Who You Callin' an Intellectual?

Abstract

Maureen Konkle. Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 367 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Twenty-five years ago Paul Conkin and the late John Higham organized a conference. Their purpose was to gather together a range of scholars young and old to examine the state of intellectual history. That there was a need for such a conference at all betrayed a worried sense by practitioners in the mid-1970s that their field was in crisis. Higham explained as much in the introduction to the resulting volume. In his very first sentence Higham announced: "In the 1930s and 1940s the study of American intellectual history enjoyed its heroic age." Heroic because, at least in Higham's view, intellectual history lay at the foundation of most of the significant historical scholarship, because its insights, concerns and conclusions shaped what we call the "consensus school" of mid-century historical thought and because it provided the basis of an emerging American Studies as well. In 1951, for example, John Caughey conducted a survey of historians asking what they thought was the most important work of American history to appear since 1920. Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1927) topped the list by a wide margin. As Higham put it: "The most exciting, as well as the most controversial, single achievement of intellectual historians in the 1950s was a fresh vision of the meaning of America—a vision that comprehended the whole of American history and thus illuminated the present also."1 That heroic age did not last. In the 1960s intellectual history got caught in the crossfire directed at consensus history by a new generation of historians. The New Social History, however, didn't merely dethrone intellectual history from its seat atop the profession and replace it as the field where fresh, exciting work was to be done (not to mention the field where grants and graduate students grew). More, it leveled the charge, implicitly or explicitly, that the grand generalizations that emerged about the "American mind" in the 1950s weren't so much synthetic as exclusionary and oppressive, that they [End Page 64] ignored the vast majority of Americans who left no poetry or painting for us to admire, that the whole endeavor of intellectual history was hopelessly . . . elitist. And so it came to pass that John Higham and Paul Conkin assembled a group of scholars who still called themselves intellectual historians to survey the state of their field. The crisis they found themselves in was simultaneously one about their disciplinary position and professional status, about their methodological approaches and assumptions, and about the politics of what they did. (In fairness, other scholars also saw their disciplines as facing some sort of crisis in the 1970s. Anthropologist Dell Hymes assembled a volume of essays by anthropologists aimed at, from the book's title, "Reinventing Anthropology.") In truth, however, this confusion of purpose within intellectual history also had roots inside the field. As it emerged in the mid-century, American intellectual history found itself exploring "culture" as much as ideas strictly speaking. And in so doing, in trying to examine the American "mentalite" these historians necessarily found themselves wrestling with theoretical ideas about the nature of culture. As Higham himself pointed out, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, rather than, say, Parrington, hovered over the conference like a "patron saint." But this embrace of "cultural history" by intellectual historians only begged the question of what, precisely, constituted American intellectual history. An Italian colleague of mine chuckles at the very notion that there is any American intellectual history. After all, as compared with Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, not to mention Locke, Hobbes, Descartes and Rousseau, whom has America contributed to the Grand Tradition of Western Thought beyond a handful of Puritan theologians, a few Founders, a couple of New England Transcendentalists, and a Pragmatist or two? In the...