then the two of them subjected the Objectivist faithful to an undignified slanging match in print, each condemning the other and forcing everyone to take sides. That dramatic break did not come until 1968. The heart of Objectivist life in the 1950s, meanwhile, was excited discussion of draft chapters from Rand’s new and even more massive novel. Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, certainly is a page-turner. The setting is an industrial America in decline. A handful of great entrepreneurs, including the dazzlingly beautiful Dagny Taggart, whose very name sounds like a sharp-edged weapon, are struggling to run their businesses in the face of collectivist inefficiency and a widespread mood of fatalism. One of the era’s great men, Ragnar Danneskjold, has become a pirate who seizes foreignaid ships on the high seas and gives the proceeds to entrepreneurs who have been unjustly taxed—he is in effect the anti-Robin Hood. An uneasy awareness grips the nation: that most of its dynamic figures are disappearing one by one. Meanwhile a cryptic riddle is making the rounds: “Who is John Galt?” At last the reader learns the astonishing truth. The great creative individuals have gone on strike as a way of demonstrating that the world will be helpless without them. Led by the greatest of them all, John Galt, they have secluded themselves in a Colorado hideaway, “Galt’s Gulch,” which he runs as a do-it-yourself capitalist utopia. They are biding their time until the world learns its lesson, welcomes them back, and abolishes collectivism.


As disaster approaches Galt emerges from hiding to make an electrifying radio broadcast. In a speech of nearly a hundred pages Galt outlines the entire economic history of the world, his critique of socialism, and his explanation of the need for unimpeded capitalism. The world agrees to his terms and he returns in triumph. Among the many readers exhilarated by this tale of capitalism triumphant was a young entrepreneur, Ted Turner, who paid for a series of billboards in Atlanta bearing the now-famous question “Who is John Galt?” Atlas Shrugged, even longer than The Fountainhead, made Rand even more famous. Once again the reviews were bad. Many authors, but not she, would have regarded public acclaim and massive sales as adequate compensation. She was enraged, and reacted by becoming even more intolerant and even less willing to discuss ideas except with disciples who were prepared to knuckle under to her view on every issue. This inflexibility meant that, with a very few exceptions (including Greenspan), her followers were docile and unoriginal or else stayed in her company only for a few weeks, until a sharp disagreement led to excommunication. Such was the fate of Murray Rothbard and his wife, when she had the temerity not to give up her Christian faith despite Branden’s demonstration to her that Rand had disproved the existence of God. By the time Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, the new conservative movement was drawing media attention. Led by William F. Buckley Jr, editor of National Review (founded 1955), it brought together libertarians like Rothbard and Henry Hazlitt, traditionalist conservatives like Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk, and anticommunists like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. Buckley, a prolific writer and an artful diplomat, found ways to reconcile these various factions, pointing out that, despite their differences, they all shared an aversion to New Deal statist liberalism and to Soviet communism. With her massive readership, Rand was converting thousands of young Americans to libertarianism every year and could have played a galvanizing role in the movement, but she would have nothing to do with National Review. This was partly because Buckley was a Roman Catholic, who saw Christianity as central to the heritage of Western civilization and central to its confrontation with “godless Communism.” (At one of their few meetings Rand told Buckley that he was too intelligent to believe in God.) It was also partly because National Review ran a crushingly negative review of Atlas Shrugged, written by Chambers, who described the book as totally unrealistic and emotionally sophomoric, and its heroes as capitalist totalitarians. His review ended in the sentence, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”1 1

On the development of the movement and its various component groups see George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945 (New York: Basic,

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Buckley was aware that in taking on Ayn Rand he might be jeopardizing his journal, since many subscribers had come to conservatism after reading her books. He was, however, determined to make conservatism politically respectable and was already involved in the campaign to win a Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater. He knew that advocacy of Rand’s brand of capitalism without taxation and with only the most minimal government (utterly remote from current realities) would harm his quest for the mainstream and so he took the calculated risk of breaking with her. His Cold War anxieties, moreover, presupposed that at least one branch of government, the military, would be immense. Much more to his taste was Milton Friedman, whose accessible and persuasive book Capitalism and Freedom (1962) made the case for free-market capitalism while leaving room for strong defense and active government. Rand’s stubborn reclusiveness made her politically irrelevant despite her fame. One of the earliest and most perceptive commentaries on her situation was Jerome Tuccille’s book It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971). Tuccille describes how he, and hundreds of young men like him, broke from orthodox Catholic and Jewish upbringings in the postwar American suburbs and found a religionsubstitute in Objectivism. For a while they lived and breathed the holy writ of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and modeled themselves on the books’ heroic characters. Before long, however, they found the reality of Rand’s Objectivist circle claustrophobic and broke out into other areas of the conservative and libertarian world, taking selective elements of the message with them rather than the whole thing.2 We get another entertaining glimpse of Rand in Tobias Wolff’s 2003 autobiographical novel Old School. Set in the early 1960s, it describes Rand’s visit to his New England prep school’s literary club, surrounded by a crowd of Objectivist groupies. At first the narrator swallows the Rand gospel whole, tries to model himself on John Galt, and regards the fallible beings around him as contemptible and weak. “I was discovering the force of my will . . . I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desires . . . but the temptation to doubt my will and bow to counsels of moderation, expedience, and conventional morality, and shrink into the long slow death of respectability.” But on vacation he gets a bad case of the flu and can’t help feeling gratitude toward the relatives who uncomplainingly nurse him back to health. So much for the idea of living for oneself alone and of despising selflessness!3

2 3

1976); and Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Jerome Tuccille, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). Tobias Wolff, Old School: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2003).


Early books about Rand were written by her disciples, or by ex-disciples like Barbara Branden, who had axes to grind and were contentiously polemical. Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market and Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by contrast, are balanced, sensible, informative, and judicious. Neither author is a current or former Objectivist and each has the necessary critical distance to recognize Rand’s mixture of ability and folly. Both express their ambivalence about Rand as a female role model. She was strong woman with a powerful sense of direction but she was also a narrow-minded dogmatist. Their explanations of exactly why she turned out that way differ. Burns, a history professor at the University of Virginia, began the project as her dissertation at Berkeley. She aims to place Rand in the context of twentiethcentury American intellectual history but soon bumps up against the fact that Rand had surprisingly little contact with the intellectual luminaries of her generation. The only philosophical debt she acknowledged in her early years was to Nietzsche, and the only one she admitted later was to Aristotle. In a letter to a friend she scoffed at the conventional approach to philosophy, writing, “I see no point in discussing what some fools said in the past and why they said it and what error they made and where they went off the rails” (Burns, 127–8). Although Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and many others were writing in defense of capitalism and against collectivism in the same years as Rand, and in ways she might easily have admired, she barely engaged with them and wrote no book reviews or scholarly articles. Neither did she invoke the names of pro-capitalist writers in her novels. In the margins of her copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom she scribbled, “The man is an ass with no conception of a free society at all” (Burns, 104). Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Graham Sumner, and the newer defenders of capitalism may all be lurking between the pages of her books but she never acknowledged them or tried to line herself up in their company. In a revealing paragraph Burns concedes that Rand’s “Romantic Realism has not changed American literature, nor has Objectivism penetrated far into the philosophy profession.” Still, she is the decisive figure in bringing new generations of Americans to free-market conservatism and in that sense should be recognized as “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.” Burns is confronted with an unusual problem for an intellectual historian, in that her subject’s influence was greater than her intellectual achievement (Burns, 4). As Burns shows, the capitalism Rand defended was quite different from the capitalism actually practiced in mid-century America. In Rand’s imaginative universe, the actual owners of great industries run them. Dagny Taggart personally manages and loves the railroad that her family has built over the generations. Hank Reardon, her lover, is equally hands-on with the steel company he has founded and brought to greatness. There is no corporate structure, no mass of managerial bureaucracy, and the implication is clear: that the rich entrepreneurs are the

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hardest-working of all Americans, and deserve what they possess. The reality was quite different. As Alfred Chandler shows in his history of managerial capitalism, The Visible Hand (1977), nearly all the great twentieth-century corporations developed not as the fiefdoms of larger-than-life individuals but through the separation of ownership and management. They also went hand in glove with big government, often using it to safeguard their market position, and they lobbied hard for protective tariffs and other un-Randian advantages. No wonder generations of small businessmen have loved Rand; they operate in a world that more nearly coincides with the one she evokes, where individual owners’ particular decisions and particular virtues are still decisive.4 Burns also shows that Rand was ambivalent about the confrontation of elitism with populism that has dogged conservatism for the last half-century. An explicit Nietzschean in her early works, she never lost faith in the idea that a magnificent handful of great beings make history. Humanity consists of a few supermen and a big flock of sheep. On the other hand, The Fountainhead ends with a jury of twelve ordinary citizens agreeing with Howard Roark that his act of destruction was justified—Rand seems at that point to have accepted the idea that the common man understands reality even when the spoiled elites do not. She then veered away from this pseudo-populism after dabbling in practical politics for a few years. Picking up where the failed Wendell Willkie campaign of 1940 had left off, she was appalled to discover the irrationality (as she saw it) even of the corporate executives she tried to cultivate. They would not fall in with her ideas and she was loath to involve herself with the painstaking compromises that are the lifeblood of American democracy. She joined the Hollywood hunt for ex-communists in the late 1940s, along with John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, but played no further role in practical politics. Rand’s great weakness, Burns argues, was her refusal to compromise and her refusal to participate in the give and take of intellectual life. Even the most influential and persuasive scholars are aware (or should be) that their work is fallible. The academic disciplines thrive on perpetual challenge, reconceptualization, and the displacement of widely shared theories by new paradigms. Each new generation undertakes acts of intellectual parricide. Anyone who refuses to participate in this process becomes marginalized and Rand was asking the impossible when she required readers to accept her system lock, stock and barrel. It was, in effect, a self-invalidating demand. Still, Burns reminds us that that even after her disillusioned withdrawal from politics Rand remained a major figure. Bennett Cerf, one of the most important American publishers in the mid-twentieth century, published Atlas Shrugged at 4

Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerian Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977).


Random House and wanted also to publish her collection The Virtue of Selfishness. His respect for her achievement, despite profound differences, reminds us not to read back her later marginality into the middle years of her career. Similarly, Burns notes that Robert Nozick paid tribute to her influence in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1975), the most philosophically rigorous statement of the libertarians’ case. He believed that she had done more than any other mid-twentieth-century figure to make a philosophically rigorous defense of capitalist individualism. Nozick was no fawning disciple, however. He later followed up with “On the Randian Argument,” a respectful challenge to her denial that self-sacrifice can be rational. As Nozick showed, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, resolves to kill himself if Dagny Taggart, whom he loves, is tortured to pressure him into talking. Rand herself, in other words, recognized circumstances in which self-sacrifice might be defensible.5 Burns was granted full access to the Rand archive, which had hitherto been closed to all non-Objectivists. As a result she was able to read through Rand’s mountainous 1940s correspondence with Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane, both formidable mid-century figures in the development of libertarianism. This access turns out to have been a mixed blessing. Her early letters to Paterson, to whom she was junior in years, experience, and publishing, show at first a refreshing openness to new avenues of inquiry. It wasn’t long, however, before the friendships foundered, souring Rand on the possibility that she had anything to learn from anyone. Burns’s excessively thorough chapters based on these unpublished works slow down her book’s narrative drive—it’s the only place where you feel that you’re reading a modified dissertation. Overall, however, Burns’s achievement is first-rate. She has found the right tone of voice for a study of Rand, objective (but not Objectivist!), detached, sober, and worldly. Her judgments are always substantiated by the evidence, and readers are reminded that the success of conservatism as a mass movement after the 1960s is as much attributable to Rand as to any other individual, even though she hated it. I have written two books on post-World War II American conservatism but I admit that until I read Goddess of the Market I had not fully appreciated the extent of Rand’s influence. Heller, a New York writer without academic ties, takes a less scholarly approach to Rand and is the more admiring of the two. She emphasizes the Russian and Jewish elements of Rand’s life much more strongly than does Burns, and even makes the intriguing suggestion that the idea for the strike in Atlas Shrugged, and the models for her heroes and heroines, all came from melodramas 5

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic, 1974); idem, “On the Randian Argument,” in idem, Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 249–70, Galt incident 261.

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Rand/Rosenbaum had read by the age of twelve. In her telling, Rand’s adult life was largely a playing out of impressions and sensations she had imbibed as a youngster. “A nineteenth-century Russian at heart,” Heller argues, Rand “believed that ideas have the power to change history and that intellectual leaders are the engines and agents of change.” She also points out that when Howard Roark dynamites the public housing project and dedicates the act “to every creator who was destroyed in body or spirit,” Rand is paying tribute to her own “father and grandfather, not only as Russians but also as Jews” (Heller, 84, 121). It’s certainly possible to make the case for Rand as distinctively Russian. Her almost mystical faith in ideas, her scorching intolerance, and her authoritarianism have the authentic flavor of the old autocracy she was born into and the even harsher one she fled. It seems to me more difficult to make a strong case for Rand’s Jewishness. She never reacted publicly to the fate of the Jews in World War II and never commented on the creation of Israel or its early struggles. Neither did she show any interest in the ordeal of Soviet Jews during the Cold War, even though the relatives she had left behind were among them. Her world was certainly not divided not into Christians, Jews, and atheists, but into members of her own coterie on the one hand, and everyone else on the other. Heller is convincing when she suggests that Rand’s novels should be thought about side by side with those of the nineteenth-century greats, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, rather than those of any American contemporary. Hugo was the one novelist to whom Rand actually admitted a debt. Her gigantism is modeled on Hugo’s, as is the sweep, grandeur, and emotional surge of her plots. Like their great nineteenthcentury predecessors, her books were written as vehicles of political and moral indoctrination. As Heller notes, Rand was infuriated when reviewers of The Fountainhead treated the book as though its actual subject was architecture. To her it was painfully obvious that she was discussing the nature of good and evil, the destiny of great individuals, and the temptation to mediocrity that besets collectivist societies. Architecture merely happened to be the medium that carried the message. Heller, with no need to conform to an academic orthodoxy, is less inhibited than Burns, and sometimes speculates about Rand in ways that go a little beyond the evidence (“she probably spent hundreds of hours poring over the drawings . . .” In early twentieth-century Vienna she “might have glimpsed some of the giants of the age” (14–15) etc.). Heller also takes at least one step into the bedroom to discuss Rand’s sexual proclivities, as reconstructed from the rough sex enjoyed by her heroines Dominique Francon and Dagny Taggart. She argues that Rand wanted women to be strong and masterful, but always with the caveat that their men had to be much more overbearing, so that when it came to the point even the strongest woman could delight in being dominated.


In short, Heller’s is the more gossipy of the two biographies, Burns’s the more scholarly. Both are well written and highly entertaining. Both authors realize the virtue of understatement; that by simply describing what happened, they would set off appropriate trains of thought and judgment in readers’ minds. The fact that neither of them calls Rand a humorless control freak makes it all the more certain that readers will fully appreciate how much she was one. Each of them recounts a story that gets to the heart of Rand’s character. John Hospers, a young philosophy professor at Brooklyn College in the late 1950s, greatly admired her work, met her, and found her conversation dazzling. In response to her urging he arranged for her to speak at a meeting of the American Aesthetics Association at Harvard in 1962, an event that she apparently expected to be the start of her conquest of the philosophical mainstream. After her talk, Hospers, the panel’s appointed discussant, offered the usual professorial mix of praise and criticism. Rand, horrified, responded by walking out, cut him dead in public, and never spoke to him again. As she saw it, his job had been to offer adulation only, and his failure to do so won him lifelong ostracism. Stories like that can only make us glad that she left Russia, where, with a slightly different set of beliefs, she might well have become one of the most merciless of all the commissars.

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modern intellectual history Editors Charles Capper, Boston University, USA Email [email protected] Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA Email [email protected] Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, USA Email [email protected] Duncan Kelly, University of Cambridge, UK Email [email protected] Assistant Editor Andrew J. Ballou, Boston University, USA Email [email protected] Editorial Board David Armitage, Harvard University, usa C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge, uk Thomas Bender, New York University, usa Ruth Bloch, UCLA, usa Julian Bourg, Bucknell University, usa Richard Bourke, University of London, uk Paul Boyer, University of Wisconsin, Madison, usa Howard Brick, University of Michigan, usa Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, usa Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge, uk Jeffrey Collins, Queen’s University, Ontario, canada Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, uk Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore Peter Gordon, Harvard University, usa Malachi Haim Hacohen, Duke University, usa David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School, usa Thomas A. Haskell, Rice University, usa David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley, usa Daniel Walker Howe, UCLA, usa Gerald N. Izenberg, Washington University, St Louis, usa Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley, usa Mary Kelley, University of Michigan, usa Aileen Kelly, University of Cambridge, uk James T. Kloppenberg, Harvard University, usa László Kontler, Central European University, Hungary Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania, usa Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London, uk Peter Mandler, University of Cambridge, uk Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University, usa Tracie M. Matysik, University of Texas at Austin, usa Michael O’Brien, University of Cambridge, uk Lewis Perry, St Louis University, usa Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton University, usa Helena Rosenblatt, City University of New York, usa Dorothy Ross, The Johns Hopkins University, usa Emma Rothschild, Harvard University, usa/King’s College, Cambridge uk Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester, usa Andrew Sartori, New York University, usa Jerrold Seigel, New York University, usa James Turner, Notre Dame University, usa Caroline Winterer, Stanford University, usa

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A Note from the Editors Articles “Almost a Separate Race”: Racial Thought and the Idea of Europe in British Encyclopedias and Histories, 1771–1830 PAUL STOCK

31–59

Madame Guizot and Monsieur Guizot: Domestic Pedagogy and the Post-Revolutionary Order in France, 1807–1830 ROBIN BATES

61–90

Transcending Babel in the Cultural Translation of Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) TUSKA BENES

91–125

171–191

Environmental, Economic, and Moral Dimensions of Sustainability in the Petroleum Industry in Austrian Galicia ALISON FRANK

193–212

Maintaining (Environmental) Capital Intact EMMA ROTHSCHILD

213–225

Review Essays The Subject and the Work of Difference: Gender, Sexuality, and Intellectual History SANDRINE SANOS

227–236

German Post-Darwinian Biology Reassessed FREDERICK GREGORY

237–251

Historicizing American Travel, at Home and Abroad LESLIE BUTLER

253–263

Ayn Rand and American Conservatism in the Cold War Era PATRICK ALLITT

Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at:

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april 2011

The Invention of Sustainability PAUL WARDE

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153–170

no. 1

Forum: The Idea of Sustainability Introduction EMMA ROTHSCHILD

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april 2011

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issn 1479–2443

modern intellectual history

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147–151

Essay Beyond “Academicization”: The Postwar American University and Intellectual History RICHARD F. TEICHGRAEBER III

no. 1

vol. 8

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Canonizing Dewey: Columbia Naturalism, Logical Empiricism, and the Idea of American Philosophy ANDREW JEWETT



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