Usable pasts

 

Thinking that it might be good to teach with, I recently looked up the essay from which the phrase “usable past” is generally said to come. The full title of the essay is, “On Creating a Usable Past,” it’s centrally concerned with novels and poetry, and is by a literary critic or literary historian, Van Wyck Brooks. I don’t expect to use it in an undergraduate classroom. But it is interesting, and so here I’m going to point out what I think is worth retaining from it. Also, I want to record some ideas about the surprising (to me) essay that immediately follows Brooks in this same issue – a labor organizer and activist named Helen Marot writing a brief for what I would call syndicalist educational ideas. The April 11, 1918 number of The Dial featured an impressive list of contributors. John Dewey leads the issue, then comes Charles Beard, then Brooks, and finally Marot, who compared to these other luminaries is basically unknown. This is a special issue on education, and the comparison between American and German institutions is arguably the through-line of the four texts, with Brooks something of an outlier. So it is worth returning to also as an example of a moment, maybe not unlike ours, when perhaps the relationship between intellectual life or cultural activity and the institutions of higher education was very much in question.  

What is our relationship to the past, and what ought it be? For Brooks, speaking mainly about literary culture, the answer to these paired questions is that we Americans have been robbed of our birthright – what should have been our tradition – and that it is time to create, in the famous titular phrase of his essay, “a usable past” in order to combat the emptiness that disables our literature. No doubt the essay could be put into the broader context of early 20^th century readers of Nietzsche, of the debate around philosophical pragmatism, and, on an even larger scale, arguments over objectivity in the decades around 1900. One might look for instance to Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream, although Brooks, since he was not a professional historian, is not a figure of particular interest to Novick. For now though, let us just replace  questions with our own: a past that is usable – usable for who and what?

Brooks opens with a distinction between two kinds of anarchy: one that “fosters” and one that “prevents growth.” Brooks does not himself come back to this former kind of anarchy, although it’s worth thinking about what he means by it. The latter kind is “the sudden unbottling of elements that have had no opportunity to develop freely in the open.” In America there are no “inherited resources,” there has been no “cumulative culture,” and so every individual who wishes to do creative work feels that they must start from the very beginning, all alone. Bad anarchy, then, is each individual responding to their particular conditions on their own. This, clearly, is a somewhat artificial situation, and Brooks places the blame very clearly on professors of literature and literary history who “have placed a sort of Talmudic seal upon the American tradition.” They exhibit a “pathological vindictiveness” toward those who are attempting to do creative work. Nothing made today can be as good as what came before, can even enter into conversation with it.

Whence this hatred for creative work in the professoriate? It is because anyone who is successful in American academic life – and again this is in 1918 – must have fully accommodated themselves to “the exigencies of the commercial mind.” The professor by default orients himself toward “the ideal not of the creative but of the practical life.” The professor “passively plays into the hands that underfeed his own imaginative life.” Finding his own fulfillment and meaning in the closed and perfect past he tips the balance against “the living present,” which, for his own psychological protection, he can only despise. Hence, says Brooks, the histories of American literature that exist always treat the present (starting around 1890) as a total failure, and “stumble and hesitate” when it comes even to Whitman. Practicality means commercial life and is antithetical to creative production; it is destructive of tradition. We may note that usability for the novelist or poet is to be distinguished from the practical. 

The university has already been conquered by the latter, indeed scholarship in a merely objective mode is the deformation of intellectual life in the spirit of commercial practicality.

For the professorial mind, as I have said, puts a gloss upon the past that renders it sterile for the living mind. Instead of reflecting the creative impulse in American history, it reaffirms the values established by the commercial tradition; it crowns everything that has passed the censorship of the commercial and moralistic mind. And it appears to be justified because, on the whole, only those American writers who have passed that censorship have undergone a reasonably complete development and in this way entered what is often considered the purview of literary criticism.

And here Brooks makes an interesting claim: successful literature thus far has been “chiefly a literature of exploitation, the counterpart of our American life.” Following the literal exploitation of the frontier there is its cultural exploitation (“Irving and Longfellow and Cooper and Bryant”). The very exceptionality of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman proves the larger point. Exploitation, however, lasts only so long. After the initial “unbottling,” there is nothing substantial left, only “lachrymosity” and spectacle.

For particular writers, as we can see from the sorry record, there are only episodes of success, no full development of authorial character. And yet, “the spiritual welfare of this country depends altogether upon the fate of its creative minds.” These creative minds are in a catastrophic position: “We want bold ideas, and we have nuances. We want courage, and we have universal fear. We want individuality, and we have idiosyncrasy. We want vitality, and we have intellectualism. We want emblems of desire, and we have Niagaras of emotionality. We want expansion of soul, and we have an elephantiasis of the vocal organs. Why? Because we have no cultural economy, no abiding sense of spiritual values, no body of critical understanding? Of course.” And why? Because “the present is a void, and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.”  The past ought to anchor, provide one with some footing that would be secure enough to allow forward motion.

For Brooks, the Europeans are in a much better situation. They have continuous tradition, livings pasts, literary histories that allow new writers to pick up a project already begun. European professors have “intellectual freedom” that does not exists in America. And looking to Europe can help the American in other ways. First, they offer us the example of created, invented, useful pasts. Carlyle and Michelet, for instance, have made just that. But in America “the grey conventional mind casts its shadow backward” and not much of use has been written by the historians. Second, as even a little foreign travel (spiritual or physical) demonstrates, different countries have different and differently useful ideas about each other. The Italians, for instance, have a very different understanding of French history than the British have, because these two nations need different things from it. Similarly, the tradition of American literature appears in a new light when seen from abroad. “Englishmen will ask you why we Americans have so neglected Herman Melville…Russians will tell you that we never really understood the temperament of Jack London.” Thus by leaving America, we can learn to ask ourselves what really matters in it for us so that “the past experience of our people can be placed at the service of the future.” 

We begin to arrive here at Brooks’ positive program for getting “a vital order out of the anarchy of the present” and reconnecting the “warm artery that ought to lead from the present back into the past,” which has been severed by the anarchic disdain of the professoriate. What do we get if we focus our attention on the creative impulse as it has appeared in American life? “What emerges them is the desire, the aspiration, the struggle, the tentative endeavor, and the appalling obstacles our life has placed before them.” We have the continual appearance of creative energies, and their interruption by the practical. Again, “sudden unbottling” rather than open development, has been the rule. This problem itself, Brooks suggests, becomes the heart of a usable American history. One example is the thwarted development of Theodore Dreiser. “And there is Vachel Lindsay,” who comes to value sound and color alone because that’s what they like in small towns. So, for Brooks, it is not individual works that ought to draw our attention, rather we should seek “tendencies.” And this seems to mean to him mainly patterns of failure in the trajectories of particular writers. “Why did Ambrose Bierce go wrong?” Or Stephen Crane, or Herman Melville again. Brooks concludes thus: “Knowing that others have desired the things we desire and have encountered the same obstacles, and that in some degree time has begun to face those obstacles down and make the way straight for us, would not the creative forces of this country lose a little of the hectic individualism that keeps them from uniting against their common enemies? And would this not bring about, for the first time, that sense of brotherhood in effort and in aspiration which is the best promise of a national culture?”

So for Brooks cultural or spiritual life is defined not by particular texts, but by the development of authorial personalities – styles, we might say. The national community in its capacity for self-reflection is both the condition and the telos of literary production. For it to develop, individuals must be able to develop themselves as personalities within it. The university is not an aid to this, but is itself so caught in the practical and exploitative life of the country – at least of America – that it is an active enemy of intellectual or creative life. We must go abroad in order to see ourselves and our own options more clearly. There is a naturalness to the development of tradition (the “warm artery”) but also clearly it can be created. At the moment, the universities are actively sabotaging the construction of a national cumulative tradition, but the European example suggests they could – were they free enough from the influence of commerce – help in the good work.

We can see Nietzsche floating around in the background here, as well perhaps as Turner’s famous argument about the frontier and American character, and even the kinds of arguments that Carl Becker would make in “Everyman his own Historian” about the usability and living nature of the past. We should also not forget that this literary moment, in retrospect, will belong to modernism. TS Eliot and Ezra Pound are only two of the Americans who went to Europe in search of something very different from the usable national past that Brooks seems to see on the horizon. So we could read Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as a response here, although perhaps it would be better to understand “Prufrock” as, already, offering a radically different account of the relationship between past and present and future.

I’ve gone on very long already, but I want just to end by suggesting that Helen Marot’s text offers us, I think, a different kind of critique. Who was Marot? She was a librarian and a labor organizer. There’s a good deal to say about hergood deal to say about her, and one might start here, but for present purposes it’s significant that she wrote in 1914 a book about the IWW and had a stint on the editorial board of The Masses before it was shut down by the US government in 1917. She joined The Dial shortly after.

Where Brooks cares mainly about literature, Marot takes the industrial school as her object. Marot frames her intervention in line with Dewey’s at the beginning of the issue – should the United States attempt to adopt a German style of industrial education? – but goes on to make an argument about the emancipatory possibilities of what might otherwise be derisively referred to as industrial or vocational training. Like Brooks, she presents us with a dichotomy, this time between predatory and creative profit-making. Like Brooks, she wishes to save the future and foster creative activity. Unlike Brooks, for Marot it is precisely within practical life that this emancipation of creativity can happen. Also unlike Brooks, her project is profoundly and essentially democratic rather than elitist.

German education has contributed to making what she – and she says everyone – recognizes as an extraordinarily efficient industrial plant. The workers are effective and docile. Yet this kind of education, Marot says, does not fit the United States. “The German has no pressing sense of the need to experiment with life” – here in the USA, we do. Marot presents an alternative path forward for industrial schools which are, today, she says, indeed not very effective. Her vision is a frankly syndicalist one: “No work in the subject matter of industry is education which does not in intention or in fact give the persons involved the ability to participate in the administration of industry.” As things stand, industrial education does the opposite: “the pupils gain more the sense of the power of the subject to control them, than an experience in their power to master the subject.” This mastery, this capacity to manage modern industrial production, is what Marot wants for every working person.

We cannot give up modern industrial production, there is no going back to an old craft system of production. The division of labor, technological development – these are conditions that, we should understand, in fact contain new possibilities. “Technological subject matter…is not part of common experience” – at least not yet. It ought to be. “If released for common experimentation, it is fit matter for making science a vital experience in everyday life.” Educators ought to seize this opportunity and “initiate produce enterprises wherein young people will be free to gain first-hand experience in the problems of industry.” We must, this is to say, fully embrace technological production as what we might call an element of civilization.

The people to ally with here are not so much the businessmen or financiers as people like architects and especially “engineers, not under the influence of business, are qualified to open up the creative aspects of production to the workers.” Marot cites Robert B. Wolf (on whom, see here), speaking at the Taylor Society, as an inspiration here, who argued that Scientific Management ought to bend its science to “making him [the working man] self-reliant and creative.” That’s not what happens now, because industrial education is carried on entirely from the side of business, and so “turn industrial education into industrial training” Educators, on the other hand, are positioned to bring out the “adventure” that exists in industry. “Industrial problems carry those who participate in their solution into pure and applied science, into the study of the market for raw materials and finished products, into the search for unconquered wealth.” Their goal is “to give young people, not an experience which is tagged on to industry under the influence of profits, but an experience which is inspired by the desire to produce and the opportunity to develop the inspiration.” Going a little beyond what Marot has written, and thinking about Taylor’s own writings – we can say that this is of course directly opposed to the plain meaning of Taylorism, which sought precisely and explicitly to strip from the worker all his accumulated store of knowledge and turn it over to the manager, to reduce to zero the ‘inspiration’ of the worker so as to achieve docile efficiency.

This is just what Marot is against. The big industrialists and financiers may well attempt to impose German style efficiency education in the USA. They’ll fail, but the cost will be high for everyone. We shouldn’t let them try: “the problem for American educators is the retention of our native concept of experimental life and the attainment of standards of workmanship – the realization of the strength of associated effort, together with the advance of wealth production.” What we need to do is insist on, says Marot, is a creative rather than a predatory industrial structure. Wealth exploitation must not be allowed to be synonymous with wealth production. For the creative concept to win out, it must “rest upon a people’s desire for productive experience, and their ability to associate together for that common end.” What Marot is trying to do, this is to say, is link a critique of shop floor and classroom practices with a larger critique of capitalist accumulation.

I’ve called Marot’s line of argument here syndicalist, and I was struck by how familiar some of it sounds from the French context. It fits to some degree with the populist mode of thinking about education. However it is revolutionary because Marot sees industrial education and education more broadly neither as training for the shop floor nor as an engine of class mobility, but rather as enabling the transformation of class relations themselves. Brooks had introduced a distinction between the practical and the useful, Marot one between predatory and creative wealth – both are supposed to mark a distance from a certain kind of bad commercial exploitation. Both want to re-activate or make available the past for use in the present, but for Brooks this is a basically elite project; for Marot the technical aspect of production is to be separated from the commercial one in order to render it – the adventure of scientific and technological capacity – available for popular use. Marot wants, we could say, to make of industrial production a usable past for all people.  

French Liberalism, Historiography New and Old

In this month’s Modern Intellectual History is a review essay from Michael Behrent on the recent historiography of French liberalism. This is a service to the profession: describing, evaluating, condensing, and extrapolating from a substantial body of recent work. The historiography of French liberalism has often in the past generation looked in two directions. First, it argued against the idea of its own Sonderweg vis-à-vis English liberalism, supposedly the ideal-type. Second it had to grapple with liberalism’s relation to republicanism, which is of course an older and, especially in France, more significant political idiom. As for the first, it seems that even American historians are finally ready to stop regarding continental Europe as presenting various detours from the one true path hewn by the UK. As for the second, Behrent suggests that it is the very illiberalism of much of French political culture that makes French liberals in particular so interesting.

Rather than summarizing Behrent’s summaries, I want to extract the broader perspective taken, he argues, by this new historiography. The landmarks in the background here include François Furet, Lucien Jaume, and Pierre Rosanvallon. The works at issue include (but are not limited to) the Geenens and Rosenblatt edited volume, Aurelian Craiutu’s multivolume project on moderation, Helena Rosenblatt and Steven Vincent’s different approaches to Benjamin Constant, and Emmanuelle Paulet-Grandguillot on the legacies of Rousseau in Sismondi and Constant—indeed the central figure here is very much Constant, not, say, Tocqueville. Behrent writes that “these works endeavor not so much to return French political thought to some indefinable liberal fold as to show that understanding how liberals contended with the peculiarities of French history can enrich and broaden our understanding of liberalism—to see it not merely as a doctrine, but as an emotional and moral disposition, a form of political judgment, and a specific political style” (449). According to Behrent, this recent scholarship seeks “to probe some of the constitutive dilemmas of liberal thought from a historically informed perspective.”

In that spirit, he offers three broad questions. Let me take them out of order. Behrent’s final question: “can the history of French liberalism—and liberalism tout court—be approached as a history of emotions, sentiments, and passions?” (476). My own tendency here would be to reframe this question as one about the liberal subject (reading Gossman’s wonderful Basel book has pushed me to think more widely about this). This is a little like Isaiah Berlin’s suggestion that at the heart of all political theories there is a theory of the human being, an anthropology. Asking after that leads in the direction of intellectual history rather than a sort of prosopo-psycho-biography of elites. But certainly the point, Constant’s point, that we are impassioned subjects but that we are nonetheless free is a relevant one that gets at some fundamental questions—are we free in our reason, or in our passion (Adolphe)? To whom would that distinction even make sense? Is that distinction, in fact, central to freedom as an idea in the modern world? Or only the European 19th century? Here is a historical question! 

Behrent’s first question concerns—following Bobbio’s famous analysis—the relationship between liberalism and democracy. These books “lend credence to the view that liberalism’s pedigree is largely independent of democracy’s—or, to the extent that they are related, liberalism must be seen as a reaction to the problems democracy raises” (473). Ultimately, with Spitz, Behrent wants to see in French liberalism an axiomatic democracy. Thus “liberalism has a democratic lining,” because without genuine democracy, individual freedom is empty. This is after all partly Constant’s argument in the famous essay on the liberty of the ancients and moderns—you must have both of these, even if you cannot expect or compel all moderns to be politically involved as all citizens were in the ancient world. But it is also—and here I would push back against Behrent’s characterization—especially in the French case very much about the Republic. Spitz, certainly, sees it in this way. Without the political action of the Republic, no liberalism. This is compatible with a much more negative view of liberalism than Behrent really allows into court, for instance Domenico Losurdo’s, in which cutting out a portion of the population as less-than-equal is essential to liberalism’s assertion of individual rights. Is talk of democracy supposed to preclude that reading? I don’t think it can. Behrent also points—this is the middle question—to the hoary opposition of of political to economic liberalisms. I have been convinced by J.T. Levy (and Marx!) that this is not a useful way of dividing the field, and it’s true that in France it is an especially muddy distinction. The economic, especially, was always on its face political (all the way back to Turgot’s ill-fated attempts at market liberalization).

Let me turn now to a venerable history of nineteenth century French political thought, one written by the British historian Roger Soltau (about whom I know very little, in fact). All proportion maintained, his view of French liberalism is an interesting contrast with the one in Behrent’s review essay. In his chapters on the end-of-century crisis of liberalism, he argues that, indeed, liberals ceased to defend any kind of meaningful “philosophy of freedom,” and hence had no real politics. They sank to defending bourgeois (not middle class) interests. This was indeed a relation of opposition, rather than necessity, between liberalism and democracy—the latter was certain to bring socialism, after all. So this was a problem, but there were also two areas of fundamental bad faith (not Soltau’s term) for French liberals—questions in which the bourgeoisie wasn’t even able to think clearly about its own interests. Soltau looks to one of the most unrepentant “economic” liberals of the age, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, to show how even the liberals were blinded by nationalism. In the name of national defense, the state had to be allowed anything. Similarly, beholden perhaps too much to the Republic, liberals were unwilling to challenge frankly illiberal anticlerical policies. As Soltau puts it, “If modern French Liberalism has proved so weak both before Jacobinism and Traditionalism...it is surely because its freedom of judgment was inhibited, as it were, on...the position of the Church in France and that of France in Europe” (304). The religious question at issue here isn't the same as it was for Constant--and the reflexive nationalism is also not the same as Jennifer Pitts' Turn to Empire (although neither is without relation). It is the freedom of judgment—the courage of thought—that he sees on the part of Charles Renouvier on both these issues that most impresses Soltau. Renouvier the neo-Kantian is, indeed, the only living representative of “the philosophy of freedom” that he sees in later 19th century France.

Why go back to a book written perhaps ninety years ago? (Other than, as in this case, almost pure serendipity?). For one thing because it seems to me that, although we may disagree about many of Soltau’s judgments, it would still be worth thinking about French liberalism and anticlericalism and nationalism—the places where, “its freedom of judgment was inhibited,” which are often telling. For another because, if we can see in Behrent’s analysis the pervasive influence of Furet, in Soltau we see (very much on the surface) that of Henry Michel, a historian of French political thought and a great advocate of Renouvier. And we can see Soltau working, as it were alongside another interwar historian of liberalism, Guido de Ruggiero (who looked to Croce's idealist liberalism). The latter, like Soltau, believed that, for complicated reasons, on a European level toward the end of the 19th century liberalism had ceased to be a genuine philosophy of freedom and had become merely the ideological cover of an increasingly unhappy bourgeoisie. This is no longer a popular opinion--why not? Both Soltau and Ruggiero were manifestly looking over their shoulders (Ruggiero literally) at fascists and “Bolshevists.” Historians of liberalism today ought to think hard about their—our—own investment in the object (whatever that object turns out to be).

Rancière & La parole ouvrière

In 1976 Jacques Rancière published (together with Alain Faure) a collection of texts by workers from between 1830 and 1851 under the title La Parole ouvrière. His short introduction to this collection, appearing as it does well before La nuit des prolétaires, his own thèse on the same material, is a good (and concise!) starting place for understanding what Rancière is up to in this early post-Althusserian phase of his thinking. I would describe this introduction as working on two levels at once: the first and most fully-stated is a methodological and historiographical argument with a certain kind of social history; the second is an intervention into what we can, problematically, call ‘post-Marxist’ theory. Neither intervention is without ambiguity.

           

In returning to the archive of “la parole ouvrière” between the revolution of 1830 and the coup of 1851, Rancière is, he says, above all not looking for an origin story. He wants to avoid the teleological story of a working class that is at the beginnings of what we all know will eventually be its self-consciousness as “proletarian.” But of course we are in the presence of growing class-consciousness. The specificity of this experience of class-consciousness in this moment for Rancière is that “La prise de parole qu’ils [les ouvrières] effectuent constitue elle-même un élément décisif de cette expérience” (10). This new accession into la parole was a claim to full humanity on the part of the workers. To be more than arms or rifles, but not because they are strong, because they are just as able to speak truth and justice as anyone. This was never separate from other forms of struggle (18-19). But there was nonetheless something particular about the claim to speech: “Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant. La parole fonde un droit que la violence ne saurait se donner à elle-même.” For this, education, and self-education, was required because it was clear that violence would be met with greater counter-violence and experience taught the likelyhood of political betrayal. “Entre la violence suspendue et la servilité refusée, ce dialogue nouveau avec la bourgeoisie exprime un idéal qui est moins de prendre la place des maîtres que de les réduire à leur rôle de marchands ou de prêteurs, d’avoir avec eux ce que Grignon appelle des ‘rapports d’indépendance et d’égalité’” (13). Or, differently put, “Le désir d’être reconnus communique avec le refus d’être méprisés. La volonté de convaincre de son droit engage la résolution de le défendre par les armes” (14). This was a dialogue with the bourgeoisie, and that is what gave it a class character.

This class character has, Rancière says, been challenged or missed by scholars who can see nothing but ideological domination in the adoption by the proletarians of the language of the bourgeoisie. What else but ideological domination could be indicated by claims to the same humanity as the bourgeoise? Claims to respectability and the like? This is to read badly, according to Rancière. The proletarian takes the language of the bourgeoisie literally, turns it against itself, denies to the bourgeois the exclusive right to determine the meaning of this language. “C’est aux ouvriers seuls qu’il revient de nommer leur situation et leur révolte” (16). Rancière pushes especially heavily on the use and reuse of the term “esclave.” The workers are not slaves. They refuse to be slaves. They are quick to feel that they have been called slaves. They refuse to be treated as slaves—and so we have a journal called “Spartacus” Because the workers are “Les Spartacus qui ne veulent pas qu’on les traite d’esclaves prennent les armes” (16). It is difficult, given the state of scholarship today, to read these lines without wanting some reference to the fact that contemporaneous with these exchanges during the Second Republic there is debate on and then the abolition of slavery in the Antilles. But Rancière doesn’t mention this. He is interested, rather in the “sourd travail de réappropriation des institutions, des pratiques et des mots” (18) undertaken by the proletarians. He is interested, that is, in the question “Que se passe-t-il quand la classe qui est dépossédée également des moyens de la production intellectuelle s’efforce de prendre la parole pour s’identifier?” (19).

In historiographic terms, Rancière is calling for a history of “la pensée ouvrière qui occupe cette place demeurée pratiquement vide entre les histoires des doctrines sociales qui nous résument Marx, Fourier ou Proudhon, et les chroniques de la vie ouvrière qui nous deecrivent l’horreur des caves de Lille...” (21). This, let us remember, was written in 1976. We are here after EP Thompson, but in the midst of the ascendency of social history. We are ready for the turn to cultural history that, in this labor-history context, we can associate with Joan Scott, Bill Reddy, Bill Sewell, and others. (Indeed, although I’m not going to try to reconstruct it here, Rancière took part in face-to-face debates with anglophone historians, I’m thinking, if I remember correctly, of a 1983 conference reproduced as Work in France eds Kaplan and Koepp, 1986). It would be interesting to explore the difference between the account of political practice through experience that Rancière suggests here, or even more so his later interventions into arguments about political subjectivity and Joan Scott’s famous anti-“evidence of experience” argument. The two after all both come from French working-class history. Here Rancière is of course aiming at something much more historically specific: “il faudrait étudier comment l’expérience quotidienne de l’exploitation et de l’oppression trouve à se systématiser en empruntant des mots ou des raisonnements au discours d’un haut, comment des idées deviennent des forces matérielles, comment des plans de réorganisation sociale sont mis en oeuvre à l’échelle d’un atelier, d’une corporation, d’un quartier...” (21).

Here, though, we turn to the second, and less fully-articulated point that Rancière wants to make in this particular text. Taking a step back from the argument he has been making, he ventriloquizes a counter-argument: you will say that all of this history is really the past, “songeries d’artisans englouties en pratique par la grande industrie et anéanties en théories par le marxisme” (21-22). Now, there is a kind of social or cultural history that would pause here and say—but all utopias, all ruptures, all possibilities unrealized, are worth recovering. This is one of the great tasks of the historian: to rescue, to paraphrase Thompson, voices from the enormous condescension of posterity. But that is not what Rancière goes on to say. He turns, rather, to Marx. And he introduces two rather surprising (1976!) mechanisms into his narrative to do so: contemporaneity and choice. He writes, “L’idée de la révolution prolétarienne est inexorablement contemporaine des discours de cette avant-garde ouvrière qui pense et agit non pour préparer un futur où les prolétaires recueilleraient l’héritage d’une grande industrie capitaliste formée par la dépossession de leur travail et de leur intelligence, mais pour arrêter le mécanisme de cette dépossession” (22). These soon-to-be obsolete artisans saw themselves to be presented with a choice between two possible futures, “celui de l’organisation capitaliste qui, dans chaque métier, annonce, à travers la réorganisation du procès de travail, l’exacerbation de la concurrance entre les bras ouvriers ou le renforcement de la discipline de l’atelier, l’instauration d’un esclavage nouveau; ou celui de l’association ‘libre et volontaires’ des travailleurs. C’est dans le sentiment de ce choix que se forme l’idée de l’émancipation ouvrière sur laquelle viendra se greffer la théorie de la révolution prolétarienne : non à partir de la conscience des prolétaires formés à ‘l’école de la fabrique’ mais à partir du point de vue de ceux qui entendent refuser cette école” (23).

Marx could abuse Proudhon for his theoretical incompetence. He could struggle to assert that utopian socialism was past, that his own socialism was scientific. But between this science and the political dream of emancipation there was a gap and “ce décalage se trouve d’entrée de jeu au coeur de la problématique marxienne.” (Is this still an Althusserian reading of Marx? But historicized differently?) Marx “n’a pas pu penser le but à atteindre dans d’autres termes que ceux de ces ‘artisans’: communisme, émancipation des travailleurs, abolition du salariat, libre association des travailleurs. It s’est efforcé de penser avec plus de riguer la nécessité du renversement du pouvoir et les conditions de ce renversement,” along with his political economy, but “il ne pouvait se représenter l’avenir communiste autrement que ne le fait en 1850 le mécanicien Drevet: monde d’ateliers sociaux et de magasins coopératifs où, dans l’égalité de tous devant le travail et le loisir, des travailleurs librement associés régaleraient leur production sur les besoins désormais connus et reconnus de leur frères.” 23-24.

But this does not mean—as for instance is suggested by the recent Sperber biography, as well as the grand narrative of bourgeois life outlined by Jerrold Seigel—that Marx is himself somehow surpassed by subsequent social-economic history. Rather, “la mise en place de ce réseau de mots et d’images où la pensée de Marx prend ses repères peut aussi être le point de départ d’une réflexion matérailiste sur l’histoire des transformations du marxisme” (24).  Rancière, much like Antonio Labriola in the 1890s, asks that we return to the moment at which Marx’s thought was constituted in order to understand it and further the project of emancipation. Although perhaps I am reading Rancière as more sympathetic to Marx than he really is?

To close this rapid overview of a single, now-ancient, text I want to present a methodological-political anxiety. I worry that the intellectual historical call to be open to the demands of the texts we encounter—dialogic, but also for instance the way Gordon frames it—makes it difficult for intellectual historians to make the kind of move that Rancière does. How can we not, if we begin by trying to allow Marx to speak directly to us, fail to read him against these worker-philosophers in just the way he wants us to? Rancière wants, we might say, to use the context of Marx to make Marx’s thinking alive in the present. But this is not the message I get from Gordon. Rancière uses the notion of historical choice—two choices, a moment of clear decision creating a rupture in imaginative futures—to insist that the workers of the 1840s, rather than the theorists, remain contemporary to the idea of revolution. This, it seems to me, requires a set of absolutely contemporary commitments (for Rancière we can say, to equality) that are simply not available to the historian. Or, if they are so available, it is at just the cost that Lilti, contra Gordon, says—we won’t be doing history any longer, but rather politics, because it seems to me that there is nothing else that a claim about contemporaneity can ultimately mean. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and this is to some degree what Gordon (et al, he’s getting unfairly abused here, see also Jay and LaCapra) wants. But with that come responsibilities and obligations that have nothing to do with professional historical training or practice. That would be militant history. That would be history that begins with a choice in the present imagined in the same way that Rancière claims works in the 1840s began with a choice. Evidently this is a problem of long standing. My worry, I suppose, is really the idea that intellectual historians (rather than, say, historians of social movements who are in many ways better equipped for this) should be particularly obliged to confront this problem of contemporaneity. Surely it is for us to ask, rather, why there could be a choice of that kind at all, in the particular moment that it seemed to present itself? There’s a problem of recursion here, of course, and the inevitability of making a choice at the beginning of subject-matter. But, then, if you begin by saying that you are an intellectual historian, probably you have already made a choice against, at the least, the equality with which Rancière begins—a choice for Marx and not the proletarians? 

Lovejoy revived

"Return of the History of Ideas?"

When I began graduate school, I was very interested in method. Theoretical and methodological discussions about historiography seemed weighty, important. As I progressed with my own project, I became less interested in discussing method. It came to seem to me that most methodological questions were simply badly posed, or really hid (and then not very well) value judgments that had to do with what ought to be studied, or who ought to write, or something even more baldly political, rather than anything properly about how one should go about ‘doing history.’ Discussing method in the absence of a concrete project or problem came to seem to me pointless. Which it certainly is not, even if many particular instances of such discussion are.

I have been meaning to have a look at McMahon and Moyn’s edited volume Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History since shortly before it appeared in 2014. The book contains 14 essays by some quite excellent historians, and looks promising. At the moment I just want to set down some thoughts on having read Darrin McMahon’s essay, the first, “The Return of the History of Ideas?” The essay is, needless to say, erudite and rich. McMahon is especially effective as selecting the pungent quotation. For instance he cites Darnton objection to Mornet’s Origines intellectuels de la révolution française that it offered a “French filter coffee machine: it assumed that ideas trickled down...”(18). I’m not sure exactly what sort of machine Darnton has in mind, but it seems to me that a French press might function as a lovely metaphor. The ideas (the caffeine!) diffuse gently out from the texts (the grounds), which are more or less well distributed in the more or less hot milieu (the water). But the brew is only finished when the plunger (revolution? historiography?) clarifies and compresses the situation...

In any case, briefly put, McMahon wants to defend a new history of ideas—the name for Arthur Lovejoy’s much-maligned field. What this tends to mean in practice is books that follow a single idea through time. McMahon has himself written Happiness: A History and more recently Divine Fury: A History of Genius. I’ve read parts of the latter. This mode of doing history, McMahon says, seems to be returning. What does this mean? His essay proceeds by recounting first how Lovejoy’s history of ideas was “Unfashion[ed]”—that is, made unfashionable—and then what a newly fashionable such sub discipline might do for us. The first part looks on the one hand to Skinner and Pocock, and on the other to Darnton. Between the out-and-out hostility of the New Social History, this is to say, and the condescension of the Cambridge School, Lovejoy-ian history could not stand. McMahon is less concerned to narrate this process (there is so little space!) than to point out the degree to which the criticisms offered in the 70s and 80s were not particularly fair, especially when applied to Lovejoy’s actual scholarship rather than his methodological statements.

In the second part of McMahon’s essay, he identifies four “principles areas” in which the history of ideas, renewed as it seems to be by a recent “spate of monographs,” might be of use. The goal here is not, of course, to claim the imperial status that Lovejoy gave to—won for—the history of ideas. “Surely the days when historians fought over their dominions and parcels of turf like colonizing generals are behind us,” all we want, writes McMahon, is “a place on the map” (22). First, the newly racinated history of ideas should return to us one of the great strength’s of Lovejoy’s approach, which was to see the longue durée histories of ideas. Braudelian histories of ideas are needed “to open up sight lines and reveal connections that are potentially obscured by a more intense focus on immediate context” (23). Second, McMahon suggests that the history of ideas, as an effective counter to the tendency to provincialism built in to intensely contextual accounts, may be in a position to confront less fearfully the charge of presentism: “not all ideas are the prisoners of context, trapped in time, long ago defeated and dead. A certain historical presentism need not be a dirty word, and in fact at a time when humanists are continually being challenged to justify their “relevance,” presentism may be a useful strategy of survival.” After all, the best history always uses “the past to illuminate the present” (25). Third, the new history of ideas ought to be “eclectic,” drawing on all kinds of resources that neither Lovejoy, attuned mostly to philosophy, nor the Cambridge School, so focused on political and moral thought, bothered to interrogate. This seems to mean on the one hand crossing yet other disciplinary boundaries, but also into popular culture: “A revitalized history of ideas ought at the very least to be eclectic, reveling in the interdisciplinary ideal that first defined it, counting itself a citizen, though hardly a king, of infinite space” (26). This, McMahon understands, means manipulating lots of information necessarily at second hand. This suggests the fourth and final possible contribution, which is to bring “writerly craft” back to historiography. Intellectual historians, McMahon feels, have spent too much time worrying about the essential limits of language as such, and not enough time working to make their language more pleasing. McMahon’s example of excellence here is not Lovejoy, but Isaiah Berlin.  

About this last point I have mixed feelings. I suspect that I share much of McMahon’s frustrations with the nature of the debates that intellectual historians engaged in over the course of the 1980s. And I do think that the form of history is important. Obviously we should all be better writers. And yet I wince (I do not reach for my revolver) when academics make good writing a programmatic goal. Similarly, I agree that a thoughtful degree of presentism is no bad thing—although I think we probably already have this—but I do not like the suggestion that this is to be thought of as a “survival strategy.” Writing history, and all the more so intellectual history, for a broad audience is commendable, if extraordinarily difficult. But this is at best a goal for the individual, it is not a disciplinary goal. McMahon would, and rightly, protest that he is after all not telling everyone to write in this way, only trying to argue that longue durée, synoptic (a term I associated with Martin Jay, who is all over this essay), well-written accounts focused on a particular idea across diverse contexts, are useful. Let those flowers bloom! Just give us a spot on the map! And I could not disagree. Nor do I disagree that Lovejoy has come in for unjust abuse and that Berlin could sometimes write in a very powerful, engaging way. And I am not in a position to evaluate the collection of new monographs that McMahon has in mind. Holding a concrete example of such scholarship in my hands, I would want to think about how it handles causality. Thinking about the collection of such monographs, I would like to know what ideas they treat, and wonder if any conclusions about the tendency of the subfield to confirm or upset categories could be drawn from this list. Finally, I would be interested to hear more about the distinction—which I think McMahon would maintain—between scholarly monographs constructed along these lines and self-consciously popularizing books.

In any case, as I move forward through this volume—and there are at least four or five of the chapters I’ll certainly read—perhaps I’ll be able to pick up some of these questions in a different light.