The Worlds of American Intellectual History

Edited by Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

The first book in more than a generation that attempts to take stock of the field of American intellectual history
Brings together senior figures and rising young scholars in the field of intellectual history
Places American intellectual history in a truly global or transnational perspective

The Worlds of American Intellectual History

Edited by Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Description

The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures.

The richness of contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across the Pacific to South Asia.

The Worlds of American Intellectual History

Edited by Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Introduction: Opening American Thought
James T. Kloppenberg

Part One: Frames
1. What was the American Enlightenment?
Caroline Winterer

2. The "Woman Question" in the Age of Mass Democracy: From Movement History to Problem History
Leslie Butler

3. "We People of Color": Colored Cosmopolitanism and the Borders of Race
Nico Slate

4. Curating the Black Atlantic
Jonathan Holloway

Part Two: Justice
5. The Sins of Slaves and the Slaves of Sin: Toward a History of Moral Agency
Margaret Abruzzo

6. Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Humanity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political Science
Duncan Kelly

7. The Political Origins of Global Justice
Samuel Moyn

Part Three: Philosophy
8. Unstiffening Theory: The Italian Magic Pragmatists and William James
Francesca Bordogna

9. The Longing for Wisdom in Twentieth-Century US Thought
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

10. Pain, Analytical Philosophy, and American Intellectual History
Joel Isaac

11. On Lying: Writing Philosophical History after the Enlightenment and after Arendt
Sophia Rosenfeld

Part Four: Secularization
12. Science and Religion in Postwar America
Andrew Jewett

13. Religion within the Bounds of Democracy Alone: Habermas, Rawls, and the Trans-Atlantic Debate over Public Reason
Peter Gordon

14. Christianity and Its American Fate: Where History Interrogates Secularization Theory
David Hollinger

Part Five: Method
15. Paths in the Social History of Ideas
Daniel T. Rodgers

16. Toward a Free-Range Intellectual History
Sarah Igo

17. New Directions, Then and Now
Angus Burgin

Afterword
Michael O'Brien

Index

The Worlds of American Intellectual History

Edited by Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Author Information

Joel Isaac is Associate Professor of Social Thought at University of Chicago. His current research focuses on the relations between politics and economics in twentieth-century British and American thought.

James Kloppenberg is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, where he teaches European and American intellectual history. He has written several books on transatlantic politics and ideas from the 16th century to the present, including Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought.

Michael O'Brien taught American intellectual and cultural history at the University of Cambridge. His research focused, in particular, on the intellectual history of the American South.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is Merle Curti Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century US thought and culture in transatlantic perspective.

The Worlds of American Intellectual History

Edited by Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Reviews and Awards

"will help you think better about the history of thinking, both in the United States itself and in a world still very much influenced, for better or for worse, by the ideological -- and ideational -- formations of the American intellectual landscape." -- Michael J. Kramer, Society for U.S. Intellectual History

"It will be a useful tool in advanced intellectual history classes because it exposes readers to transnational perspectives on US thought that extend beyond the North Atlantic world, where it is too often cloistered....Highly recommended."--C. R. Versen, CHOICE

"This wide-ranging anthology amply demonstrates the resurgent vitality of American intellectual history as its practitioners push their insights beyond national and disciplinary boundaries, creating a discourse characterized by unprecedented capaciousness and fluidity. What are especially exciting are the fresh forays into the challenging regions of religion and philosophy. No serious student of American thought, past or present, can afford to ignore this book."--Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

"If you thought American intellectual history was provincial and elitist, this eclectic collection demonstrates just how mistaken you were. Covering topics as various, and as essential, as American secularism, 'colored cosmopolitanism,' relations between John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, and 'wisdom' literature, leading experts in US and European intellectual history here illustrate, as never before, the wide-ranging richness of the field. These essays, contributed by both veterans and rising stars, provide points of reference and departure that will animate our work for the next decade and beyond."--Suzanne Marchand, author of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (winner of the George Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association)

"Written by some of the best younger scholars in American intellectual history, with a few of the old guard in a supporting role, these essays demonstrate how far the field has come since New Directions in American Intellectual History (1979). They set an enlarged and imaginative agenda for this and the coming generation of scholars."--Dorothy Ross, Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor Emerita of History, Johns Hopkins University