Showing papers on "Intellectual history published in 1974"

The History of Economic Thought as Intellectual History

Abstract: Economic thought is a branch of intellectual history. While there is no alchemy involved in seeing the history of economics as intellectual history and although the two aspects obviously run together and are not always readily or conclusively disentangled, there are aspects of the subject which derive from it being the history of economics and aspects which derive from it being the history of ideas; aspects, that is, which reflect the nature (or differential perceptions) of the economy and aspects which reflect the impact of and assume the character of ideational systems. The general objective of this article is to suggest opportunities for creative research that flow from contemplating the history of economic thought as intellectual history. It is primarily concerned with the form rather than the content of the history of economic thought, with characteristics which inform and channel economic enquiry but represent modes of thought rather than economic analysis per se. More specifically, the article attempts to set forth some of the diverse facets that confront the historian of economic thought who considers the subject a branch of intellectual history. A second and correlative objective is to suggest a strategy of inquiry that promises to enrich both the work of the historian of economic thought and the discipline of economics.

The History of Psychology and its Retrieval from Historiography: I. The Problematic Nature of History

Abstract: Stimulated by the popularity of T. S. Kuhn's monograph The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a number of writers have concerned themselves with the question of the applicability of Kuhn's account of scientific development for the discipline of psychology. They have attacked or defended allegedly 'Kuhnian ideas' in a multitude of guises, and have offered an alarming profusion of 'refutations' or 'corrections' to 'Kuhn's conception of science'.' Relatively unnoticed, but of crucial importance in attempting to assess the merit of these articles, is the fact that virtually all these writers have a theoretical axe to grind in supporting or attacking (what they perceive to be) Kuhn's views. Equally important, that axe may have either or both a methodological and historiographical, or substantive psychological, character. Both affirmations and denials of Kuhn's views result in large part from the methodology of scientific research that the writer accepts, from the historiography of science that he endorses, and in psychology especially, from the ongoing research programme and conceptual framework in which he works. Another factor of crucial importance is that with few exceptions, these theorists assume that the history of psychology is an unproblematic issue, and

The University of Kansas: A History

Abstract: Here is a through assessment of the development of the University of Kansas during its first century. Clifford S. Griffin traces the University from little more than a high school or preparatory school to a college, and then to a major institution. No mere chronicle of the University's triumphs and progress, this book gives equal attention to the many disappointments and frustrations over the years. Griffin concerns himself not only with the physical growth of the institution, but with the nature of the University's goals and character as well. From John Fraser to W. Clarke Wescoe, each Chancellor of the University of Kansas faced unique problems in shaping the destiny of the ever-expanding institution. They struggled with the perils of an unstable economy, enrollment crises, departmentalization, disagreements with faculty and regents, disputes over open admission and the importance of scholarly research, demands for higher salaries and alteration of the curriculum, and even grasshopper plagues. Each administration competed for legislative appropriations, status, and public support. Anyone who has been associated with the University will find in this history many of the things he remembers best: its social organizations, athletic contests, student pranks, class feuds, and campus politics. Colorful Mount Oread personalities are described leaders, scholars, politicians, and benefactors. Thirty-six photographs trace different phases of the University's growth. Even those individuals well informed concerning the history of the University will learn much about its past and its potential for the future. In addition, Griffin explores ideas about the purposes and practices of higher education, including the concept of the American state university as a servant of society. In many respects the development of the University paralleled the growth of the state itself; this book is therefore a valuable contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Kansas."

Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault

Abstract: Les Mots et les choses' was and remains a fashionable book in France. It was much talked about; it may even have been read. More importantly, the book and its author have acquired, on a smaller scale but very quickly, the kind of influence which Sartre's and Levi-Strauss' books Freud's even, or Marx's have had. That is, some of its theses, more or less vaguely understood, are in danger of becoming articles of faith among intellectuals. Foucault is not only an attractive and a persuasive writer; he has quite clearly those qualities which make for leadership in St. Germain des Pres: that is, he gives the impression of saying something radically new while, at the same time, his "discoveries" turn out, to the young reader's satisfaction, to fit supremely well into the general movement of ideas currently in vogue. It almost seems that to reconcile the new with the fashionable, all that is required is a hermetic turn of phrase at crucial points, and the coining, preferably, of a special vocabulary of terms borrowed from some technical discipline whose meaning no one can be quite sure about. That is how "structuralism" came upon us, and now it is the turn of Foucault's "archaeology of knowledge," whose inspiration is both "structuralist" enough to be familiar and respectable and at the same time radical in its rejection of all previous methods. Quite simply, and daringly, Foucault proposes to apply the "structural" method to the study of intellectual history. His subject is nothing less than the making of the modern mind. Disregarding all his predecessors, Foucault wipes the slate clean: no one had ever understood anything about the origins of our culture. All the scholarship of the past century or two was wasted effort, for lack of the method which alone can supply the answers. Once freed of the errors of the historical method, the application of his own "archaeological method" leads to stupendous and totally unexpected results the discovery, first of all, that man is a recent invention.2 The study of man "to naive

The History of Ideas and the Study of Politics

Abstract: LJN RECENT YEARS, a cloud of methodological confusion has been cast over the study of politics. The traditional procedure, studying political institutions and selected texts from the classics of political philosophy, had previously existed in uneasy compromise in most politics departments. The application of sociological techniques to the study of politics has made that compromise even more difficult to maintain, and many observers have argued that politics, far from being a unified discipline, is simply a naive application of different disciplines to a loosely defined and notoriously ambiguous subject-matter. Politics, in short, is seen to possess no more unity than such a subject as European studies. A voice from America, perceiving the difficulties of the old world, has attempted to unify the study of politics by the application of new methods. Closely adhering to the methods of the natural sciences, strongly influenced by the techniques developed in cultural anthropology, the voice has called us to follow along the road to positivism to a haven of rigorously empirical political science. But if we are of a historical frame of mind, we will appreciate that revolutionary apostles have been quite a normal feature in the history of political thought. We need only recall the claims made by Hobbes about his science of politics. And the claim to base the study of politics upon the natural sciences is not itself a new phenomenon. It has been made with monotonous regularity since the

Nnamdi Azikiwe and nineteenth-century Nigerian thought

Abstract: This article is concerned chiefly with the connection between Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe's thought and that part of Nigeria's intellectual history which was the product of its nineteenth-century heritage. This relationship is important because, until comparatively recently, the intellectual life of what is now Nigeria was really an extension of that of the Negro. What we generally speak of as the beginnings of modern Nigerian social and political thought are really parochial manifestations of the more general history of the black man.

"Stand Still and See the Salvation": the Rhetorical Design of Martin Delany's "Blake".

Abstract: If artistic standards were the sole criteria for evaluating the importance of black literature of the nineteenth century, much of what is otherwise informative, frequently interesting and entertaining, and certainly of cultural significance would be excluded from American intellectual history (Bone, 1958: 228). Martin Delany's novel Blake, an important social document, would remain obscure or, worse still, fall prey to unmerciful attacks by literary critics eager to condemn its obvious stylistic and structural flaws. Those less interested in judging the artistic and aesthetic merits of a work, and more intent upon understanding the rhetorical design of art as social protest, ought to find Blake well-deserving of high status, at least in the ante-bellum rhetorical tradition. A "rhetorical tradition" ought to encompass literature viewed as argument and judged in terms of how the artist supports claims through the medium of his art. It should foster examination of literature as a response to social conditions, rather than as merely a mirror of literary canons.

Naphtali Herz Wessely's Attitude toward the Jewish Religion as a Mirror of a Generation in Transition

Abstract: Of all the important Hebrew writers of the German Haskalah in the last quarter of the 18th Century, Naphtali Herz Wessely is one of the most conservative in his attitude toward the Jewish religion. Nevertheless, he was selected by a scholar like Joseph Klausner to designate the be ginning of modern Hebrew literature.1 It is due mainly to four pam phlets which he had published between 1782 and 1785 that Wessely was so designated. Divrei Shalom Ve'emet (Words of Peace and Truth) — the title of the first pamphlet, by which the other three pamphlets are also generally known — advocates major changes in Jewish éducation (or to be more exact: in religious eduction). These changes, to be sure, reflect the ideology of the contemporary Hebrew Haskalah, and are the

A Reading of Brian Fitzpatrick

Abstract: In the small but growing literature on Australian historiography there already exists a cast of stereotyped characters. Brian Fitzpatrick's role is easily recognised: he is presented as the first to apply to Australia's past an economic interpretation, or, as Ian Turner puts it, the first to apply Marxian concepts of a class-struggle to the whole history of Australia.1 Not only did he pioneer valuable research into the economic development of the country, then, but he helped mould what C. Hartley Grattan later called a 'fashion of thinking' among Australian historians. Like most clich?s, this contains a basic truth but it leaves little room for comprehending what is complex, distinctive and unresolved in Fitzpatrick's work. These elements can only be restored through a closer reading of his texts than is normally offered in such historio graphical discussions. It may be time, furthermore, to restore these writings as important statements in Australian intellectual history rather than to treat them solely as sources for revisionism. In this essay, therefore, I shall not be concerned with the validity of Fitzpatrick's formulations but with the nature and range of his concerns. British Imperialism and Australia, 1783-1833 (1939) and its sequel The British Empire in Australia, 1834-1939 (1941) do constitute an attempt to unify the Australian experience within the framework of an economic interpretation. The opening sentence of the first edition of the second book makes Fitzpatrick's stance clear?'Political philo sophies and political trends can usually be explained by reference to economic developments which they reflect'?and the argument which follows further holds that Australian political and social history will be unintelligible unless it is placed in a larger context, that of the social and economic condition of Britain. Fitzpatrick's intentions here were not those of the comparative historian; he was concerned to emphasise that the economy of Australia was inextricably related to and fundamentally controlled by the forces and impulses of the British economy, in particular by the flow of British capital and labour. A basic proposition of the first book is that the British design entertained a dual vision of Australia?'every governor was required to maintain a prison and to plant a peasantry' 2?and a major theme in Fitzpatrick's account is the vitiation of this plan for a smallholders' Australia. The explicit subject of his books is the economic process that frustrated this vision which he presents almost as a conspiracy of the interests of British capital and the collusion of Australian governments to achieve the ascendancy and dominance of wool. By the

Franklin and Villarroel: Social Consciousness in Two Autobiographies

Abstract: SCHOLARS DEALING WITH THE ENLIGHTENMENT continue to recognize the documentary value of autobiography, a genre which discloses as much about collective social history as about individual private affairs. Not only does social consciousness weave itself into the autobiographical fabric, but the threads of class attitudes trace a sociomoral design of great subtlety. The perspectives suggested by this tapestry converge at the vanishing point of intellectual history, an infinitely large position capable of unifying all components of the picture. Among these perspectives, two important ones involve the relationship between the autobiographer's value system and the direction taken by his society's historical development. For example, Benjamin Franklin's personal code of behavior also summarized the ethos of a burgeoning society. The pragmatic character of American culture derived from the same axiological source as Franklin's. Therefore his autobiography may be taken as a gauge measuring his nation's bourgeois transformation and, eventually, its integration with the Enlightenment. In contrast, the problematic autobiography of Diego de Torres Villarroel1 raises other issues regarding Spain's class structure and the value system which sustained it. By Spanish standards. America's

Two Approaches to the Study of Utopia

Abstract: Michael Fellman. The Unbounded Frame-. Freedom and Community in Nineteenth Century American Utopianism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. $10.00. 203 pp. Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Commitment and Com- munity: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1972. $10.00. 303 pp. These two recent books, one of them a highly traditional intellectual history and the other a pioneering work of sociology, allow us to assess the virtues and limitations of two widely differing approaches to the study of a topic such as American utopianism.