Wisdom and Scholarship

THE on Cardinal Newman and the university:

Wisdom should be pursued for its own sake, alongside its attendant virtues of patience, forbearance and magnanimity. This general cultivation of mind was, Newman believed, the best way a university could promote professional and scientific study and serve wider society.

He saw knowledge not as accumulated facts, still less argumentative ability, but as an "acquired illumination...a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment". This was attained by enlargement of mind: the "power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence". To instrumentalise knowledge would be self-defeating, producing students unable to find their feet or make a contribution in the real world - better, Newman suggests, the rounded if mundane education of a poor farming boy...

The university was, for Newman, primarily a place of teaching and scholarship. Research also had value, but could not be equated with the pointless proliferation of low-quality debate and comment. A better model for research is Newman's own work on early Christian writers: intelligent, intense reflection on primary sources that, avoiding both utilitarianism and dogmatism, interrogates questions of fundamental importance to life.

Two Cultures?

In the succeeding quotations of diminishing lengths, here's the next. A Catholic view:

Today's greatest moral battle involves abortion, which is at the very epicentre of the struggle between the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death.

So much for C.P. Snow.

The Ideal Curriculum for the Ideal Student

From Daniel Mendelsohn on Oscar Wilde, in NYRB:

[At Oxford] one can be, simultaneously, brilliant and unreasonable, speculative and well-informed, creative as well as critical, and write with all the passion of youth about the truths which belong to the august serenity of old age.

What is humour?

From the LRB:

But it is also hard to avoid the thought that Blair is himself shirking the real question. He faced two serious and determined enemies during his time in Downing Street: al-Qaida and Gordon Brown. One, he concluded, represented a force so strong and rooted that it had to be uprooted and destroyed, since confrontation was inevitable; the only question was when and how. The other had to be contained, because stepping over the line would have been crazy and made war inevitable. But why on earth did he think that al-Qaida was an example of the first, and Gordon Brown of the second, rather than the other way round?

What's a job?

I was thinking about the job market, not something I have any authority to comment on, but here we are. I want to keep my options open while I'm still here studying. Not only do I not know if I want to be an academic, it might be moot anyway: if things keep on like they are, there won't be any academic jobs in the humanities in three years' time.

So here is my tip (to myself, really) on how to be something when you grow up: start being it now. I'm already doing it in academia, obviously: I am a historian now, the work I do is researching, teaching, and writing history. But if you want to be a publisher, what makes more sense than to go and publish something? If it's economically impossible to publish on paper, well that's part of the industry itself, you have to find some other way to make it wor, but it can definitely still be done. If you want to be a writer, write; we all know that one. If you want to be a teacher, teach! There are a load of projects that want volunteers for helping out in schools and stuff like that.

This is the beauty of the student period of life: there is an opportunity to do these things, to build experiences, and to try things out. That's something everyone should have, and something I should try to make the best of.

Research Approaches, 1

One potential way of organising not only research but the thesis itself is to focus on specific close-knit groups of Federalists. That will presumably mean focusing on certain locations, and the idiosyncracies of place would form part of an explanation of the differences within Federalism. The thrust of the thesis would be towards understanding why, when, and how those different groups and networks came together for the constitution.

What I'd hope to do with this approach is to avoid just talking about politics, whether local or continental, but to include the whole range of cultural, social, and intellectual experience. There is a question there, about whether Federalism is just a political persuasion, a surface preoccupation, or if it is something deeper or more complex. So what I would hope for in terms of research is to bring together local newspapers and pamphlets, correspondence, records of meetings and local politics, social and economic trends and networks, cultural productions like books, poems, and plays, civic organisations like museums and philosophical societies, even things like fashion. It may be a matter of establishing local Federalist mentalities before fitting them into a continental collage.

Gathering Time

I'm about to go and talk about my 'military influence' ideas with the graduate seminar. Then I'm going to put them away for a while. So far this term, I've been reading secondary literature, and thinking about theory. I've found that 'theorising' can slip quite easily into the realm of 'guessing,' especially when up against some sort of deadline for the production of work. At the beginning of term, I set myself up to present papers, giving myself deadlines, so that I would work. After this, I have one more thing to write, 'a geographical interpretation of the constitution,' which again will be based on theory, secondary sources, and work done last year. I'm hoping to write that this week, although it's due to be presented in three weeks' time.

When I've done that, I'm going to devote myself to primary research. I want to build up an archive, maybe even on paper but at least on computer files, of original sources to read and draw on in my work. Part of this may also mean noting archives that are not available to me here in Oxford, which I'll have to travel to in order to use. Working out, literally, where I want to go in my research, will be useful for funding application stuff next spring, and for my own sense of planning. Of course it's not completely simple, and 'research strategies' isn't something I know much about. But I intend to learn by doing.

Post-War Militarism

Yesterday I asked about the military-nationalist campaign's links to politics and ideas later in the decade. Now I want to think about the whole question of the military and how it relates to politics and ideas in the 1780s.

Periodisation] There are three key phases of military existence in the 1780s. First, while the war is still going on - and early 1781 was by all accounts a low-point in the rebel campaign. Second, the period after Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, until the army was disbanded through late 1783. Third, from then onwards. The middle period is obviously critical; the Newburgh Conspiracy is the dramatic crux; Washington's resignation is the moment of resolution.

Groups within the army] It clearly can't be seen as a homogenous whole. Continentals are different from militia. Within the Continental Army there are still separate state lines, as well as Northern and Southern departments. There is also obviously a division between officers and men. Among the officers, there are differences in rank, and between field and staff officers. Among rank-and-file, some enlisted for the whole war, some for only a year or two; different men had had different wartime experiences. To what extent, then, can we speak of a 'military mindset,' or 'militarism' and who did it effect?

Relations with civilians] This complex internal structure is reflected in complex relations with the outside world. Because enlistment periods were often short, and movement in and out of the army (or from the militia to the army) was relatively fluid, rank-and-file soldiers were not always easy to distinguish from civilians. Yet soldiers and civilians were mutually hosile over issues like supply, biletting, and behaviour. This could translate into animosity towards the civil government, Continental Congress. On the other hand, lack of power in Congress was blamed for the supply and support problems. Likewise, state governments at different times seemed to both hinder and help soldiers, Continental and militia.

On this basis, it's hard to envisage a clear-cut military perspective emerging or surviving after the war's end. This is borne out, perhaps, by the way pro-military policies waned during mid-decade. The ideology of citizen militia was in a sense fulfilled by the soldiers' return to the fields during 1783. However, at the officer level there was a conscious effort - in the Society of the Cincinnati - to prolong and reproduce the military brotherhood. Public memory and historical writing must also have played a continuing role. How did these processes interact with politics and ideas in the 1780s?

Federalists' Military Precursors

[Continuing a military thread. Starts here.]

In the early 1780s a powerful group in the Continental Congress, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, as well as Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris, pursued expansion of Congressional power. Their priority was to achieve a revenue independent of state grants. The rhetorical focus of their campaign was military: the succesful prosecution of the war depended on Congress' effectiveness in military administration. After the war, duty to the soldiers and (more importantly) the officers who fought became a key theme, as well as the continuing security of the states. Yet this campaign faded in the middle of the 1780s without having achieved its core goal: strengthening the Continental Congress.

Does the movement for the constitution in the late-1780s represent a re-emergence of the same campaign? How similar or different were its aims, rhetoric, and support? Why did the later campaign succeed and the earlier one fail? How were the ideas and mentalities behind the earlier campaign reproduced - and how did they change - during the fallow period at mid-decade?

Diversity and Conflict

Further to yesterday's thoughts on post-revolutionary instability, here is Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (who, by the way, wrote an article that I found moving when I read it for a seminar on gender history last year, "The Female World of Love and Ritual," Signs, 1975):

Diversity and conflict existed not only on the demographic and economic register, but on the discursive plane as well... [In the new republic there were] multiple divergent, at times warring, political, social, and economic discourses... During these troubled and changing times, divergent speakers battled over the meaning of even such basic political terms as "independence," "republican virtue," "citizenship," and "popular sovereignty."

... Composites of diverse and shifting personas, of the gentleman and the hardworking tradesman, the Lockean liberal and the slaveholder, the classic republican and the fiscal capitalist, identities in the new Republic were dynamic productions informed by their social location and interactions. [This Violent Empire, 2010, pp.14-18.]

I think her use of the word 'bourgeois' for the new republican elite, elsewhere in this book's introduction, is disingenuous. Also she is concerned with the concept of a centripetal nationalism, which I suspect is an obstacle more than a goal for my own work. Those disagreements make me even more glad that her speculation seems to match mine on the point quoted here. It feels better to relate to other scholarship obliquely than to face it head-on, or merely agree.

Post-Revolutionary Consensus

I have previously hypothesised that the Revolution had a destabilising effect on American thought, breaking up old hegemonic patterns and creating a more open field for change. However, there is also a reverse effect which is perhaps also implicit or dialectially linked. That is the intellectual and social desire to create consensus and stability precisely at the moment when it is weakest. Perhaps it is precisely these countervailing forces that characterise all cultural change.

In the 1780s, the idea of 'union' and what might be called American nationalism was the subject of this consensual movement. Union symbolised American strength in the world, it served to justify the Revolution itself, and ironically it actually united Americans who were together in search of a sense of union and uniformity. If the model outlined above is right, then this type of nationalism also obscured the division and confusion in post-Revolutionary thought. How can historians find their way between these layers?

One approach is to look for differences within the 'union' consensus, among different notions of American nationhood. Yet by exploring its variants, that method might keep the particular issue of union in the foreground, and foster the assumption that it is the most important. It seems more likely to me that it is one of the least important issues, in terms of examining difference, precisely because it is capable of sustaining consensus. This is also why 'union' achieves such prominence in campaign propaganda like the Federalist.

If the question of union is a red herring that can tell us little about the Federalists or anyone else, will it be possible to look behind it to deeper problems of government, society, and liberty?

The Meaning of Blogging

Without comment:

Before writing this article, I was worried, because I didn’t have the idea for this article. I had no idea what I would do, but I knew I had to do something relevant that would drive traffic. As I struggle to come to any logical conclusion in this piece, I hope that I have at least driven an amount of traffic that only I can deem sufficient to feel satisfied.

In 2007, on brandon-alien-fine.blogspot.com, I blogged for hits because I was lonely and insecure and I wanted people to recognize me as a deep individual that knew something mysterious and special that they would never be able to understand, even if I were to offer them a sufficient explanation. Now I am not as lonely as I once was, and I have written this article on Thought Catalog to attract your pageview with the hopes of one day making money from it.

Results in History

I hope my thesis will have two kinds of results. Both of them are common types of results in works of history, yet often they are to be merely implicit. First, I hope that my work will give an account of how ideas and mentalities work in society. It would be useful to better understand how thought spreads and changes through society and over time. I hope my examination of a specific case will challenge old and suggest new ways of thinking generally about these processes.

Second, I hope to frame or reveal hidden dilemmas and connections between values or between ideas. The ways Americans in the 1780s thought (for example about liberty and power) are different from how we think now; the changing uses of words both obscure and reveal, in different ways, changing relationships between concepts. Such differences are 'hidden' in the sense that they're immanent, or inherently possible but absent: revealing them could lead to changes in our own thought.

I think both these types of results characterise the usefulness of historical study. At their centre is the typically historical ambivalence between continuity and change, or similarity and difference - the same ambivalence that haunts all human action, not least political action.

Yet most historians seem to prefer to stress an evolutionary or developmental vision. When they explicitly justify their work or point out their results they tend to suggest a linear relationship between their field of study and the present or the future, which is more or less facile or tenuous. Historians who, on the contrary, try to avoid this shadow of the Whig interpretation shy away entirely from the idea of justifications or conclusions. I want my own work to be both meaningful and sincere. Hence the need for theory and reflection.

Mentality and Motive

Sometimes Federalists say they're glad about the economic crisis, or Shays' Rebellion, because it will convince the public to favour stronger government. Sometimes they go to the extent of seemingly wishing any number of calamities on themselves for that purpose. This obviously makes their public rhetoric suspect, when they say, 'but of course we must have stronger central government, in order to deal with the economic crisis.' It seems not to be the real reason they want reform. Historians have often responded to this double talk by positing a hidden, anterior motive: namely, consolidation of elite power for its own sake.

Is there an alternative conception? Instead of dismissing ostensible motives in favour of implicit ones, perhaps it will be possible to give the former weight by making them part of a mutually supporting framework of thought. In such a framework, each individual prop (economic crisis, military weakness, and so on) may seem insufficient and therefore suspect, but we need not necessarily look beyond or beneath the framework itself - as an interrelation of parts - for a stable explanation of the Federalists' thought. Not only might that work from a historian's perspective, but it is also characteristic of mentality itself: the structure of thought may (or must) be hidden from the mind in which it operates. How many of us are aware of our true motives?

Military Influences in the 1780s

To judge by their own figures, the correlation between army officers and Federalists isn't actually as strong as often is implied by the historians of military influence, like Richard Kohn. Likewise, the Society of the Cincinnati clearly doesn't represent a proto-Federalist organisation: future Federalists like John Adams and James Madison were suspicious of it, and even Washington was anxious and ambivalent about it. So these groups played complex roles in the construction of a Federalist persuasion. They did not simply carry military values into the new politics of the republic. Rather, they participated in a dialectic that produced shifting patterns of values, and new visions of the world.

For one thing, the debate around the idea of inherited prestige in early versions of the Cincinnati did more than demonstrate that such a notion was not anathema to some revolutionaries: it also helped set Federalist politics against that idea. Congressional wrangling in the 1780s also acted to shape Federalist thinking on the issue of militia and the standing army. In the Federalist, Hamilton (the militarist par excellence) was even able to use fear of standing armies as an argument in favour of the Constitution. One thing both these examples show is how negotiation and shifts over values and institutions was continuous throughout the 1780s, not just at the Philadelphia Convention.

After all, there seems to be a fundamental contradiction in the basic militarist case, as made around the end of the war. The idea that such a weak central administration, and such limited support for the professional armed forces, could not effectively defend the country or protect its interests, was belied by the very victory those forces had achieved. Civilians and anti-militarists could effectively rest on their antagonists' laurels. Meanwhile, real American weakness was being revealed by issues like the Northwest forts and Barbary states piracy, but these could be seen as beside the point. The same counter-point could even be made about Shays' Rebellion: it was, after all, put down relatively easily and swiftly.

Max Edling may not, then, be totally correct to say that "Federalism would create a state focussed on the fiscal-military sphere." We should ask in what ways Federalist notions of the fiscal-military sphere developed, and what they entailed. How much and in what ways did Federalists want to replicate their European cousins, and how much fulfil the promise of the new?

To Change the World

More social reproduction. Pierre Bourdieu, "Social Space and Symbolic Power:"

To change the world, one has to change the ways of making the world, that is, the vision of the world and the practical operations by which groups are produced and reproduced...

The power of imposing a vision of divisions, that is, the power of making visible and explicit social divisions that are implicit, is the political power par excellence: it is the power to make groups, to manipulate the objective structure of society.

The Unintended Constitution

How Gordon Wood's thesis of the unintended and ironic Constitution has become reality in the minds of political commentators:

Do “the protection of slavery, the restriction of suffrage and so on” mean that “the framers’ constitution represented values that Americans should abhor or at least reject today”? I’m not so sure. It is certainly the case that many of the framers had values Americans today abhor and should and do reject. I tend to support those who argue, however, that most of those values were not, in fact, found in their Constitution...

...Yes, the Framers as a group were afraid of what they thought of as democracy; feared the masses and did nothing specific in the Constitution to enfranchise them; and had ideas about citizenship and virtue that were interesting but also deeply problematic... Yet it’s also the case that the ideas of self-government they derived from liberalism and republicanism turned out, in practice, to be intensely democratic. In other words, whatever they thought about “democracy” at the time, and whatever their own personal prejudices about elites and masses may have been, what they actually put into the Constitution was extraordinarily democratic. [The New Republic]

Virtue's Self-Sacrifice

Sacrifice is part of virtue: if corruption is submission to temptation, its opposite is self-denial. Revolutionary leaders wanted to be seen to practice this trait; in the early years, the Revolutionary movement thrived on sacrificing British vices like tea and fine clothes; soldiers and officers after the war held that they had made great sacrifices for an insufficiently grateful people. In Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic, he presents the Constitution as an ironic finale to this Revolution based on virtue, for contrary to the aims of its designers, it provided for a system that rejected the idea of virtue in favour of libertarian freedom and interest politics.

But if we, alternatively, pay attention to the sacrificial aspect of virtue - perhaps its Christian rather than its classical face - we can also interpret the 'end of classical politics' as no less paradoxical, but more deliberate: the framers offering their virtue to create a system that would not rely on virtue in the future.

Man's domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken... This immense though superfluous sacrifice is required - against sacrifice itself. Odysseus, too, is the self who always restrains himself and forgets his life, who saves his life and yet recalls it only as wandering. He also is a sacrifice for the abrogation of sacrifice. His dominative renunciation, which gains mastery over itself not in order to coerce itself and others, but in expiation. [Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp.54-6]

Virtue and Domination

The concept of virtue is a problem in America's critical period. Historians of the 'republican' school emphasise its importance as a civic ideal: the virtuous republic vigilant against the threat of corruption, to both leaders and the whole community. But this seems inaccurate when we see how little concerned leaders like Washington were with encouraging virtue (and fighting corruption) among ordinary people. Perhaps we should instead see virtue as a particular quality that an elite saw in themselves, inaccessible to the majority.

In Dialiectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer discuss the episode when Odysseus has himself tied to his ship's mast by his crew, so he can listen to the Sirens' song without being lured to his death. Their interpretation seems to offer a model for an elite bourgeois concept of virtue in the Age of Revolutions:

The other possibility Odysseus, the seigneur who allows the others to labor for themselves, reserves to himself. He listens, but while bound impotently to the mast; the greater the temptation the more he has his bonds tightened - just as later the burghers would deny themselves happiness all the more doggedly as it drew closer to them with the growth of their own power... [H]is men, who do not listen, know only the song's danger but not its beauty, and leave him at the mast in order to save him and themselves. They reproduce the oppressor's life together with their own, and the oppressor is no longer able to escape his social role. [p.34]