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Policy History and the Sublime Immodesty of the Middle-Aged Professor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Guy Alchon
Guy Alchon
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
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Extract

The idea of policy history arises from an awareness of“something missing.” In the view of some social scientists, politics and public policy too often have been treated ahistorically by their disciplines, with evidence subordinated to theory. For some historians, the apparent waning of disciplinary interest in political history has been similarly distorting. Because of these things, social scientists, political historians, and more than a few social historians increasingly function as “policy historians,”as scholars especially alive to the vagaries and contingency of public policy and its history.

Type
Critical Perspectives
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , July 1997 , pp. 358 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1997

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References

Notes

1. Several recent efforts embody, in varying degrees, such a critical self-consciousness. I have in mind, for example, Ricci, David M., The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship and Democracy (New Haven, Conn., 1984)Google Scholar; Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The“Objectivity Question”and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; Brint, Steven, In an Age of Experts: The ChangingRole of Professionals in Politics and Public Life (Princeton, N.J., 1994)Google Scholar; Damrosch, David, We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Christopher Shannon, Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills (Baltimore, 1996).Google Scholar

2. Repplier, Agnes, “The Chill of Enthusiasm,” in Americans and Others (Boston, 1912), 171.Google Scholar

3. Coles, Robert, “Moral Smugness,” New Oxford Review 61 (December 1995): 26Google Scholar; and Howe, Neil and Strauss, William, “The New Generation Gap,” The Atlantic Monthly 270 (December 1992): 74.Google Scholar

4. The late-twentieth century case for antitotalizing skepticism is summarized by Berlin, Isaiah in “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” a chapter in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London, 1990)Google Scholar; and in Jahanbegloo, Ramin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London, 1991), 46–48Google Scholar. See also, Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodemity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; Ross, Dorothy, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930 (Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar, Introduction; and Gray, John, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modem Age (London, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. The late Christopher Lasch best anatomized the idea and seductions of“progress” in American life. See, especially, his The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; “Politics and Social Theory: A Reply to the Critics,” Salmagundi 46 (Fall 1979): 194–202Google Scholar; and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. Michael Lind delivers an apostate's rebuke to the progressive conceit of late modernity's professional and technical“overdass”in“To Have and Have Not: Notes on the Progress of the American Class War,”Harpers 290, No. 1741 (June 1995): 35–47. See, too, Saul, John Ralston, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York, 1992).Google Scholar

6. It appears lately that when professors think about the university's relations with corporate capitalism, the state, and the public, they mostly see state and corporate “attacks” and the public's “anti-intellectualism.” Such formulations conveniently accept as given the disinterestedness and critical content of contemporary scholarship, and “forget” the long-standing and sometimes compromising story of public, state, and corporate support of universities. See, for example, Scott, Joan W., “The New University: Beyond Political Correctness,” AHA Perspectives 30 (October 1992): 14–18Google Scholar; and Kammen, Michael, “History as a Lightning Rod,” OAH Newsletter 23 (May 1995)Google Scholar. Better, but still operating from the assumption that the academic class represents—morally, politically, and critically—a superior force in American life, are Lauter, Paul, “Political Correctness and the Attack on American Colleges,” in Michael Berube and Cary Nelson, Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; and Soley, Lawrence C., Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia (Boston, 1995).Google Scholar The more important matter of the nature of the university in the face of corporate pressure and state subsidy is taken up by Turner, Frederick Jackson, “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” in Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920)Google Scholar; Barrow, Clyde W., Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928 (Madison, Wise, 1990)Google Scholar; Diamond, Sigmund, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities With the Intelligence Community, 1945–2955 (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Simpson, Christopher, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Noble, David F., America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Noble, and Pfund, Nancy, “Business Goes Back to College,” The Nation 231 (September 22, 1980)Google Scholar; and Noble, “The Selling of the University,” The Nation 234 (February 6, 1982). Christopher Lasch captured part of the problem in his last book: The right and the left share [an] important assumption: that academic radicalism is genuinely subversive. [But academic radicals] do not seriously threaten corporate control of the universities, and it is corporate control, not academic radicalism, that has “corrupted our higher education.” It is corporate control that has diverted social resources from the humanities into military and technological research, fostered an obsession with quantification that has destroyed the social sciences, replaced the English language with bureaucratic jargon, and created a topheavy administrative apparatus whose educational vision begins and ends with the bottom line. One of the effects of corporate and bureaucratic control is to drive critical thinkers out of the social sciences into the humanities, where they can indulge a taste for “theory” without the rigorous discipline of empirical social observation. “Theory” is no substiture for social criticism the one form of intellectual activity that would seriously threaten the status quo and the one form that has no academic cachet at all. Social criticism that addressed the real issue in higher education today—the university's assimilation into the corporate order and the emergence of a knowledge class whose “subversive” activities do not seriously threaten any vested interest would be a welcome addition to contemporary discourse. For obvious reasons, however, this kind of discourse is unlikely to get much encouragement either from the academic left or from its critics on the right.

See Lasch, “Academic Pseudo-Radicalism and the Charade of Subversion,” in The Revolt of the Elites, 192–193.

7. Susan Haack distinguishes among “sham,” “fake,” and “genuine” forms of inquiry. The first is the refuge of scholars who already know the right answers and are not interested in inconvenient facts; the second is typical of those who really don't much care about “how things really are,” and who are willing to push any argument so long as it serves their purpose; and the third characterizes those who are willing and able to subordinate desire to evidence. See Haack, Susan, “Preposterism and Its Consequences,” Social Philosophy and History 13 (Summer 1996): 298–299.Google Scholar

8. The quoted phrase, from a gloss on the work of Andre Glucksman, is in Berman, Paul, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York, 1996), 339Google Scholar. “Grandiose ludicrousness” is from Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York, 1963), 52Google Scholar. See, too, Elshtain's, Jean Bethke treatment of Arendt and revolutionary grandiosity in Democracy On Trial (New York, 1995), 118–123.Google Scholar

On the malignity of the twentieth century and its totalizing appetites, see Anderson, Kenneth, “Illiberal Tolerance: An Essay on the Fall of Yugoslavia and the Rise of Multiculturalism in the United States,” Virginia Journal of International Law 33 (Winter 1993): 385–431Google Scholar; Simpson, Christopher, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Monroe, ME, 1995)Google Scholar; Destexhe, Alain, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Rubenstein, Richard, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (NewYork, 1975)Google Scholar; and Elliot, Gil, Twentieth Century Book of The Dead (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

9. The least defensive and self-congratulatory approach to these issues, the one most alive to larger isues of political economy, is Berube and Nelson, eds., Higher Education Under Fire.

10. “A generation,” long, Mary Antin ago wrote, “is sometimes a more satisfactory unit for the study of humanity than a lifetime.” The Promised Land (Boston, 1912), xiGoogle Scholar. Kuttner, Robert, “The Patrimony Society,” The New Republic 196 (May 11, 1987): 18–21Google Scholar; Longman, Phillip, “The Yuppies' Dirty Little Secret,” The Washington Monthly 27 (April 1995): 20–21Google Scholar. “The 1990s,” writes Katherine Newman, “are returning us to an earlier era in which birthright determined one's fortunes. Those who can afford the better things in life will have them from the beginning…” Newman, Katherine S., Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream (New York, 1993), 218Google Scholar. Still, few baby boomers will inherit enough to compensate for their otherwise declining fortunes.

Most of the interesting work on our generation's rendezvous with history is taking shape either as memoir or as a type of social comment arising, as Elizabeth Hardwick once put it, from “the sedgy valley of autobiography.” See, for example, Patricia Hampl, A Romantic Education (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Digges, Deborah, Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the 50's and 60's (New York, 1991);Google ScholarWillis, Ellen, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (Hanover, NH, 1992)Google Scholar; Noonan, Peggy, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Gates, Henry Louis Jr., Colored People: A Memoir (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Clausen, Christopher, My Life With President Kennedy (Iowa City, 1994)Google Scholar; Maran, Meredith, What It's Like to Live Now (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Beers, David, Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America's Fall From Grace (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; and Carroll, James, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us (Boston, 1996).Google Scholar

11. Lasch, “A New Generation in the Wings,” New Oxford Review 50 (September 1993): 7–10. The “pig in a python” metaphor is established early on in Landon Jones's, Y.Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (New York, 1980), 2.Google Scholar

12. “Era of middle-class ascendancy” is from Gorman Beauchamp, “Dissing the Middle Class: The View From Burns Park,” The American Scholar (Summer 1995), 348. The rise and dissolution of the exceptional post-1945 epoch is further discussed in Collins, Robert M., “The Economic Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the ‘American Century’,” American Historical Review 101 (April 1996): 396–422CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galambos, Louis, “Paying Up: The Price of the Vietnam War,” Journal of Policy History 8: 1 (1996): 166–179CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes (New York, 1995), ch. 9Google Scholar; Blumberg, Paul, Inequality In An Age of Decline (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Peterson, Wallace C., Silent Depression: Twenty-Five Years of Wage Squeeze and Middle-Class Decline (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Phillips, Kevin, Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Kaus, Mickey, The End of Equality (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Newman, Declining Fortunes; Wolff, Edward N., Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in Americ (New York, 1995).Google Scholar

Karl Mannheim suggested that generational world views might derive from the competition, succession, and different situations of generations. See his 1927 essay on “The Problem of Generations,” reprinted in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1952), Ch. 7Google Scholar; and Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, 1936, 1985), 270Google Scholar. See, too, Wohl, Robert, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 73–84Google Scholar; Feuer, Lewis S., The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Ryder, Norman B., “The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change,” American Sociological Review 30 (December 1965): 843–861CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the several essays on “Generations” in Daedalus 107 (Fall 1978); and Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584–2069 (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

13. On graduate education and the professional crisis, see Cary Nelson, “Lessons From the Job Wars: What Is to Be Done?,” Academe 81 (November-December 1995): 18–25; and Berube and Nelson, eds., Higher Education Under Fire, Introduction.

14. Mike Males argues that something more ominous than “inattention” characterizes adult attitudes toward the young today. See Males, Mike A., The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents (Monroe, Maine, 1996).Google Scholar

15. Gray, Francine Du Plessix, “Starving Children,” The New Yorker 61 (October 16, 1995): 51Google Scholar; Merkle, Clare McGrath, “Our Children, the Public Schools, and Our Toxic Culture,” New Oxford Review 63 (January-February, 1996): 14–18Google Scholar; Popenoe, David, Elshtain, Jean Bethke, and Blankenhorn, David, eds., Promises to Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in America (London, 1996)Google Scholar; Gallagher, Maggie, “The Divorce Advocates,” in The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love (Washington, DC, 1996)Google Scholar; Males, “Generation Y,” in The Scapegoat Generation; Elshtain, Jean Bethke, “The Family in Trouble,” National Forum 75 (Winter 1995): 25–32Google Scholar; and “The Family and Civic Life,” in Power Trips and Other Journeys: Essays in Feminism as Civic Discourse (Madison, Wise., 1990), ch. 4Google Scholar; Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe, “Dan Quayle Was Right,” The Atlantic 271 (April 1993)Google Scholar; Rose, Stephen & Fesenfest, David, Family Income Changes m the 1980s (Washington, DC, 1990)Google Scholar; and Schorr, Juliet, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

16. Howe & Strauss, “The New Generation Gap;” Henwood, Doug, “Work and Its Future,” Left Business Observer 72 (April 3, 1996)Google Scholar; Richard J. Barnet, “The End of Jobs,” Harper's 287 (September 1993): 47–52; Males, “Impounding the Future,” in The Scapegoat Generation; and Elshtain, “The Family in Trouble.”

17. Metter, Israel, The Fifth Corner of the Room (New York, 1989, 1991) 21.Google Scholar

18. Damrosch, We Scholars, Introduction, 78, 105.

19. Damrosch, We Scholars, p. 16.

20. Shorris, Earl, A Nation of Salesmen: The Tyranny of the Market and the Subversion of Culture (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

21. “Coterie behavior” is from Damrosch, We Scholars, 9.

22. Sowell, Thomas, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis For Social Policy (New York, 1995), 5.Google Scholar

23. George M. Frederickson, “Personal Statement,” Organization of American Historians, “Biographical Data For 1996 Nominees.”

24. Rorty, Richard, “Two Cheers For Elitism,” The New Yorker 70 (January 30, 1995): 86–87Google Scholar

25. Michael Kammen, “History as a Lightning Rod.”

26. Kolodny, Annette, “Why Feminists Need Tenure,” The Women's Review of Books 33 (February 1996): 23–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in a similar vein, see Scott, “The New University;” and Faludi, Susan, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

Despite his otherwise sensible musings on the difficulties of academic professionalism, Michael Berube also finds sufficient proof of our virtue in the obvious fatuity of some of “our attackers.” See his “Public Perceptions of Universities and Faculties,” Academe 82 (July-August 1996): 12–13.

Jacoby, Russell, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; and Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Patai, Daphne & Koertge, Noretta, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales From the Strange World of Women's Studies (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; and Patai, , “What's Wrong With Women's Studies?” Academe 81 (July-August, 1995), 30–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kenneth Anderson, “Heartless World Revisited,” Times Literary Supplement No. 4825 (September 22, 1995): 3–4; and “Illiberal Tolerance;” Susan Haack, “Preposterism and Its Consequences;” Smith, Page, Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Elshtain, Democracy on Trial; Bromwich, David, Politics By Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (New Haven, 1992)Google Scholar; Lasch, Christopher, “Academic Pseudo-Radicalism;” and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991).Google Scholar

27. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, Epilogue.

28. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 472–473; Lazonick, William, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy (Cambridge:, 1993).Google Scholar

29. “Feminism today,” Daphne Patai wrote in 1983, “is the most Utopian project around. That is, it demands the most radical and truly revolutionary transformation of society…” Patai, Daphne, “Beyond Defensiveness: Feminist Research Strategies,” Women's Studies International Forum 6:2 (1983): 177–189CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “What's Wrong With Women's Studies,” 30. “Feminist scholarship, women's history, and gender analysis,” as Nancy A. Hewitt puts it, “emerged in the United States and Western Europe during the late 1960s and flourished alongside the women's movement for the next decade and a half.” Editorial, Gender & History 3 (Autumn 1991): 243–245.

Joan Scott's writings on gender analysis and academic politics have epitomized this contradictory tendency, forswearing totalizing explanatory schemes while lauding the transformational possibilities of today's “critical scholarship.” See “Gender A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (December 1986): 1053–1075CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, Introduction. More recently, Scott has worried about the dangers of moralizing as a substitute for argument, of a dogmatism which “insists that its truths are immune to criticism or change,” in “Academic Freedom as Ethical Practice,” Academe 81 (July-August 1995): 47. See, also, Scott, “The Rhetoric of Crisis on Higher Education,” in Berube and Nelson, eds., Higher Education Under Fire, 293–304.

30. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 6; and Haack, “Preposterism and Its Consequences,” 313.

31. Some of the best historical work here, perhaps because it is more resistant to evasive abstractions, has been biographical. Biography, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall remarks, emphasizes “disciplined empathy.” And it is a practice, Dee Garrison reminds us, that intensifies the ethical relation to the subject, making the biographer an “artist under oath.” See Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, “Second Thoughts: On Writing a Feminist Biography,” Feminist Studies 13 (Spring 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Garrison, Dee, “Two Roads Taken: Writing the Biography of Mary Heaton Vorse,” in Sara Alpern, et al, The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modem American Women (Urbana, III., 1992), 67.Google Scholar

The quoted phrases are from Kerber, Linda K., Kessler-Harris, Alice, and Sklar, Kathryn Kish, eds., U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill, 1995), 6.Google Scholar

The progressivism of the turn toward gender, its theoretical superiority to earlier feminist epistemology, is explicitly alleged by Linda Gordon in “Gender, State, and Society: A Debate With Theda Skocpol,” Contention 2 (Spring 1993): 145–146,188. A “potentially explosive approach …,” gender implies “not only difference but power …”, editorial, Gender & History 6 (April 1994): 3–4. The relation of gender analysis to matters of power also is noted in Kerber, Linda, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,” The Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Diversity and the Transformation of American Studies,” American Quarterly 41 (September 1989): 429Google Scholar. On the implications for masculinity, see, for example, Carnes, Mark C. and Griffin, Clyde, eds. Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar; Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; and Lasch, Christopher “The Mismeasure of Man,” The New Republic 208 (April 19, 1993): 30–35.Google Scholar

It must be noted that feminists and women's historians have for years understood the contradictions and tensions within an academic project that seeks at once to serve truth and political desire. See, for example, Gordon, Linda, “What Should Women's Historians Do: Politics, Social Theory, and Women's History,” Marxist Perspectives, 1 (1978): 128–36.Google Scholar

32. Linda Gordon's reaction to Novick's account of developments within women's history is interesting. In That Noble Dream, Gordon wrote, “feminist scholars are treated quite differently from scholars of any other political persuasion: not primarily as scholars or intellectuals at all but as political activists.” By ignoring the theoretical work enlivening academic feminism, Gordon argues, Novick's account “becomes disrespectful.” That Novick had recognized in the “dual citizenship” of women's historians a tension at once creative and irreconcilable, and that this was much more interesting—and revealing—than any number of “rich theoretical debates,” was a a point Gordon chose to ignore. See Novick, That Noble Dream, 510; and Gordon, Linda, “Comments on‘That Noble Dream’,” The American Historical Review 96 (June 1991): 687.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. The quoted phrase is from Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 41.

34. The phrase is Agnes Repplier's, from Eight Decades: Essays and Episodes (Boston, 1937), 156.Google Scholar

35. The Stevenson quote is from Malcolm, Janet, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York, 1994), 108–109.Google Scholar

36. Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, 67.

37. “Forced consistency …” is from Elshtain, Jean Bethke, “Symposium on Transcending Ideological Conformity,” New Oxford Review 58 (October 1991): 18Google Scholar. Passos, John Dos, Chosen Country (Boston: Houghum Mifflin, 1951), 466.Google Scholar

38. Hirschman, Albert O., The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)Google Scholar