Middle Class: An Intellectual History through Social Sciences

REVIEWS Edward Sapir: Linguist, anthropologist, humanist. By Regna Darnell. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Pp. xix, 480. Cloth $29.95. Reviewed by Edgar E. Siskin, Jerusalem Center for Anthropological Studies* Everyone who came to know Edward Sapir called him 'brilliant' ; some called him a 'genius'. His scholarly achievements, reach of intellect, gifts of intuition and imagination, powers of rhetoric and articulation, and graces of personality stamped him as a singular academic figure. Franz Boas, the 'father' of American anthropology and Sapir's mentor at Columbia University, called him 'one of the most brilliant scholars in linguistic anthropology' (Darnell, 418). For Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, he was the 'intellectual giant of Boasian anthropology' (181). Franklin Edgerton described him as 'one of the greatest figures in American humanistic scholarship ... Many of us do not think it going too far to call him a genius' (1940:463). Kroeber once wrote, ? would unreservedly class [him as a] genius' (418). Harry Stack Sullivan, the noted psychiatrist , spoke of him as 'an intellect that evoked reverence ... a genius largely wasted on a world not yet awake to the value of the very great' (1939: 159). In this first biography of Edward Sapir, Darnell cites the encomiums to which his colleagues, disciples, and students gave enthusiastic assent. Darnell calls her book the 'intellectual biography' of a 'man of ideas' (x, xiv). I will not list all twenty-one chapter titles here; they range from 'The early years' (Ch. 1, 1-15) and 'Ottawa: Maturity and independence' (Ch. 3, 44-64) through 'Synthesizing the Boasian paradigm' (Ch. 5, 87-106) and 'The University of Chicago: A new start' (Ch. 11, 202-222) to 'The call to Yale' (Ch. 17, 327-44) and 'Dénouement' (Ch. 21, 398-419). The book also contains a 'Complete bibliography of Edward Sapir' (457-73). The chronological record of Sapir's life is presented as the framework for his scholarly and aesthetic interests and ventures. These were amazingly rich and diverse. Endowed with superb creative intelligence, a restless imagination, uncommon powers of communication, and rare artistic gifts, Sapir explored a range of disciplines—linguistics, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, behavioral and social science, poetry, music—making contributions, some noteworthy and some revolutionary, to all. At the peak of his career he 'assumed a dominant role in learned societies ... hobnobbed with the heads of great foundations', and was recognized as 'one of the most influential figures in American anthropology' (224, citing Margaret Mead, Robert Lowie, and Earnest Hooton). His personal life was at times darkened by trials, and the last years of his academic life were marred by disappointment and frustration. His colleagues—Boas, Kroeber, Lowie, Benedict, Mead—regarded him as without equal among the linguists and anthropologists of their day. His students knew * [Editor's note: Edgar Siskin studied under Edward Sapir at Yale.] 620 REVIEWS621 him as a luminous personality and an inspiring mentor who decisively influenced their intellectual and personal lives. He remains a towering figure in linguistics, anthropology, and the social and behavioral sciences. Edward Sapir was born in Pomerania, Germany, in 1884, the son of an itinerant synagogue cantor. He grew up in New York, was recognized as a prodigy, and studied at Columbia, majoring in Germanics and coming under the guidance of Boas. Soon after receiving his doctorate, he was invited to Ottawa to become chief anthropologist at the Canadian National Museum, where, during the next fifteen years, he produced much of the superb body of linguistic and anthropological studies for which he became celebrated. He also wrote poetry and criticism, and, a gifted pianist, composed music. Godfrey Lienhardt, the British critic, has written of 'the literary and musical Edward Sapir, a character of Henry Jamesian sensibility' (1985:647). In 1925 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Chicago, where, after the isolation of Ottawa, he flourished. His courses became magnets for students, and in the larger intellectual community, as well as in the general community, he was in demand as a lecturer. His growing interest in the interplay of culture and personality led him to write pioneering papers which, utilizing the insights of psychology and psychiatry, became landmarks in the interdisciplinary terrain of...

Notes on Contributors

American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn Ryan C. McIlhenny (bio) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 222 pp. Notes and index. $18.95. It seems that no other branch of historical study is as buoyant as intellectual history. There have been dips in terms of its popularity, especially in relation to what may be the sexier developments within cultural studies, but intellectual history consistently reappears to provide critical assessment not only of historical changes but also changes in the methods of historical research. In the generation after Merle Curti, Perry Miller, or Henry Commager, intellectual history went through a revival in the late 1970s, due in no insignificant way to the Wingspread Conference of 1977, a gathering of historians including Paul Conkin, John Higham, Gordon Wood, David Hollinger, Dorothy Ross, Henry May, and Thomas Bender. Wingspread played an important role in joining older approaches to intellectual history with new creative discoveries within the humanities, breathing new life into this mode of historical writing. Distinct from the history of ideas and the history of philosophy, intellectual historians, according to Peter Gordon, see ideas as “historically conditioned” and thereby “best understood within some larger context, whether it be the context of social struggle and institutional change, intellectual biography (individual or collective), or some larger context of cultural or linguistic dispositions (now often called ‘discourses’).”1 Aware of the historical conditions from which ideas emerge—not to mention, as Daniel Wickberg does in American Labyrinth (2018), the contingency of contexts—intellectual historians are also cognizant of how such contingencies shape the way that they understand the methods of their own craft. Disciplines across the intellectual spectrum have been influenced by developments in cultural studies. Scholars—not just those in the humanities or social sciences, but also in the hard sciences—have demonstrated greater historical awareness, becoming increasingly wary of presenting ideas as normative or static. Social history steeped in the turbid currents of the 1960s, emphasizing long-ignored marginalized groups, was followed almost immediately by cultural history, which considered at a deeper philosophical level the social identities created through textual discourse. The [End Page 165] attendees at Wingspread, as well as those who helped author the collection of essays in New Directions in Intellectual History (1979), engaged the messiness of ideas, especially those articulated by iconoclastic intellectuals like Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz. The cultural presupposes the social and thus edges ever closer to the philosophical. Cultural historians are often reluctant to attribute causation to ideas, but Ratner-Rosenhagen and others would argue that causation can be the result of ideas, including cultural ones related to identity. Consequently, the cultural, especially in regard to ideas, has provided fodder for intellectual historians, since both are “invested in decoding meaning,” write Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman in American Labyrinth (2018), and thus “interested in language as a historical source.”2 For James Livingston, cultural change “is the groundwork of intellectual innovation.”3 Benjamin Alpers likewise suggests that cultural history has had an important impact on “intellectual historical practice” and that cultural and intellectual history should be viewed “as a single subfield.”4 Since the 1980s, cultural history has emphasized the pluralistic and unintended happenings from below and from the periphery, challenging first-principles foundationalism, eschewing any form of unidirectional history—whether top-down, bottom-up, or side-to-side (core-periphery)—and welcoming the ongoing creations of and negotiations within these spaces. The revolt of cultural scholars against simplistic bifurcations has led to an acceptance of ideas as contingent, inherently unstable, yet rich with possibilities, revitalizing in turn a dialectical method without a rigid teleology. Since Wingspread, contemporary intellectual historians have come to appreciate such dynamism, expanding interpretive boundaries and injecting the field with new and relevant insights. Following the success of American Nietzsche (2011), Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America embraces the creative possibilities of intellectual history, making the multiple worlds of ideas more palatable for readers. Daniel Rodgers, a leading figure among contemporary intellectual historians, identifies movement “as a central motif in intellectual history,” comparing it to a kind of “borderlands history.”5 Ratner-Rosenhagen agrees...

This article addresses the increased interest in intellectual history as a line of research. Additionally, focus is placed on the subject of intellectual history research, which covers many types of human creative activity. The authors of the article see it, rather, not as a subdiscipline of history, but as an interdisciplinary field focused on clarifying problems and drawing attention to boundaries, and believes that it should not follow one “correct” approach. The authors contend that the issues of religion and identity, problems of collective motivation, and our relationship with the natural world are important topics in intellectual history today. Intellectual history offers what other areas of history could not. Historians’ claims are more restrained than those of philosophers and social scientists. In modern intellectual history, the desire to unite the efforts of all specialists whose professional interests are associated with the study of various types of human creative activity, including its conditions, forms and results, prevails. This, however, does not deny the existence of more moderate versions of “intellectual history”, limited to the study of exclusively the intellectual sphere of consciousness, in particular the outstanding personalities of the past. Thus, in their scientific quest, intellectual historians can turn to disciplines such as economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, philosophy, literature and its criticism, but at the same time they should not neglect their own task and the restrictions imposed by their cultural horizons and disciplinary rules. When building a cultural context, intellectual history becomes an internal part of cultural history, and cultural history serves as the external side of intellectual history; therefore, historians should pay attention to both the internal and external. Key words: intellectual history, methodology, history of ideas, sociohistoricism, culture, mindset, history of mentalities, creativity, explanation

Making Sense of the Postwar Middle Class Charles L. Ponce de Leon (bio) Lawrence R. Samuel. The American Middle Class: A Cultural History. New York: Routledge2014. 174pp. Selected bibliography and index. $135.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). Janice M. Traflet. A Nation of Small Shareholders: Marketing Wall Street after World War II. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. xiv + 242 pp. Notes, essay on sources, and index. $45.00. Louis Hyman. Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011. 392pp. Illustrations, notes, references, and index. $24.95. For several decades, politicians and much of the American public have obsessed about the fate of the “middle class,” a concept so protean and elastic it has become almost meaningless. Being middle class can refer to income, net worth, or one’s material standard of living. It can mean education or having a particular kind of job or career. For most Americans, however, it also stands for something more nebulous: beliefs and values that transcend socioeconomic categories and make “middle class” a more widely embraced identity in the United States than in other advanced industrialized nations. The vast majority of Americans—roughly 90 percent in most surveys—think of themselves as middle class, making appeals to the middle class the modern equivalent of nineteenth-century appeals to “the people.” Social scientists have long been interested in this phenomenon and have produced some notable works exploring its political and cultural implications. So, too, have historians. But our contributions have mostly focused on “middle-class formation” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, we know a great deal about how the eighteenth-century “middling sort” became a middle class of entrepreneurs and small proprietors, and how the emergence of a corporate economy gave rise to new professions and white-collar occupations and made the middle class more diverse. And we know much about how gender, religion, cultural practices, and political activism [End Page 168] helped such people see themselves as “middle class”—and distinguish themselves from the majority of Americans. We know far less, however, about the middle class in the decades after World War II, the years when, thanks to the postwar economic boom and the expansion of education, the ranks of the middle class grew. And the whole process of how so many Americans, including people who, in other countries, would have proudly identified as “working class” came to see themselves as “middle class” remains quite mysterious. Thankfully, historians have begun to turn their attention to this subject, inspiring hope that we may eventually be able to explain what it meant to be middle class in the second half of the twentieth century and why being middle class remains so appealing today. The boldest recent attempt to address the subject is Lawrence Samuel’s lively and engaging “cultural history” of the middle class. Samuel’s book is quite ambitious for so slender a work. It purports to be both a history of the postwar middle class and a history of ideas about the middle class, drawn largely from journalistic sources and notable works of social criticism. It begins after World War II and examines the growth of the middle class amid postwar prosperity. Samuel then discusses the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and their impact on middle-class Americans in particular. For Samuel, this was an important period of transition, when a variety of factors contributed to a “fragmentation” of the middle class. The second half of the book covers the last three decades of the century, when it seemed that the middle class was in “crisis.” In these chapters Samuel assesses developments that encouraged this belief. The best sections of the book are those that cover periods when the state of the middle class was a major source of discussion: the 1950s and early 1960s, when commentators were struck by the impact of rising incomes and living standards and concerned about the spread of conformity; and the 1980s and especially the 1990s, when it became clear that political and economic trends were threatening the privileges and expectations middle-class Americans had long taken for granted...

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

OF THE YEAR 1913, THE VIENNESE NOVELIST Robert Musil wrote, The time was on move ... But in those days no one knew what it was moving towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and what backwards.1 This new relationship to time, space, and history pervaded literature, arts, and social and natural sciences in Europe at turn of twentieth century, from about 1890 until 1914. William Everdell, author of a recent book on intellectual history of this era, defines its central theoretical project as the profound rethinking of whole mind set of nineteenth century. This process of rethinking eroded familiar nineteenthcentury European and North American paradigms: beliefs in progress and in seamless continuity were shaken by a new emphasis on rupture, randomness, and ontological discontinuity, and reliance on scientific objectivity by a recognition of subjective element in all thought and observation. Most of literature on European and North American intellectual history at turn of century emphasizes problematic and disorienting effects of (as Everdell puts it), the impossibility of knowing even simplest things that nineteenth century took for granted.2 In fact, characterization of period from 1890 to 1914 as an era of pessimism, alienation, and anxiety has become a cliche of intellectual history. In German political thought, Fritz Stern describes a mood of cultural despair; for social sciences, writes Lawrence Scaff, the central problem appears to be same in every case: a sense that unified experience lies beyond grasp of modern self and that malaise and self-conscious guilt have become inextricably entwined with culture. Eugen Weber remarks that, in France at turn of century, the discrepancy between material progress and spiritual dejection re-

Matteo Battistini, Middle Class: An Intellectual History through Social Sciences. An American Fetish from its Origins to Globalization , Leyde-Boston, Brill, 2022, 217 p.

Introduction During the last decades there has been a significant increase in the number of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary fields in the humanities and social sciences in Europe. One may wonder what the position of Studies is, or preferably should be, amid these various intellectual domains. What are its special merits-if there are any still-in today's intellectual world? How does it relate to other areas of interest? What are the rationales for its continued existence? This essay attempts to answer these questions and offers insights into Studies in Europe today. It needs to be emphasized, though, that this expose has its limitations since it is written from the perspective of a European observer whose expertise concerns first of all sociology and related approaches within popular culture and Studies, and who is best acquainted with the current situation in northwestern Europe.' Studies in Europe: its origins and current state of affairs Contrary to popular opinion, Studies was not exported from the United States to Europe after the Second World War, but had already been instituted there previously. study of the United States as an object of intellectual interest and teaching existed in many European countries long before 1945, extending as far back as the late eighteenth century (Skard). Yet, it was in the 1920s, among German literary scholars with a basic commitment to cultural and intellectual history, that the term Amerikakunde (American Studies) and its conceptualization originated. At the beginning of the twentieth-century, in Germany's intellectual life, cultural area studies, including those within linguistic and literary studies, were fostered by tendencies of counter-specialization. Cultural morphology, as developed by historian Karl Lamprecht and ethnologist Leo Frobenius, was applied to German literary studies as well as to English and Studies. Its conception of a cultural system as an integrated organic whole was also implemented in world history by Oswald Spengler. Foreign language educationalists, who utilized the cultural morphology concept, advocated Kulturkunde in the form of national area studies. These tendencies were influential in the (slow) institutionalization of Amerikakunde from the late 1920s onwards, which was part of a more general set of endeavors concentrated on a so-called Auslandkunde (Foreign Studies).2 Similarly, in its early years, the late 1920s and 1930s, the Studies movement in the U.S.A.3 was an academic heresy which started in English departments among scholars who turned to literary texts, not as philologists, literary historians, or New Critics (like in the 1940s and 1950s), but as cultural or intellectual historians and analysts. This proclivity became a movement when it was joined by historians who had also abandoned traditional historiographywith its predominance of political history-for intellectual and cultural history, particularly the investigation of The Mind (Wise 293-373). These young and ambitious scholars, mostly at Ivy League universities, tried to be interdisciplinary, to cross departmental boundaries, and to combine the insights and methods of intellectual history, literary criticism, political theory, and sociology. architects of the movement were affected as well by the various forms of cultural nationalism that became increasingly prevalent during the late 1930s and the war years. cultural politics of the Popular Front Communism then recovered and celebrated folk culture. A minority of U.S. Americanists found virtue in particular cultural works, simply because they were in and of the American soil, a Blut und Boden aesthetics (McCormick 69). These combined strains would culminate in the consensual symbol-myth-image school of explanation of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its habit of reading the entire culture from inside literary texts (Pells 105). …

While the history of international law has been mainly dominated by intellectual history, the neighboring humanities and social sciences have witnessed a ‘material turn.’ Influenced by the new materialisms, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have highlighted the role of objects and nonhuman infrastructures in the making of the social. Law, however, has been conspicuously absent from these discussions. Only until recently, things began to be studied as instruments of – global – regulation. In this article, I trace an intellectual history of the intellectual history of international law, contextualizing it since its inception in the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ to its spread into the legal field via the Critical Legal Studies movement and its final import into international law in the last two decades. I conclude arguing that international legal historians can depart from the ‘well-worn paths’ of intellectual and conceptual history to engage with the materiality (past, present, and future) of global governance.

In Secular Religion, his posthumously published book, Kelsen intended to defend the prevalent theories in the social sciences from the threat of discredit. The drawing of analogies between the social sciences and religion was indeed quite common at that time among intellectuals (such as Eric Voegelin, Raymon Aron and Ernst Cassirer) and Kelsen thought that this analogy created a serious risk to the credibility of the social sciences. I argue that (1) the drawing of analogies between social sciences and religion is not necessarily bad for the social sciences (2) this rhetorical battle between historians of ideas was much less dangerous for the credibility and survival of the social sciences than Kelsen estimated (3) the method chosen by Kelsen to defend the social sciences, conceptual analysis, might not have been the best method for this purpose.

Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education: Southern Theory, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Alternative Epistemologies

This book is a collection of 17 studies about Peruvian history in the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on Lima and especially on the capital’s social and educated elite, most deal with intellectual, political, and cultural history. Aside from the epoch and the city under investigation, the articles are very heterogeneous in character. This makes the book a kind of reader in current trends in historiography pertaining to nineteenth-century Lima.Five articles are dedicated to an intellectual history of Lima’s upper classes: a chapter on the lawyer Francisco García Calderón, a discussion of liberalism in the 1850s, an essay on ideas of sovereignty, an analysis of nineteenth-century Peruvian historiography, and an exploration of the memory of the battle of May 2. The main focus of the book is political history, with chapters discussing the creation of departments and provinces, primary-education policy in Lima, and conflicts between church and state. In my view, the most interesting articles describe the exclusionary policies of Lima’s middle and upper classes. Using census data from 1876, Jesús Cosamalón shows that, unlike the poor in Santiago de Chile or Mexico City, Lima’s lower class was highly stratified along racial lines. As a result, Lima’s social structure was more closely linked to racial background than in other Latin American capitals. Race therefore played a crucial role in the policies of inclusion and exclusion among the political parties of the middle and upper classes: class was not only an economic issue. Carlos Aguirre employs similar arguments. By referring to contemporary discourse on criminality, he shows that in the second half of the nineteenth century, the educated classes created an image of lower-class criminality that was then linked to racially mixed or “dark” people. This was the image that drove authoritarian exclusionary measures planned at establishing greater control over the lower classes. Finally, Gabriella Chiaramonti demonstrates that in the 1870s, congressmen proposed and discussed laws restricting the right to vote to a relatively small, educated elite, which eventually came into effect in the 1890s.While these three contributions analyze political exclusion, other articles use culture as a starting point to examine the exclusionary practices of Lima’s middle and upper classes. Paul Rizo Patrón describes the ways in which the people enriched by guano fortunes attempted to integrate themselves into the European nobility. Similarly, Cristina Mazzeo holds that the main goal of a guano trader named Francisco Quirós was to stop being a merchant and become an hacendado instead. Francesca Denegri describes how the changing style of women’s clothes during this period was used to create a distinction between rich educated “whites” and the rest of Lima’s inhabitants. In the only article that focuses on early-twentieth-century history, Carlos Gálvez analyzes the ways in which less-wealthy people tried to conform to aristocratic, or at least upper-class, norms of death and burial.Many of the articles recap their authors’ previous research, while some present interesting new case studies. Most of the articles form part of current historiography trends in their analysis of nineteenth-century Latin American nation-states from a political and intellectual perspective, asking the question of why the realities of Peru’s political system differed so much from the ideals of its republican founders. The historiography of the last two decades has answered that political culture is related to, but not dependent on, economic and social structures; consequently, we must examine political culture to understand the nation-state. This explains why the concept “citizenship” gained so much importance and the concept of the “liberal revolution” replaced that of the “bourgeois revolution.”While most of the articles form part of this revisionist view of the nineteenth century, the title and the introduction of the book defend the concept of bourgeoisie. Carmen Mc Evoy makes the point that bourgeoisie is not only an economic concept but also a cultural one. From a cultural point of view, she argues, a bourgeoisie certainly existed in nineteenth-century Peru, characterized by a high level of education, moral values, and republican political commitment. But even if one were to accept that the concept of bourgeoisie has no economic implication at all, the articles collected in this book testify in great detail to the fact that the education, moral values, and political commitments of Peru’s middle and upper classes were not as similar to European bourgeois culture as Mc Evoy appears to think. The comparison she makes to the German Bildungsbürgertum, for example, does not work. Although I do not agree entirely with Mc Evoy’s interpretation, I nevertheless believe that the book is a good starting point for the study of the political, intellectual, and cultural history of Lima’s elite in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Like many key terms in history and the social sciences, ‘middle class’ is at once a category ‘of social and political analysis’ and a category ‘of social and political practice’, in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper's terms – two aspects that were, and continue to be, entangled in complex ways. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the term ‘middle class’, or the ‘middling sorts’, has been a catchword in political discourse, and it became one long before scholars defined it in any systematic fashion. Once it became a more or less well-established conceptual tool of research, however, it began to take on an academic life of its own, with scholars also using it to describe people who did not invoke this category for their own self-description. But scholarly terms could – and indeed did – also feed back into folk understandings of social stratification. In particular, the recent global popularity of the term ‘middle class’ seems to be at least in part a result of the appropriation of academic categories by policymakers. This article contributes to the discussion on African middle classes by tracing the genealogy of theoretical perspectives on class and by outlining some findings from studies of the history of European and American middle classes as well as recent research on middle classes in the global South. I discuss both the history of scholarly debates on the middle classes and what empirical studies tell us about people's contested self-categorizations, and how their understandings and practices of being middle-class have changed over time. The article argues that future research on the dynamics of African social stratification has much to gain from a regional and historical comparative perspective.

The article takes a look at one of the most controversial personalities of inter-war Lithuania. Augustinas Voldemaras (1883–1942) was educated in classical philology, had a keen interest in universal history and the history of Lithuania and an additional concern in philosophical and sociological issues. A consistent search for integrated and synthetic knowledge, openness to philosophical questions and his disposition to polylogi­cal cooperation of disciplines are some of the principal moments in his intellectual biography. Therefore, the present study attempts to highlight certain contexts of Voldemaras’ intellectual biography, witnessing the tightly intertwining interdisciplinarity, aspirations of some type.While a student, Voldemaras found himself in the environment where the problems of ancient history were addressed at the European level and where attempts were made to bring the research on the classical era carried out in pre-revolutionary Russia closer to Germany, being the leader in this sphere.The openness to interdisciplinary search, postulates of integrated and synthetic knowledge that mani­fested over a long-term, not to mention his philosophical quests and attempts in the field of history, brought Voldemaras closer to the prominent European philosophical movement Centre International de Synthèse founded by Henri Berr, linked by special ties with the formation of one of the most outstanding 20th century schools of history The Annales School. Voldemaras belonged to the History Section of Henri Berr’s Centre International de Synthèse, thus finding a niche among the distinguished representatives of social sciences and the humanities of that time. There is no wonder that in this respect, Voldemaras established himself in Lithuanian historiography as one of the pioneer figures attempting to overcome the disciplinary isolation of sciences, their one-sided empiricism or the lack of a broader approach towards history.The attention paid by Voldemaras to the philosophical issues of identification of history as a science, deliberate attribution of an important role to theory in social sciences and the humanities, the highlight of interdisciplinary initiatives in these sciences are what add the aspect of appeal to his intellectual biography. Voldemaras himself becomes one of the most interesting Lithuanian intellectuals of the first half of the 20th century.