If one Googles “Wingspread” a vast number of conference titles covering all manner of topics will fill the screen: from Fire-Rescue Service Stakeholders to Endocrine Disruptors, from Domestic Violence to Civic Responsibilities of Research. Of more interest to intellectual historians was the conference on the future of American intellectual history held at the Wingspread Conference Center in 1977. Over forty years the “Wingspread conference” and the book that came out of it has echoed through the field. Neither the conference nor the book that emerged from it, New Directions in American Intellectual History, edited by John Higham and Paul Conkin, was a celebration of the field.Footnote ¹ It focused on a collective crisis of confidence, particularly among the more senior scholars. The heart of the matter at the conference was the perceived challenge of social history, a social history that fancied itself “scientific” and more rigorous than intellectual history. There was fear that this movement in the profession was marginalizing a field that had flourished for a couple of generations.

Intellectual history and social history had been partners in expanding American history beyond traditional political history. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, as far back as James Harvey Robinson at Columbia University and a bit later in the American field with the influential scholarship of Arthur Schlesinger Sr, intellectual, social, and political history were bundled. This “new history” displaced the traditional and dominant nineteenth-century political history at Columbia and elsewhere.Footnote ²

By the 1950s intellectual history was well blended into political and social history, as exemplified by works by Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, C. Vann Woodward, Edmund Morgan, or Perry Miller, among others.Footnote ³ Yet, with perhaps the exception of Woodward, the focus was the higher elevations of the social, political, and intellectual pyramid. Its lower elevations were noted but less often incorporated. Particularly important—and different today—with the exception of Miller, these authors and their works were not only important within the profession but also read and discussed by the wider public.

But by the 1970s, a more sharply defined social history from the bottom up had emerged. It was very professional; this work was not for the general reader. And it broke away from previous social history with a new energy associated with new methods. In place of text-based methods the new social history turned to quantitative studies that were mostly based on the manuscript census or voting patterns of ethnic or occupational groups. The focus was ordinary people, especially working class men, not leaders. Later women were included. Ideas had no significant place in this history. The focus was on data, sampling, and aggregations, with particular interest in employment, property, or voting patterns. Intellectual and social history were thus separated rather than blended, and it seemed that intellectual history was being pushed to the margins. The new social historians often deployed computers; one historian even declared that the historian must be a computer programmer or nothing.Footnote ⁴ As it turned out, in time this visionary new history collapsed on technical methodological issues and massive interpretive problems.

Energy in the historical profession turned to a richer social history. Historians turned to the examples of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and the various writings of Eric Hobsbawm, both British historians. Among American social historians, most turned to the more humanistic scholarship on the working classes and slavery undertaken by Herbert G. Gutman.Footnote ⁵

Such was the context for Wingspread. Worried about the movement of the profession away from intellectual history, it was a moment of “self-reflection,” a phrase recently used by Daniel Wickberg and cited by Angus Burgin in his fine chapter about the Wingspread conference in The Worlds of American Intellectual History.Footnote ⁶ Yes, there was reflection, but there was also an undertone of unease, episodically rising to a sense of urgency about the present and future status of the field of intellectual history. It was that worry that had prompted the organizers, John Higham and Paul Conkin, both of whom entered the profession when intellectual history (or the combination of intellectual and social history) was at the heart of the discipline.

The conference was organized roughly in generations: long-time leaders in the field and profession; a well-established middle generation, including associate professors and full professors; and the younger generation who were marked by 1970s degrees and a first book. The participants were as a whole a quite varied group of intellectual historians, by generations, institutions, and by areas of research—less so by gender.Footnote ⁷

One of the key themes of the discussion and the papers—many of which were published in New Directions in American Intellectual History—was to identify or find channels by which ideas emerged in a particular context, often an institutional context. Though the word was not used, or at least I do not remember hearing it, there was a concern to ground the study of ideas. In that context there was significant discussion of “communities of discourse” or equivalent frames. Grand generalization, such as Henry Steele Commager's The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character, was unwelcome.Footnote ⁸

But one of the participants, Gordon S. Wood, who had already written an enormously successful broad intellectual and political history in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969), usefully suggested in his Wingspread chapter that

Whatever one thinks of the metaphor, it is a pertinent point still.

After the event, those I am calling the “1970s degrees group” sought to keep the conversation going. With the strong support particularly of Wood, David Hall, Dorothy Ross, and, especially, John Higham, the younger participants set out to establish the Intellectual History Newsletter in 1979. I was the first editor. In its early years the newsletter was xeroxed sheets stapled together, but over time, particularly when it moved from NYU to Boston University, it acquired a cover and finally an actual binding. The newsletter lasted until 2002. The editors at that time, Charles Capper and Anthony La Vopa, brought on board Nicholas Phillipson as a third editor. At the same time they upped the ante by founding Modern Intellectual History, of which they were the editors. And they produced its first issue in 2004. If you are reading this essay in Modern Intellectual History, you know that it has flourished, and the research it publishes is rigorous and diverse.Footnote ¹⁰

More recently, a group of young intellectual historians took up the challenge of creating the Society of US Intellectual History (USIH).Footnote ¹¹ They began with a blog in 2007, then a conference in 2008, and regular conferences continue. They, too, looked back to the Wingspread conference as they shaped their own vision. In 2009 the USIH organized a panel at the CUNY Graduate Center that was chaired by Charles Capper and four panelists who had been participants at Wingspread and contributors to New Directions in American Intellectual History: Dorothy Ross, David Hollinger, David Hall, and Thomas Bender. This new generation recognized their predecessors, yet they are no copycats. They have had their own agendas, structure, and new technologies that have made their project distinctive and an increasingly important one.

But the echo of Wingspread persists, and it is alive in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, particularly with the concluding chapter by Angus Burgin, “New Directions, Then and Now.” It is the best account of Wingspread, based as it is on documents associated with its aspirations and organization. Burgin also addresses the New Directions in American Intellectual History volume, using it as a “point of comparison.” The real lesson of the comparison with Wingspread or New Directions in American Intellectual History (1977) and The Worlds of American Intellectual History (2017) is that the field has moved past its past.

Yet I am not sure it is fair to suggest, as Burgin does, that like the 1940s and 1950s United States intellectual history “is again a hubristic discipline.”Footnote ¹² There is, however, a new and welcome confidence. Indeed, there is an impressive boldness in several of the chapters of this collection. Not only are there new directions in this volume, but it makes clear the vitality and progress of the field—in the expansion of topics, the richness of the chapters, and its cosmopolitanism that breaches the territorial bounds of the United States. Burgin quotes the first of John Higham's several appraisals of American intellectual history published in the American Historical Review in 1951: he characterized the field as “still seeking coherence, still eluding confinement.”Footnote ¹³ Whatever meaning it had for Higham or for Burgin, for me it seems just right for the spirit of this volume, and I hope that it is a lasting description of the field.

The intellectual history arrayed in the well-titled volume at hand is quite broad in its definition of the work of American intellectual history. In comparison, I am particularly struck by the inclusion of intellectuals associated with “Third World” scholarship as well as the increasingly more common white/black sense of incorporation in American intellectual history. This volume shows American intellectual history's cosmopolitan aspirations. The spectrum of intellectual history here is notable in its broadness: it does not target elite intellect alone. We find a range of thinking men and women: from an intensive and detailed analysis of the ideas of two of the most influential Atlantic world philosophers of the postwar years to an innovative recovery of the voices of the black Atlantic and the contents of “glossy generalist magazines.”Footnote ¹⁴

In both Wingspread and the Cambridge conferences the table of contents emerged after the participants contributed the chapters on their own themes or topics rather than responding to directives from a central committee. This sometimes makes constructing a table of contents difficult. In the case of Wingspread, there were three sections: “Definitions,” “History of Ideas,” and “History of Culture.” My sense is that almost every essay could have been moved to at least one or both of the other sections. The section titles in The Worlds of American Intellectual History are a bit more creative: single words of two types: conceptual (“Frames” and “Method”) or topical (“Justice,” “Philosophy,” “Secularization”). But here, too, it is easy to shift essays into one section. As I read this difference between the two conferences, Wingspread was seeking a path forward, while in The Worlds of American Intellectual History substantive work rather than rescue work is at the core.

But there is also a more fundamental difference, one of a piece with the agenda of Modern Intellectual History. The essays in the New Directions volume were all within United States history, with no significant engagement with European history, while The World of American Intellectual History is far more cosmopolitan—with four European authors and several chapters that move between the United States and Europe. I, for one, hope that whenever the next similar volume like these two collections is put together some connections and comparisons with South American intellectual history will be included.Footnote ¹⁵

The first section in this volume is true to its categorical title of “Frames.” After a rich and acute analysis of the bibliography of the American Enlightenment, Caroline Winterer turns to digital technologies to keep track of letters by participants and thus shows the dimensions of the Atlantic Enlightenment.Footnote ¹⁶ We have always understood the Enlightenment as international, and we use the term, as in the title of Henry May's history, The Enlightenment in America, as a way of acknowledging it. But that stops us at the border. The question raised by Winterer poses the geography of the frame, and she urges us to go outward. Her project is to put the American Enlightenment figures into an Atlantic geography. She gathers the common threads and the distinctive ones in an American (as northern hemisphere) Enlightenment, excepting Latin America. Were we historians also to look to the South, we might usefully explore more fully the similarities and differences of North and South America. We might then readily incorporate the full range of Atlantic Enlightenment ideas in the age of revolution, including the Haitian Revolution, the third of the great eighteenth-century revolutions, but which is so often forgotten in that context.Footnote ¹⁷

Alexis de Tocqueville is a richly complex thinker. The more one rereads him, the more one discovers. Leslie Butler's chapter on “The ‘Woman Question’ in the Age of Democracy” is an example. She examines a clutch of nineteenth-century thinkers, men and women: Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, and to a lesser extent Harriet Taylor Mill and Catharine Beecher. For me the core of the chapter is the focus on the ideas of Tocqueville on democracy and gender—and his change over time in the course of the larger conversation she examines. In her interpretation, he shifts his understanding of family and gender in significant ways between volume 1 and volume 2, the latter one being a much longer and deeper analysis, with Butler suggesting that the shift was prompted by the “conversation” among his interlocutors. Both public and private good-faith conversation can impact public culture and produce stronger truths.

Productive conversation is what we academics seek, and when we find it we are impressed. But not all historical conversations are productive. Failures could be of the actors and/or the context or structure of the conversation. If the first two essays in the section labeled “Frames” showed the historians bringing the actors into constructive conversation, then Nico Slate finds failure in “‘We the People of Color’: Colored Cosmopolitanism and the Borders of Race.” In tracking the groups of color concerned with environmental justice, he finds an inability of various actors to break out enough to establish a common conversation and agenda for solidarity. This finding of failed engagement is, I think, quite important for scholarship and ought to be considered more often.

On this issue, Slate recognizes the pertinence of a statement of Frederick Cooper, a historian of Africa and imperial histories, in an analogous context: historians must confront or discover “why some affinities in some contexts give rise to groups with a hard sense of uniqueness and antagonism to other groups, while in other instances people operate via degrees of affinity and connection, live with shades of grey rather than black and white, and form flexible networks rather than bounded groups.”Footnote ¹⁸

As a field, intellectual history has long been not only elite in focus but also grounded on the word, not the image. But more and more historians are learning from images and objects, and we see this in the essay by John Holloway and his exchange with Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum of Harlem. Here curatorial space and narrative space are combined in ways that enrich our sense of the dimensions of the black Atlantic that was opened up by Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic and Double Consciousness.Footnote ¹⁹ The historical analysis of objects and images is often called cultural history, but specific ideas are embedded in them. Curatorial analysis in this instance is, Holloway observes, a conscious effort to write a new narrative about how an unobserved blackness operates in the Atlantic world and how acknowledging it changes the narrative of the present.Footnote ²⁰

It is striking that Holloway's chapter is broken into distinctive subsets. A tight argument is difficult. The use of visual evidence poses issues in interpretation. So does language, of course, but words give us more signs and we feel more confident. Still we should take on the challenges, and working with curators, as Holloway does, is the way to open up a window into ideas otherwise closed to us. Yet there is hope, suggested in Holloway's closing reference to the work of anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, notably his compelling book Silencing the Past: Power and Production in History, which pierced the silence surrounding the invisibility of the Haitian Revolution, only now being recognized by academic historical scholarship.Footnote ²¹

If the chapters in “Frames” are diverse in content and wide-ranging, the next set of chapters under the category of “Justice” are very tightly framed with very close analysis, more precise as the sequence proceeds. Here we observe what literary critics used to call “close reading.” Margaret Abruzzo's rich exploration of the expansive relations of sin, moral agency, and enslavement in her dense chapter, “The Sins of Slavery and the Slaves of Sin: Toward a History of Moral Agency,” reveals the moral complexity of daily life, particularly in the case of an enslaved woman. Can a person without agency or with only severely limited agency, like a slave, sin? This is different from the common case of the drunkard, prostitute, or gambler. What about a slave who is “forced” to take an action ordinarily sinful: an ordered killing or failing to resist the sexual demands of a man who owns her? Here is moral complexity. We historians make judgments on such circumstances. But judgments are likely to be different in different circumstances. “Morality prescribes,” Abruzzo observes, “but histories of morality must push beyond prescription to understand how actors conceptualized morality.”Footnote ²²

The heart of this complex chapter is an elaboration of Harriet Jacobs's explanation of why she willingly had sex with a white man. “Neither can I plead ignorance or thoughtlessness . . . I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation.”Footnote ²³ Building on Jacobs, Abruzzo observes,

This made sense in the public life of the antebellum United States, where there were constant temptations—gambling halls, saloons, and other places of gathering—easily located with a quick look at such books as George Foster's New York by Gas-Light (1850). The moral or moralistic voices of the time implored them to avoid such situations. But it was different for “enslaved people,” as Abruzzo notes. “The contradiction between the responsibility of moral agency and the seeming inevitability of sin exposed slavery's wickedness.” Without full agency, the slave remains “responsible to God.” They “could not flee occasions of sin; slavery itself was the occasion of sin,” to which Jacobs was exposed against her will. But Abruzzo makes a final turn. Citing Theodore Dwight Weld, an abolitionist, the slave suffered his or her “prostration of consciousness.” It was this “death-stab into the soul of the slave” that the moral damage “lent urgency to anti-slavery.” And that made the work of abolition all the more compelling for Weld and the religiously motivated abolitionists more generally.Footnote ²⁵

In his erudite, analytically tight but wide-ranging study of the constitution of nations as liberal in a cosmopolitan world, Duncan Kelly shows the relation of nation and cosmopolitanism in the thinking of Francis Lieber, a figure surely underrecognized in American intellectual and political history. Exiled from Prussia for his politics in 1827, he took up a position at South Carolina College, an odd place for an Atlantic liberal. In 1857, when his liberal views were increasingly less welcome in the South, he moved to New York and took up the chair of law and political science at Columbia. When the Civil War broke out, he was commissioned by President Lincoln to draft a military code, and the resulting Code for the Government of Armies (1863) remains a classic, for which he is usually remembered. But his political thinking about the nineteenth-century nation-state is equally significant. Kelly gives him his due in his explication of Lieber's core political principles: domestic republican nationalism and international cosmopolitanism. This work was often developed in relation to the contemporary Prussian political scientist, Johannes Kaspar Bluntschli, who had been the mentor of Herbert Baxter Adams, but less visible than Lieber in United States historical scholarship of the Atlantic conversation about political liberalism and the emerging nation-state.Footnote ²⁶

We see in Kelly's account of these two German-educated political scientists, one still in Prussia, the other in seemingly agreeable exile, especially when he moved from South Carolina College to Columbia, developing a vision of a liberal nation-state system in the international community of the emerging Atlantic that they envisioned as cosmopolitan.Footnote ²⁷ Cosmopolitan, as they defined it, pertained to the international system made up of “civilized states.” It was, Kelly argues, a nationality grounded in a racially unequal form of cosmopolitan liberalism. He argues as well that the two “alighted, very early, on the theme of American exceptionalism.”Footnote ²⁸ For me, the meaning is unclear, and I would instead argue that cosmopolitanism means a world of difference without exceptionalism.Footnote ²⁹ Most important is Kelly's point that both Bluntschli and Lieber held that “national self-determination was natural, but the process of civilization and national self-development was uneven.”Footnote ³⁰

Justice is the topic of Samuel Moyn's essay—both justice within the nation-state and global justice. For the former the text is John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), with Rawls's further elaborations. For the latter the text is Charles Beitz's engagement with Rawls and his own elaboration of a philosophical argument for the obligation of global justice. As a student, Beitz, now a professor of philosophy and political science at Princeton University, recognized the importance of Rawls's famous theory of justice. But Rawls assumed a nation-state. How could one internationalize or rethink Rawls's theory of justice? This chapter is striking for its combination of broad social concern with very, very close examination of concepts and their implications for two large domains of justice.

To move out to a global scale, without global juridical or legislative or executive powers, makes the challenge of action radically different. And though there is no reference to Kelly's preceding chapter, there is an echo and implied revision of Lieber and Bluntschli in Samuel Moyn's chapter, which explores the place of the nation in a moral global framework. Moyn examines Charles Beitz's effort to devise a philosophically compelling moral argument for the enforcement of human rights within states in a cosmopolitan system of states. Can one make a philosophical argument that gets beyond Lieber and Bluntschli, one that legitimates addressing human rights when the system of states is cosmopolitan, but nations may not be. Beitz argued in International Organization that “the effect of shifting from a statist to a cosmopolitan point of view is to open up the state to external moral assessment (also, perhaps, political interference) and to understand persons, rather than states, as the ultimate subjects of international morality.”Footnote ³¹ And he further argued that “it is the interest of persons that are fundamental, and ‘national interests’ are relevant to the justification of international principles only to the extent they are devised from the interests of persons.” Moyn concludes with the observation that Rawls and Beitz “hit on the best available justificatory principles for distribution locally and globally, but that history went the other way”—and, I would add, dramatically so.Footnote ³²

Moyn assures his readers that nothing in this argument changes or reduces “states to intermediaries, without moral standing in themselves, between global principles and deserving individuals.”Footnote ³³ But he does not pick up as strongly as I would the point of “national interests” that Beitz insists are pertinent. What is an action that the cosmopolitan world can use to challenge distinctive national interests? This practical point is not engaged. But perhaps the mechanism is sanctions. They are external yet they can and have been effective under particular conditions. The next questions might be those conditions and the moral status of sanctions, which may harm the innocent masses far more than the leaders.

Although the essays in previous chapters were grounded in philosophy, they were located in a section on “Justice,” not in the following section on “Philosophy,” which has a set of four somewhat various essays. But two of the contributions, Joel Isaac and Sophia Rosenfeld, share methodological and philosophical concerns. In Isaac's phrase, the point is that “philosophical insights can be gleaned from historical inquiry.”Footnote ³⁴ Surely historical scholarship can do some of that. But analytic modes of philosophy are not an easy blend, at least in the United States at the high end of the discipline. When Richard Rorty exited the analytic mode for a historical approach he was more or less exiled—a happy exile in his view, but exiled. But Isaac, the historian, makes it work.

Eventually, what Isaac desires is a debate engaging “philosophical history, about the persistence and character of the Enlightenment, about the roots of cosmopolitanism.”Footnote ³⁵ Neither he nor we quite get there in this occasion. But he does construct a foundation for such a discussion. Using “pain” and “personhood” as a thread, he elaborates a compact but rich historical account of key issues in analytic philosophy. From there he asks “what, aside of learning something about Wittgenstein and his readers, can we take away from this exercise?” As a historian Isaac has here elaborated an interesting short history of analytic philosophy, a primer much like the philosophy of the social sciences course that I took in graduate school. But his accompanying richer result is that “we learn something about the limits, and something about the possibilities, of a way of thinking about human reasoning and sociability.”Footnote ³⁶ More importantly, he urges us to see that “this manner of reconstructing some core arguments within the analytical tradition allows us to connect the Age of Wittgenstein in illuminating ways with the social and political thought of the Enlightenment.”Footnote ³⁷

Sophie Rosenfeld likewise hopes for a more philosophical intellectual history, or history with implications for philosophy. But her approach to and conception of being a philosophical historian is quite different from Isaac's. She provides the reader with a quite rich and compelling celebration of Hannah Arendt's mode as a philosophically grounded mid-century public intellectual, thus bringing a historically grounded philosophical discourse into the public culture. Arendt, of course, was trained in philosophy, but it was training quite different from the Anglo-American analytic brand that would include Isaac. She seems to stand alone in Anglo-America—yet perhaps not entirely so. If there was a United States historian of American intellectual history whose work was akin to Arendt's, I think it would be Christopher Lasch, who references her for support on his key intellectual and moral commitments as a critic.Footnote ³⁸

The other chapters in this section by Francesca Bordogna and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen are quite different in topic and genre—one focuses on the genre of academic/scholarly thought, while the other is a study of a magazine designed for a broadly educated public. In “Unstiffening Theory: The Italian Magic Pragmatists and William James,” Bordogna explores the work of Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, both self-taught Italian psychologists and philosophers sympathetic to Mussolini and disciples of James. One might not expect James to reciprocate, but Bordogna shows that he responded quite positively to them, even visiting them in Italy. As a pragmatist, James believed that there was a tight link between knowledge and deliberate action. Presumably it was this quality, or a corrupted version of it, that drew them to both James and to Mussolini, who they followed into the World War II years, almost to the end. In a distortion of pragmatism Papini envisioned a “new philosopher and a new politician, both of whom aimed to become ‘creators of their own truths.’”Footnote ³⁹ James, who died in 1910, of course missed the career of Italian Fascism and their association with it.

Is intellectual history the history of “intellectuals”? Or is the spectrum of serious writers of nonfiction wider than that problematic nomenclature? Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen makes a good case for the wider view. In her last paragraph she quotes William James to the point that “the art of being wide is the art of knowing what to overlook.” Actually, he had such remarkable curiosity that he must have failed in this art, and Ratner-Rosenhagen turns to William's younger brother, Henry, as a “better guide . . . recommending that we be observers on whom nothing is lost.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Her examination of Wisdom (a magazine previously unknown to me) shows that the editors brought to their broad readership significant intellectuals, classical writers, and others who were not all public figures. Her essay raises real questions about the bounds of intellectual history as a field.

Ratner-Rosenhagen references Sarah Igo's somewhat underdeveloped notion of the value in a “free-range” version of intellectual history.Footnote ⁴¹ One might argue that such openness suits the exploration of the intellectual history of a modern democracy. Igo does not offer a formal definition of “free-range” intellectual history. One would err, I think, if one assumed that Igo has in mind some vague “cultural” history. I believe she is advocating the full range of persons who articulate ideas—located in time and place, as in her own chapter, which is quite focused and fixed. And I take Ratner-Rosenhagen's contribution as an example. It addresses a text more popular than the more rigorous, even esoteric, texts usually associated with the study of intellectual history, which, in fact, is the case in Igo's chapter. I assume that “free-range” means that one can search out a wide expanse of texts and themes with as many methodological approaches. Thinking and the resulting expression, it seems to me, are the domain of intellectual history. Thus the ideas of Max Planck and P.T. Barnum might both be the proper objects of intellectual history.Footnote ⁴²

Andrew Jewett's chapter opens the section titled “Secularization.” In his contribution on religion and science, he makes the case that the place of religion and science between the 1930s and the 1960s, the “long fifties,” was more complicated than is usually understood. There was a worry that science and its spokesmen aimed to replace religion as the foundation of culture and morality. Might science treated as a humanistic discipline and moral force possibly displace religion? The issue was less science as practice than what Jewett, and those he is explicating, describe as “scientism,” which “meant the illegitimate extension of science's narrowly empiricist, reductive mindset into the intrinsically nonscientific realms of human affairs and moral meanings.”Footnote ⁴³ Many religious leaders argued that “scientism,” itself a “moral vacuum,” pointed to “totalitarianism.” Reinhold Niebuhr, widely recognized as a major neoorthodox liberal voice of the era, “targeted scientism” (and his use of scientism and not science is important) in his Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and in The Irony of American History (1952), both of which challenged the secular and science-oriented John Dewey.Footnote ⁴⁴

Will Herberg, generally thought to be a liberal, largely on the basis of his Protestant–Catholic–Jew (1953), challenged “scientism” a few years earlier in his Judaism and Modern Man (1951).Footnote ⁴⁵ While science can be useful, “when it turns master and savior, it inevitably becomes a brainless monster, imperiling life.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In studies of the intellectual history of this era we take note of the global leadership of the United States in the natural sciences and the huge new investments in the social sciences, most notably by the newly established Ford Foundation. Global leadership in the natural sciences was American. But Jewett nicely captures the legitimate unease, with the “Bomb” being only one of the reasons for concern.

Peter Gordon begins his chapter, “Religion within the Bounds of Democracy Alone: Habermas, Rawls, and the Transatlantic Debate over Public Reason,” by noting John Rawls's “proviso” that in their political life individuals must set aside their religious faith or other aspects of the self. This is problematic. If it is genuinely a religious commitment, it is a fundamental part of one's self, and as such exclusion is neither plausible nor possible. It produces a serious dilemma since “the original position already suggests a distinction between who we are” and the “political reasoning we are all expected to exercise.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Put differently, the elaborate rules of self-denial that Rawls's masterpiece demands of the citizen may effectively dehumanize that citizen and thus vacate the meaning of democratic citizenship.

When he turns to Habermas, Gordon points out that one cannot ignore a “superficial” similarity of the “ideal-speech situation” to the “original position.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The point is worth noting. Yet the concepts are quite different: one is internal to the citizen's identity and the other is a model of the common space of politics, where interests and values, religious or otherwise, come into political conversation and debate. With Habermas, Gordon writes, there is “more open procedure of an argumentative practice that proceeds under the demanding presupposition of the ‘public use of reason’ and does not bracket the pluralism of convictions and worldviews from the outset.”Footnote ⁴⁹ For Habermas the focus is not on the self, but on the self in the public sphere. Here one comes closer to practical democracy and perhaps a pragmatic justice.

What is secularization? David Hollinger's exceptionally rich and wide-ranging chapter brings together numerical data as well as insightful analysis of discourse to shift the issue of secularization from its usual framing as a process over time to an understanding of what it means or what religion means. Certainly, the course of modern intellectual life, particularly in the North Atlantic world, has made much of secularization. Yet something at least akin to a spiritual sense beyond us, whether one is a conventional believer or not, may well indicate a continuing belief in something that others might call God. On that point Hollinger closes with a quote from Ronald Dworkin, who makes the point that evoking belief in the Deity may not be necessary. Adherents to “religion without God” would feel, Dworkin wrote,

American Christianity, Hollinger observes, is at one with “the gradual and episodic diminution of supernaturalism.” Yet he finds, as does Dworkin, the possibility of “religion without God.”Footnote ⁵¹

The volume concludes with a section on “Method,” with contributions from Daniel T. Rodgers, Sarah E. Igo, and Angus Burgin, the last of whom wrote, as I discussed above, an account of the meaning of the Wingspread Conference and its legacy. Almost a half-century ago, Peter Gay and Robert Darnton offered two rather different programs for what they called a “social history” of ideas: Gay surveyed the upper tier of the context and ideas of the Enlightenment, while Darnton reached downward into the world of underground publications.Footnote ⁵² In this volume Rodgers updates the notion of a social history of ideas that is marked by richer advice.Footnote ⁵³ As Rodgers has already exemplified in his much praised Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), he makes the point that ideas are not nation-bound. Ideas travel, and their meaning may or may not change in passage depending on context. Some are not nation-generated ideas, as in Paul Gilroy's “black Atlantic” or Sugata Bose's “cosmopolitan thought zones.”Footnote ⁵⁴ There is, also, internal multiplicity. There are numerous cultures and intellectual traditions within a given nation and beyond that suggest a network approach to ideas. Ideas are in motion over spaces or social groupings, and are not always random. Material objects, too, can warrant the attention of intellectual historians, for they too carry ideas. As Rogers concludes, the “production of ideas goes on everywhere.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Rodgers's conclusion could stand as a preface for Sarah Igo's notion that intellectual history, or certain topics in intellectual history, would benefit from an embrace of “unfencing” and from opening the project to a “free range.” This is not entirely novel, and perhaps utterly American. I see an unexpected echo that may go (in a restricted way) back as far as Arthur O. Lovejoy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like Lovejoy, she has an interest in a word or concept with multiple meanings in different eras and locations in the culture. She doubtless has in mind a greater of range of words and ideas than Lovejoy would have explored, but the point is that many very important words or concepts have significant variations of meanings and implications depending on historical and linguistic circumstances.

Her excellent chapter begins with an article by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” published in the Harvard Law Review. She follows the voluminous legal scholarship on the article, but notes that these studies and cases focus on invasion of a particular kind—publicity and the right of privacy, mostly of elites.Footnote ⁵⁷ But she wishes to open up privacy by looking beyond this legal-history context, noting the “gulf between ‘The Right to Privacy’ and the actual rights to privacy Americans enjoy.” Thus we have an example, but for her “a free-range approach would counsel grazing more widely, and in fresh pastures.” This may open up a huge new field of research findings.Footnote ⁵⁸

The “Afterword” was contributed by Michael O'Brien, the author of a brilliant and transformative intellectual history of the American South, among other works.Footnote ⁵⁹ He was one of the organizers of the conference, but sadly he died before the volume, which is dedicated to his memory, was published.

In his closing appraisal of the conference and volume, he particularly noted that the field of intellectual history had become less tightly bounded to national geographies, which the volume demonstrates. He makes it clear that the volume is rightly described as oriented to the Atlantic intellectual universe. But to that point he makes an important observation: “The cosmopolitan imagination, because it is implicitly comparative, has a way of reifying the particular cultures it wishes to transcend.”Footnote ⁶⁰ I did not see evidence of that problem in these essays, but it is something that we must self-consciously take care to avoid. Among his further comments, he observes that at this point in the field there is a striking “openness” with no gods—no Kuhn, no Foucault, no Marx, no Freud, no Geertz—which was much more evident in the Wingspread conference where participants were reaching out for ideas that might have helped to refigure and energize the field. Whatever the reason for this development, whether it is “intellectual fatigue” or “postmodernist” play, he thinks that “there is no harm in eclecticism, that fragmentation is not a threat, that inconsistencies need not be reconciled, and that history does not have a direction.”Footnote ⁶¹

This bolsters the already mentioned image contained in the free-range metaphor, and I think it is a fitting description of the collection as a whole. The range of historical questions explored in these essays is vastly larger than that of the Wingspread group forty years ago, and the contrasting confidence in these chapters is striking. Intellectual history in its openness may also be on its way to moving more centrally into the general narrative of the United States. That prompts the possibility that editors of general history books or United States history series will get past the apparent default position of commissioning political historians as generalists and recognize the virtues intellectual historians also as historians of works of synthesis. In fact, to my mind the best and surely the freshest of the synthetic volumes so far published in the distinguished Oxford History of the United States series was authored by an intellectual historian.Footnote ⁶²