No title

C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 2 (2004), pp. 151–183
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000113 Printed in the United Kingdom

an open elite: the peculiarities of connoisseurship in early modern england* brian cowan Department of History, McGill University

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton’s thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it.

Strictly speaking, connoisseurship did not exist in England before the early eighteenth century. The first recorded use of the word “connoisseur” in English is in the first edition of the Dutch immigrant Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714), which refers to connoisseurs as “judges of painting.”1 Not

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Earlier versions of this essay have been read by my colleagues at the Mapping Markets for Paintings conferences in Antwerp organized by Neil De Marchi and Hans van Miegroet, as well as various audiences at Stanford University, Emory University, and the British Art Center in New Haven, Connecticut. Along with the editors and referees of this journal, I am particularly grateful to Carol Gibson-Wood and David Ormrod for helpful comments and criticism. B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (1714; rpt Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), 1:326. Cf. Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth OED), s.v. “connoisseur”. Not all early uses of the word made reference to the judgment of paintings, as in Jonathan

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long after Mandeville’s introduction of the term merely en passant, Jonathan Richardson consecrated an entire treatise to the notion in the second of his Two Discourses (1719), in which connoisseurship is introduced as a “science” of judgment regarding the value, both monetary and cultural, of paintings.2 Before the early eighteenth century, the most popular term used to refer to one who was interested in the arts was a word borrowed from the Italian: virtuoso. By adopting the word virtuoso, the English meant to associate themselves with a continental, and especially an Italianate, tradition of art appreciation, but the word quickly came to mean much more than just this. The reception history of the words used to identify early modern interest in the fine arts is important, but an overly precise obsession with the words alone may obscure more than it reveals. Even without the word, there may have been a concept of connoisseurship in England well before it entered the vernacular at the dawn of the eighteenth century. The problem that historians of English connoisseurship have faced is that the language of artistic assessment emerged in the seventeenth century in tandem with the discourse of wide-ranging and thus apparently indiscriminate curiosity that was used and embraced by the people who began to call themselves virtuosi. Was the virtuoso then a connoisseur avant la lettre? Most studies of English virtuosity have been inclined to disagree. For the intellectual historian Walter Houghton, the virtuoso sensibility of the seventeenth century lacked the discernment necessary for artistic connoisseurship. He argued that even a virtuoso as learned and distinguished as John Evelyn (FRS, 1660) could not offer a language of distinction which would allow a collector to distinguish between the interest provoked by a painting, an antique coin, or even that of natural wonders or mechanical inventions. According to this account, the virtuoso possessed no separate aesthetic appreciation for the objects of his interest, he had rather an “insatiable appetite for the strange and ingenious” that was incompatible with the perspicacious ability to discern between the good and the bad, or an original from a copy.3 For Houghton, the virtuosic appreciation for the fine arts was insufficiently discriminate and it lacked a developed critical vocabulary in which artistic judgments might be articulated. The history of the

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Swift’s “On Poetry: A Rapsody” (1733), line 276, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 2:649. On Richardson’s concept of the connoisseur, the works of Carol Gibson-Wood are essential. See her “Jonathan Richardson and the Rationalization of Connoisseurship,” Art History 7/1 (1984), 38–56; Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli (New York: Garland, 1988), esp. chap. 7; and now Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Walter Houghton, “The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century,” 2 parts, Journal of the History of Ideas 3/1 and 3/2 (1942), 191 n. 72; quote at 205.

an open elite: the peculiarities of connoisseurship in early modern england

English virtuoso was thus a chapter in what might be considered the “pre-history” of art connoisseurship in England, and it came to an end in the early eighteenth century when Shaftesbury and Richardson began to write sustained reflections on the criteria by which works of art should be judged. More generally, Houghton suggests that the appeal of the “gentleman scholar” in English elite culture began to wane in the eighteenth century, as it was replaced by the greater cachet to be gained by fashioning oneself as a “gentleman of the world.”4 Although now over six decades old, Houghton’s conclusions have been reinforced by the more recent work of art historians such as Ann Bermingham and Carol Gibson-Wood. For Bermingham, the seventeenth-century virtuosi did not appreciate the pictorial arts for their own sake but rather as “signs of learning or signs of personal status.” Hence the more aesthetically inclined connoisseur did not emerge until the eighteenth century.5 Gibson-Wood’s dismissal of virtuoso connoisseurship is even more thorough. In her estimation, “an aesthetic appreciation of art was entirely lacking amongst the virtuosi” in England. English art collectors before the eighteenth century simply lacked the “level of sophistication” to be found in the French and Italian critical discourses on art.6 The staying power of Houghton’s interpretation is impressive. Perhaps one reason why it has remained convincing is that his story of transition has fit well with newer understandings of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English cultural history which see the period as marked by a “rise of politeness”, the invention of a distinctive “high culture”, and a growing interest in “taste” as a category of understanding.7 For historians of this new eighteenth-century culture of politeness, Houghton’s old story of the replacement of the baroque virtuoso by the enlightenment man of taste fits very well into their own narrative of cultural change. This essay revisits Houghton’s analysis of the virtuoso appreciation of the visual arts. Did the English virtuosi really lack an aesthetic appreciation for the works of art which piqued their interest? I would like to suggest that they did not: virtuosity and connoisseurship were by no means incompatible. English connoisseurship 4 5 6

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Ibid., 217–18. Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 47. Gibson-Wood, Studies, 99. Gibson-Wood’s more recent work has been more receptive to the ways in which virtuosity and connoisseurship coexisted, as in her “Classification and Value in a Seventeenth-Century Museum: William Courten’s Collection,” Journal of the History of Collections 9/1 (1997), 61–77. Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

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began well before the word itself was introduced into the English language, and it emerged within the broader portmanteau of virtuoso culture.8 Virtuosity and connoisseurship were not mutually exclusive means of understanding and appreciating art works. Rather than understanding connoisseurship as an alternative to, and ultimately a replacement for, virtuoso culture, we should recognize that they developed together. Who then were the virtuosi? The word virtuoso was Italian in origin, and the first use of the term with reference to those interested in the fine arts appears to date from the foundation of the Virtuosi al Pantheon in Rome in 1543. This society of artists and art lovers sponsored some of the first public exhibitions of paintings in Europe for noncommercial purposes. It seems that the terms virtuoso and virtuosa had become a common means of identifying individuals associated or in sympathy with this original Roman confraternity by the later sixteenth century.9 It did not take long for the term to migrate to England: Henry Peacham seems to have become acquainted with the notion through his association with the Earl of Arundel’s Italianate household in the early seventeenth century, and he was indeed the first English writer to use the word “virtuoso” in print, in the third edition of his The Compleat Gentleman (1634). While this reception history is well known, it is less often remarked that Peacham also introduced the Dutch term liefhebber to the English as well in this text at the same time, although the Dutch word did not take hold in the way that the Italian virtuoso did. Both liefhebber and the Italian term curioso could be used as synonyms for virtuoso in early modern English.10 By adopting the word virtuoso, the English meant to associate themselves with a continental, and especially an Italianate, tradition of elite cultural interests, and the word remained applicable to anyone with a strong, perhaps even obsessive, interest in either the natural sciences or the fine arts. The English virtuoso as a cultural phenomenon is best understood in terms of a particular sort of sensibility, a set of attitudes, habits and preferences, rather than as a member of a discrete club.11 The sensibility that brought these virtuosi

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Two important early statements of this argument were Salerno, “Seventeenth-Century English Literature on Painting” and Claire Pace, “Virtuoso to Connoisseur,” Seventeenth Century 2/2 (1987), 167–88. Ilaria Bignamini, “George Vertue, Art Historian and Art Institutions in London, 1689– 1768,” Walpole Society 54 (1988), 31 n. 6. The scientific aspect of Italian virtuoso culture is the subject of Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London: Francis Constable, 1634), 105. Cf. OED, s.v. “lief-hebber” and “curioso”, and Edward Norgate, Miniatura: Or, The Art of Limning (c.1655), ed. Jeffrey M. Muller and Jim Murrell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 83. Cf. Houghton, “The English Virtuoso,” 57.

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together was an almost limitless curiosity about the wider worlds around them. This curiosity “was an attitude of mind involving a fascination for the rare, novel, surprising and outstanding in all spheres of life,” and it was the preserve of “a self-declared, cosmopolitan elite.”12 The virtuosi were almost exclusively men, although the feminine term vertuosa was also occasionally used to refer to exceptional women with similar interests.13 They were also predominantly gentlemen, although again the term was flexible enough to include clever or interested individuals who could get on in a predominantly genteel milieu, even if they lacked the wealth or the landed property to present themselves as such— Robert Hooke (FRS, 1663) and the young Samuel Pepys (FRS, 1665) stand out as prominent examples of this type.14 Although virtuosity was elitist, the virtuosi founded their sense of exclusivity more on their shared knowledge and interests than on more conventional means of social distinction, such as wealth or titles to nobility. The Royal Society, established in 1660, was perhaps the most prominent institutional base for English virtuoso society, although membership in the Royal Society was not essential in order to be considered a virtuoso.15 The virtuosi did share a certain number of concerns that bound what would have otherwise been a quite disparate group into a distinctive social type. They believed in the value of collecting the curiosities that interested them, often in a room or space they called a cabinet; they had a propensity to speak with learning and eloquence when referring to the works of art or nature they collected; and they tried to conduct their social relations according to a courtly manner of conduct, often understood as “civility”, despite the fact that most of the English virtuosi lived and worked outside the Stuart or the Hanoverian royal courts.16 12

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Katie Whitaker, “The Culture of Curiosity,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone, 1998), quote at 218, see also 215–301. For virtuosa, see British Library (hereafter BL), Evelyn MSS, Mary Evelyn to Ralph Bohun, 7 April 1695, cited in Carol Gibson-Wood, “Susanna and Her Elders: John Evelyn’s Artistic Daughter,” in John Evelyn and His Milieu, ed. Michael Hunter and Frances Harris (London: British Library Publications, June, 2004). I am grateful to Professor Gibson-Wood for allowing me to read her article before publication. On the complex nature of gentlemanly identity in early modern England, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 42–64. It is for this reason that fellows in the Royal Society are noted as such, along with the date of their election to the Society, at the first mention of each individual throughout the text. Virtuoso pretensions to courtly civility were often honored in the breach, as demonstrated in the work of Robert Iliffe, “Material Doubts: Hooke, Artisan Culture and the Exchange of Information in 1670s London,” British Journal for the History of Science 28/3 (1995),

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It was in fact this peculiar social situation of the English virtuosi that accounted for their articulation of a discourse on the arts so different from the traditional concerns of other connoisseurs that it has often been read by Houghton and others as antithetic to the practice of connoisseurship itself. This article begins with an examination of the intellectual content of virtuoso thinking about artistic expression and then proceeds to relate that “virtuoso aesthetic” to the various social milieux in which that thought was articulated.17 In terms of content, virtuosity was torn between an “antique” aesthetic that set the achievements of classical antiquity in the fine arts up as a model which every living artist should emulate but could never hope to surpass in quality and a “modern” aesthetic that found beauty and instruction in much more than the models of classical antiquity. While this tension was European in scope—it was indeed one skirmish in the epic culture wars between the ancients and the moderns—it had a particularly powerful purchase on the emergence of art appreciation in England. This occurred because unlike in France, English art connoisseurship lacked an institutional base from which it might properly distinguish itself against the broader culture of virtuoso curiosity. The royal court did not serve as a prominent fount for artistic patronage, especially after the ill fated reign of Charles I, and consequently England also lacked a proper royal academy of arts until 1768. For these reasons, English connoisseurship remained more beholden to the ideals and practices of the non-courtly and non-academic elite society that also nurtured virtuosity. It also remained open to influences from non-artistic quarters such as the natural sciences and metropolitan commercial culture than in societies with more autonomous and institutionalized “art worlds”.18 While such influences were characteristic of early modern European visual culture as a whole, in England they faced little competition from other corporate entities such as artists’ guilds or art academies which sought to define an artistic domain that was separate from the worlds of natural science, antiquarianism or commerce.19 Early

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285–318, and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. chaps. 7–8. On the emergence of civility, see Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Although the term “aesthetic” is an anachronism for the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, it is used here as a heuristic means of identifying the general means by which contemporaries articulated a sense of artistic value. Like “connoisseurship”, the concept existed before the word was introduced into the English language. I refer here to the well-known concept developed in Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), esp. x. For the widespread relations between virtuosity and visual culture in early modern Europe as a whole, see the essays in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2002).

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modern England’s art world, like its aristocracy more generally, was dominated by an open elite.20

i. what was the virtuoso aesthetic? Seventeenth-century English art lovers were themselves well aware of the differences between the state of connoisseurship in their own country and that which prevailed abroad. William Aglionby’s (FRS, 1667) complaint that “of all the civilized nations in Europe, we [English] are the only that want curiosity for artists”, was only one of an incessant series of complaints by English art lovers that the standards of connoisseurship in their kingdom paled in comparison to those which prevailed across the channel.21 Indeed, Aglionby’s own writings on painting were more or less a reiteration of arguments made several decades earlier by the French writer Charles Du Fresnoy in his De Arte Graphica (1667), and his history of master painters was itself an abridged translation of eleven of Giorgio Vasari’s Italian lives of Renaissance artists.22 Despite his despair at the lack of appreciation for works of art in his native country, Aglionby was not prepared to offer an indigenously English alternative to the classical tradition of connoisseurship he had picked up in his travels and diplomatic appointments on the continent. There was one standard for artistic excellence and it had already been established by the ancients in classical antiquity before being revived by the Italians in recent years.23 Even the Dutch, amongst whom Aglionby had lived for years as a diplomat and with whose art market he was quite familiar, he thought were obliged to “transport themselves into Italy, where are the best masters of [painting in] the world.”24 20

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The preliminary conclusions of Lawrence and Jean Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) should now be revised with reference to the work of Professor Stone’s former students: Susan Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Verneys, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and James M. Rosenheim, The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English Landed Society, 1650–1750 (London: Longman, 1998). William Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues (1685; rpt London: John Gain, 1686), sig. C2r; cf. Jonathan Richardson, “A Discourse on . . . the Science of a Connoisseur” (1719), in Two Discourses, 2 vols. (London: W. Churchill, 1719), 2:2–3, 48–9, 64–5. The paucity of English interest in painting before the eighteenth century is the major theme of Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of English Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). Luigi Salerno, “Seventeenth-Century English Literature on Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 14 (1951), 250–51. Aglionby, Painting Illustrated, 34, 93, 104–5. William Aglionby, The Present State of the United Provinces of the Low-Countries (London: John Starkey, 1669), 224–5, quote at 224.

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Not all of Aglionby’s readers were inclined to agree with him, however. In contrast to Aglionby’s vision of a pristine ancient ideal of painting, one reader scribbled in the margins of the text: “How does this man know the excellency of ancient paintings since there is not one piece of the antient paintings left in the world, nor has not been [sic] for some hundreds of years?”25 The quick answer to this indignant reader’s response would have been: “from Pliny’s Naturalis Historiae, of course”. Pliny’s writings on natural history were the locus classicus for the early modern defense of painting as a liberal art worthy of a gentleman’s interest.26 This work was full of anecdotes about, and histories of, the fine arts and painting of the ancients and it had been a primary source for the first major work of art history published in England and in English, Francis Junius’s The Painting of the Ancients (1638).27 Aglionby’s work also demonstrates a familiarity with the writings of Pliny on painting.28 It would be overly hasty to dismiss the marginalia of Aglionby’s reader as the scribblings of an ignorant curmudgeon. His point was that the paintings of the ancients themselves no longer exist even if Pliny’s writings about them might.29 Words did not count, or, as the motto of the Royal Society put it, “nullius en verba”. It was the evidence that mattered and one could not simply take Pliny’s word for it. Peter Paul Rubens phrased much the same point more politely in a letter to Francis Junius upon reading the Latin version of Junius’s work on ancient painting, De Pictura Veterum (1637). Here Rubens praised Junius’s assiduous compilation of references to the art of painting in the works of ancient authors, but he added: since those examples of the ancient painters can now be followed only in the imagination, and comprehended by each one of us, more or less, for himself, I wish that some such treatise on the paintings of the Italian masters might be carried out with similar care. For examples or models of their work are publicly exhibited even today; one may point to them with the finger and say, “There they are.” Those things which are perceived by the senses produce a sharper and more durable impression, require a closer examination,

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Aglionby, Painting Illustrated, BL shelfmark 61.c.24, also in Wing A765, p. 104, and cf. p. 105. Pliny, Natural History, esp. book 35; John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 16. It is worth noting that Junius himself was Dutch and his work was originally published in Latin as De Pictura Veterum (1637) at the behest of Thomas Howard, second Earl of Arundel and Surrey. See David Howarth, Lord Arundel and His Circle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 79, and Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 280–86. Cf. Aglionby, Painting Illustrated, 35–6, with Pliny, Natural History, 35:5. A point later echoed in Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1797), ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 138.

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and afford richer material for study than those which present themselves to us only in the imagination, like dreams, or so obscured by words that we try in vain to grasp them.30

The different attitudes towards the study of ancient art found in these exchanges between Junius, Aglionby and their more practical-minded readers echoed a much larger conflict within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English intellectual culture, a clash which has been described, both then and now, as a contest between the “ancients” and the “moderns”.31 At issue in this battle was not whether classical ideals of beauty were to be embraced or abandoned, for nearly all early moderns agreed that the ancient achievements were impressive indeed. The difference was something more like a matter of method: how should ancient ideals best be understood? Was it through the modern methods of humanist scholarship, antiquarianism and scientific experiment? Or should one simply read, absorb and imitate the rules and practices of antiquity? When it came to discussing the art of painting, the last answer, given by the ancient party, tended to dominate English art criticism.32 But the equivocations of Rubens and Aglionby’s “modern” reader demonstrate that the moderns had not wholly relinquished the study of art to their antique contemporaries. This should not be too surprising, given that English virtuosity very quickly associated itself with the moderns. The Royal Society’s new sciences, antiquarianism, and an appreciation for the advancement of learning in all fields were the hallmarks of both modern learning and the virtuoso sensibility. What then did these virtuosi make of the visual arts, and painting in particular? In some respects, the artistic concerns, the aesthetic values, the collecting practices and the social organization of the English virtuosi reflected the idiosyncrasies of elite culture and society in England as a whole.

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Peter Paul Rubens to Francis Junius, 1 Aug. 1637, Antwerp, in The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, ed. and trans. Ruth Saunders Magurn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 407. Cf. Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 25–7. The best guide to these conflicts is the work of Joseph Levine, especially his Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England (1977; rpt Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). For the nature of the debate with reference to the natural sciences, see Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in SeventeenthCentury England (1961; rpt New York: Dover, 1982), and for the fine arts, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts, expanded edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). This is the impression left by Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns.

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Collecting and commissioning portraits, perhaps more than any other genre of painting, was popular amongst both the virtuosi and the wider society of the English gentry as well as the aspirant bourgeoisie.33 Portraits often served as emblems of personal loyalty, patronage and reverence to a prince or lord, and although it is probably an exaggeration to claim that “there was scarcely a country house in which some image of the king or court did not hang,” they must have been quite common indeed.34 But portrait paintings were understood more complexly by the virtuosi. They could serve as visual reminders of ancient and modern “worthies” whose lives and works remained an inspiration to the virtuoso collector. John Evelyn, the virtuoso par excellence, recommended collecting the portraits of a notable worthy, even in print rather than paint, in preference to the works of any putative master painter in a pedagogic letter to his friend Samuel Pepys, who desired instruction on how to assemble a respectable collection of images. Evelyn was “in perfect indignation” when he considered the “extravagant summs . . . given for a dry scalp of some (forsooth) Italian painters hand let it be of Raphael or Titian himselfe, [which would be] infinitely more estimable, were one assur’d it was the picture of the learned Count of Mirandula, Politian, Quicciardini, Machiavel, Petrarch, Ariosto or Tasso; some famous Pope, Prince, Poet, Historian or Hero of those times.”35 This passage has often been taken as an example of the neglect shown by the virtuosi of artistic style and attribution to a particular artist, and for these reasons it is often cited as a reason to conclude that virtuosity lacked some of the basic concerns of what one should properly consider as connoisseurship.36 It is true that the disregard shown here by Evelyn for the style of, and attribution to, the creative artist is not compatible with what we would now consider to be connoisseurship, but his main point was not an unusual one 33

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On gentry collections, see J. T. Cliffe, The World of the Country House in SeventeenthCentury England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 39–45; and cf. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 54–9. References to commissions are numerous, but see Whyman, Sociability and Power, 48, 59, 63; and see the detailed attention paid by Samuel Pepys to portraits made of his wife and himself in Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols. (London: Bell, 1971), vol. 7 passim. Kevin Sharpe, “An Image Doting Rabble: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, eds., Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 37 (quoted). On the emblematic and sentimental role of portraits, see Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1715), 15–16. John Evelyn to Samuel Pepys, 26 Aug. 1689, in Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, ed. Guy de la B´edoy`ere (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1997), 189. Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 46; Houghton, “The English Virtuoso,” 208–9.

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for early modern assessments of artistic value. He wished to emphasize that the point of admiring a painting was not to take pride in distinguishing the hand of one artist from another, or still less to value a painting merely because of the artist’s renown—although such responses were as common then as they are today. Guessing the hand and style of different artists was a favored amusement at the court of Charles I.37 But it was not considered the height of aesthetic appreciation by the virtuosi; nor indeed would it be for many later continental connoisseurs, such as the French art dealer Edm´e-Franc¸ois Gersaint, who consistently elevated intrinsic artistic quality over putative attributions in his valuations of the works he sold.38 For Evelyn and many other early English art critics, a painting must have an edifying purpose inherent in the work itself. In this case, if a portrait was to be included in a collection such as the one Pepys was endeavoring to build up, it must be a representation of a known sitter. The edifying purpose of the portrait is entirely independent of the practical execution of the work. According to the virtuoso aesthetic, even the most skilled painting of “the most beautifull Courtezana or Prostitute of them all who has nothing to commend in her but her impudence, and that she was a painted strumpet” must be rejected for its lack of decorum. Views such as this were so common as to make an appearance in Ned Ward’s popular but thoroughly low-brow periodical The London Spy (1709).39 This notion was not abandoned in the eighteenth century. While it is identified as a key element of “the civic humanist theory of painting” by John Barrell in The Political Theory of Painting (1986), this is by no means a belief confined to writers whose politics conform to the language of civic humanism that has been of central concern to historians of political thought.40 For authors as diverse in their politics as Evelyn, Roger de Piles, Jonathan Richardson, Ned Ward and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a work of art was valuable only insofar as it offered instruction, either moral or historical, or preferably both.41 Although it owed much to the

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R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 122. See Neil De Marchi and Hans van Miegroet, “Recycling Paintings on the Paris Market, 1723–1750” (unpublished MS), and Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, Amateurs et Curieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 163–94. John Evelyn to Samuel Pepys, 26 Aug. 1689, in Particular Friends, 189–90; Ned Ward, The London Spy Compleat, 4th edn (London: J. How, 1709), 95. The locus classicus for the study of civic humanism is, of course, J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). See and cf. Roger de Piles, The Art of Painting, and the Lives of the Painters (London: J. Nutt, 1706), 66; Richardson’s “The Science of a Connoisseur” (1719), in his Two Discourses, 2:39–40; and Shaftesbury, “A Notion of the Historical Draught of Hercules,” in Shaftesbury’s

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humanist impulse to recreate and reinvigorate classical standards of beauty, there was nothing particularly “civic”, let alone republican, about the notion that a work must be morally good before it could qualify as aesthetically beautiful. The aesthetic judgment of painting in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was hardly the property of any one political or social interest group. Even the virtuosi did not have a monopoly here, as Ned Ward’s Grub Street interventions demonstrate quite clearly. Nevertheless, England’s self-declared virtuosi did take to the job of assessing the artistic worth of paintings with a greater than average zeal. The members of the primordial virtuoso society that emerged amongst the Arundel circle in the early seventeenth century were the first Englishmen to hammer out a recognized canon of old master painters. They did this partly as a result of reading and reinterpreting Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, although the complete work of this text was available only in Italian and even that was so “hard to come by” that Henry Peacham lamented he was unable to consult it.42 Peacham was familiar with the work of Karel Van Mander on Dutch and Flemish painting, however, and, despite having not read Vasari, he provided his own list and lives of the “best masters Italy alone hath afforded” in the several editions of his popular courtesy manual, The Compleat Gentleman.43 Similar lists appear in the late seventeenth-century works of Aglionby, who translated eleven of Vasari’s lives, William Sanderson and Marshall Smith.44 Although this process of listing and evaluating demonstrates the strong desire amongst these virtuosi to formulate a canon of master painters, the precise contours of this canon were not yet clearly defined. One could still argue about the respective merits of a painter as renowned as Michelangelo.45 Although Michelangelo was frequently named as having been “esteemed the best painter in Europe,” Evelyn viewed his paintings with contempt because they failed to follow the rules of artistic

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Second Characters, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 59–61. Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, 1st edn (London: Francis Constable, 1622), 137. Contrast Howarth, Lord Arundel and His Circle, 118–19, and John Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance: The Growth of Interest in its History and Art, 2nd edn (London: Fontana, 1996), 55–9. Peacham, Compleat Gentleman, 1st edn, 117–37 (quote at 117); Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, 3rd edn (London: E. Tyler, 1661), 138–55. Aglionby, Painting Illustrated, 125 bis–375; William Sanderson, Graphice: The use of the pen and pencil, or the most excellent art of painting (London: Robert Crofts, 1658), 17–20; Marshall Smith, The Art of Painting, 2nd edn (London: M. B., 1693), 17–26. See Gibson-Wood, Jonathan Richardson, 175–8, on Michelangelo’s contested status in early modern art criticism; and for his later rehabilitation, cf. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 82–4, 271–82.

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decorum.46 In this respect the role of connoisseurship in the early modern art market was to validate or indeed construct the inherent value of a given art work rather than to simply authenticate whether that work was indeed the product of the hand of a recognized master painter. Early modern connoisseurs thus played a role more like that of experts on “contemporary” art in the present day art world than they did the role of current experts on classical, old master paintings, obsessed as they are with the problems of identification and attribution.47 Attribution therefore was not the highest item on the early modern art lover’s agenda, and it is true that the study of the individual styles (or maniera) of artists did not garner as much interest in England as it did in the art academies of late Renaissance Italy.48 But it would be wrong to think that the virtuosi paid no attention to the authorship of an art work before Richardson made such concerns one of the key elements in his science of connoisseurship.49 Although clearly secondary to the question of conceptual excellence, it did matter to the virtuosi whose hand executed the work.50 William Sanderson advised his readers that “originals have a natural force of grace rising; copies seem to have only an imperfect and borrowed comeliness; and if you stay to judge of them . . . [they] proceed not of a naturall genius in the workeman.”51 Even Evelyn, who railed against the self-centered presumption of artists who were sure to leave “some character of their owne name whilst they remember not the other” name of their subject, was quick to recognize that an original work was much to be preferred to a copy. “Though all copies,” he added, “are not to be rejected, if hard to come by.”52 Virtuoso writers on art were convinced that a trained eye could in principle be able to discern the work of different hands from each other. Humfrey Wanley, whose expertise was put to use in building the Harleian collections for the first and second earls of Oxford, thought that “when a painters hand is fixed, his manner is then limited, and so when a curious person comes into a gallery, he knows that this picture was done by Ryley, Kneller, Vandyke, Dobson, Tintoret, &c. and that to be a copy after Rubens, Georgeion, Salv. Rosa, Han. Caraccio, 46

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Peacham, Compleat Gentleman, 1st edn, 109 (quote); Sanderson, Graphice, 18; Smith, Art of Painting, 21; Evelyn, “Preface” to Fr´eart de Chambray, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting, sig. A3v. Raymonde Moulin and Alain Quemin, “La Certification de la Valeur de l’Art,” Annales E.S.C. (1993); Becker, Art Worlds, 109–10. Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 40–47. Richardson, Two Discourses, 1:98–199 [misnumbered as 219]. Pace, “Virtuoso to Connoisseur,” 175–6. Sanderson, Graphice, 16. John Evelyn to Samuel Pepys, 26 Aug. 1689, in Particular Friends, 189 and 192. Cf. John Evelyn, Numismata: A Discourse of Medals, Antient and Modern (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1697), 209, 217–18.

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Pietro di Cortona, &c.” At the same time, however, Wanley admitted that some great forgers had succeeded in borrowing a picture in order to make a copy and return the fake in the place of the original, “and I believe it possible,” he added, “for a great master to copy a picture so, that when they both stand together, a good judge shall not dare positively say which is the copy and which not: Nor he that drew the original, dare to own, that could imitate his own handiwork better than a stranger has done.”53 The problem of distinguishing an original from a copy, or from an outright forgery, was no less a problem for the collector of natural and antiquarian curiosities than it was for the collector of paintings.54 Certainly those collectors and dealers active in the early modern art market were well aware of the difference in price between what could be commanded by an original painting and what by a mere copy.55 Nevertheless few guidelines were offered on how to distinguish in practice between an original and a copy. The reason was not only that such judgments can often be very difficult to make and even more difficult to explain in theory, but also because the theorists of artistic value were less interested in the practical than in the intellectual content of a painting. There was a certain conflict of interest between the pecuniary interests (in all senses of the word) of the players involved in the early modern market and the aesthetic interests of virtuoso writers on art. Hence perhaps the continuing refrain in early modern art criticism that truly great art was beyond the market.56 It was priceless. To put a monetary value on a work of true beauty was demeaning. Thus Aglionby noted with approval the Emperor Charles V’s patronage of Titian in which “his design was not to pay him for his work, which could have no price.”57 Pliny’s account of the ancient artist Zeuxis, who gave away his paintings as presents because he thought that no price could properly match their value, resonated strongly with early modern

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Humfrey Wanley, “Part of a letter, written to a most learned prelate, in answer to one written by his grace, judging of the age of MSS, the style of learned authors, painters, musicians, etc.,” Philosophical Transactions 24 (1704–5), 2007–8 (emphasis in original), 2002. Randall L.-W. Caudill, “Some Literary Evidence of the Development of English Virtuoso Interests in the Seventeenth Century, with Particular Reference to the Literature of Travel” (DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1975), 138–56. Jonathan Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 231–5, 247. For similar views in seventeenth-century Italian discourses on art, see Christopher Marshall, “‘Onorato Mercante’: Art Dealing and its Associations in Baroque Naples” (unpublished MS), and idem, “‘Senza Il Minimo Scrupulo’: Artists as Dealers in Seventeenth-Century Naples,” Journal of the History of Collections 12/1 (2000), 15–34. Aglionby, Painting Illustrated, sig. b1v.

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connoisseurs who wanted to make a claim for the importance of painting, as did his claim that the painter Apelles was paid for his work in uncounted gold coin: “in nummo aureo mensura acceptit, non numero”.58 For the earliest English connoisseurs of painting, it was best to try to maintain the pretence that these art works circulated most properly within the more exalted world of gift exchange rather than as vulgar commodities.59 When one had to admit that there was a price to be paid for such works, the preferred point to make was that a true art lover would “spare no cost” in obtaining a masterpiece. Peter Heylin’s advice that “money is never better spent than when it is layed out in the buying of knowledge” acutely summed up the virtuosic anxiety with regard to the commercialization of objets de virtu.60 It was better that they be placed beyond the market, but if they must be found there, then the virtuoso was well advised to spend whatever it took to obtain them and care for them properly.61 Just as the virtuosi viewed the art market with great ambivalence, so did they tend to view the artists themselves. For many virtuoso critics, the artist had not yet been freed from his vulgar artisanal roots. While the judgment of painting was increasingly accepted as a liberal art, the mechanical execution of the task was less easily accommodated by early English art lovers.62 A commonplace of seventeenth-century art criticism was the assertion that the best judge of the value of a painting was not a practicing artist but a learned, percipient and disinterested gentleman observer. To be sure, artistic practice itself was not seen to be demeaning or unbecoming of a virtuoso. Henry Peacham recommended that a gentleman might well profit from the practice of painting and drawing. Peacham may have been encouraged to make his claims by the growing cachet adhering to an interest in painting in the court circles around Charles I. The king himself was rumored to have taken up the brush himself in order to “supply the defects in art” he found in the works of the artists’ studios he visited.63 Although the veracity of this claim is dubious, its appearance in a martyrological work

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Pliny, Natural History, 35.36.62; 35.36.92 (quoted); cf. Aglionby, Painting Illustrated, sig. b1v. Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 143–55; on the role of gift exchange in early modern culture, see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). Peter Heylin, Survey of the State of France (London: E. Cotes, 1656), sigs. b[1]v–b2r. For similar sentiments, see Archibald Campbell, Duke of Argyll, Instructions to a Son (London: J. Latham, 1661), 76–7, 102–3. See Richardson, “The Science of a Connoisseur,” in his Two Discourses, 2:47–9. The Quattrocento Italian origins of this longstanding debate are summarized in Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), 48–57. Richard Perrinchief, The Royal Martyr (1676), 253, as quoted in Smuts, Court Culture, 158.

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of the Restoration era is no less remarkable for the way in which it associated princely virtue with artistic talent.64 A few nobles with virtuosic proclivities, most notably the central European e´ migr´e aristocrats Wenceslaus Hollar and Prince Rupert, tried their hands at producing art works themselves. For a struggling noble like Hollar, this was a means to scratch out a living; for Prince Rupert it was just another fashionable diversion.65 Many other prominent virtuosi were also competent artists, albeit primarily for private pleasure rather than public approbation. John Evelyn was a competent draftsman and etcher; William Petty (FRS, 1660) encouraged his children to learn to draw and copy pictures as well as to understand the art of painting; Richard Waller (FRS, 1681) produced several watercolor illustrations of botanical subjects; and Ralph Thoresby (FRS, 1697) too was a draftsman and amateur painter.66 Nevertheless, practical competence in drawing or painting was not considered a proper qualification for making proper judgments about artistic value. Francis Junius was convinced that “well-willers of art . . . doe very often examine the works of great artificers with better successe then the artists themselves, the severitie and integritie of whose judgements is often weakened by the love of their owne and the dislike of other mens workes.”67 In a similar vein, John Evelyn praised the ancient painters who were “so docile and humble” as to submit willingly to the criticism of scholars and indeed the general public.68 Shaftesbury concluded from the same premises that a gentleman of taste should take care not to consort too closely with “practical and empirical” painters, for in doing so he not only “becomes interested, makes himself a party, [and] espouses a manner,” but “as he is subject to their flattery and emulous of their praise 64 65

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For similar associations see Warnke, The Court Artist, 164. On Peacham’s attempts to promote gentlemanly drawing and incorporate it into the virtuoso ethic, see Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 34–53, 63. On Hollar and Rupert, see Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 158–9; see also Gillian Tindall, The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in Reality and Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002). John Evelyn, Diary, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 1:15–16; 3:271; Evelyn, Sculptura: Or the History and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper (London: J.C., 1662); Kim Sloan, “A Noble Art”: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000); William Petty, The Petty Papers, ed. the Marquis of Lansdowne, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1927), 2:6, 8; Margaret J. M. Ezell, “Richard Waller, S.R.S.: ‘In Pursuit of Nature’,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 38/2 (March 1984), 221–2; Ralph Thoresby, Diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., ed. Joseph Hunter, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), passim. Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, 72–3. John Evelyn, “Preface” to Roland Fr´eart de Chambray, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting: demonstrated from the principles of the art . . . , trans. John Evelyn (London: Henry Herringman, 1668), sig. A3v.

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[he is] brought into society and sympathy with this race, so as to be in a manner one of them, and of their club and fraternity; a circumstance which will prove as little advantageous to his fame and reputation as to his manners, his interest, family and estate.”69 Although Richardson tried to resuscitate the claims of the practicing artist to be a judicious connoisseur, his argument failed to become fully accepted in the wider art world.70 As with so many other aspects of the virtuoso aesthetic, this faith in the judgment of the learned amateur, rather than the skilled practitioner, persisted well into the eighteenth century. It was an ideal advocated by Philip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, in his famous letters to his son and it was the same notion that was excoriated by William Hogarth in his mid-eighteenth-century culture wars with the connoisseurs of foreign old master paintings.71 Hogarth, to be sure, was no virtuoso, but his enemies in the Georgian art world owed much to the virtuosic trends in connoisseurship that had been established amongst the Arundel circle over a century before. Perhaps the greatest tension within the virtuoso discourse of connoisseurship that emerged over the course of the seventeenth century was between the propensity towards an indiscriminate appreciation of all things exotic and rare, often called “wonder” or “curiosity”, and the need to establish a set of standards for artistic excellence, also often called “curiosity”, and a canon of recognized master painters.72 Although the enthusiasm of the virtuosi for all things new, strange and exotic could often appear to be indiscriminate and for that very reason injudicious, there was in fact a method to their madness. Modern understandings of the virtuosi have accepted too readily the persistent criticisms of the virtuosi by wits such as Thomas Shadwell, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and Alexander Pope’s Scriblerian circle.73 These satirists attempted to portray the virtuosi as frivolous philistines and scholarly dabblers who valued rarity for

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Shaftesbury, “Plastics or the original progress and power of designatory art,” in Second Characters, 112–13; see also Edgar Wind, “Shaftesbury as a Patron of Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 2 (1938), 185–8. Richardson, Two Discourses, 2:65–6. Chesterfield, no. 95 (19 April 1749), in The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, ed. John Bradshaw, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1892), 1:203–5; Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830, rev. edn (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 63–6; Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 211–15. The histories of wonder and curiosity are well covered in Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, and Carlo Ginzburg, “The High and the Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in his Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 60–76, 194–7. Even the magisterial account of Houghton, “The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century”, is guilty of this charge.

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rarity’s sake alone.74 Although such critiques hit home at the crucial cultural fault line between classical antiquity and contemporary modernity that perplexed the virtuosi, they should not be accepted without reservation. For virtuosic curiosity did discriminate between things worth knowing and those that were not: it aimed only at those objects of nature or artifice that were instructive in either a moral or a utilitarian sense. It is true that the virtuosi did not erect intellectual barriers between the arts and the sciences, but they did possess a concept of aesthetic value. Why then have historians consistently tended to argue that there was a great discontinuity between seventeenth-century virtuosity and eighteenth-century connoisseurship? Possibly this is because the virtuosi did not always think or behave in ways that one might expect from a connoisseur. Many of the aesthetic concerns and priorities of the English virtuosi were not entirely in line with those of their continental contemporaries and they do not sit easily with current concepts of what constitutes connoisseurship. Despite a continuing lip service to the priority of history painting and the need to understand the ancient and modern masters in that genre, they retained a deep and abiding interest and love for portraiture. They were less concerned with identifying the style, artistic technique or attribution of painting than they were with its inherent quality. Even writers who claimed to espouse those very ideals were unable to reconcile them with the peculiar nature of the English art world. Lacking any major native tradition of great master history painters, but possessing a strong tradition of portraiture, English connoisseurship was all too easily assimilated into a virtuosic and antiquarian discourse of art appreciation that placed a greater emphasis on the subject and “lifelike” qualities of a painting than on its adherence to any putative classical and canonical standards of painted excellence. Much as they wished to live up to the aesthetic ideals of the continental art world, the English virtuosi could not fail but to create one that was peculiarly their own.

ii. no ivory towers: connoisseurship, academies and english society Despite the Italian origins of virtuosity and the continuing reference to Italian models of gentility and connoisseurship amongst the English, their role within the aesthetic world of early modern England soon began to take shape in a peculiar way. The English virtuosi set the agenda for good taste in matters artistic 74

The key texts here are Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso (1676); The Tatler, ed. Richmond Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1:251–5; 3:133, 153–5, 219; and John Arbuthnot and others, The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1741). The best discussion of these satires is Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield.

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without significant competition from other quarters. To a large degree, this was a case of faute de mieux. The practicing artistic community of England was small and deeply influenced by a continuous influx of continental immigrants until well into the eighteenth century.75 Aside from the rather small and weak Painter-Stainers’ Guild, English artists did not have a corporate guild identity through which they might protect their interests.76 Neither did the monarchy offer a substantial source of artistic patronage. After 1649, English court culture was unable to make a Versailles out of Whitehall, and a Royal Academy of Art was not established until 1768.77 The academic tradition on the continent was varied, but it tended to offer an anchor upon which commonly agreed upon standards for artistic excellence could be fixed. The primary purpose of artistic academies such as the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (1648) may have been to offer practical training for practicing or aspirant artists, but connoisseurship was an important by-product. As a result, the discourse of art appreciation articulated by the curieux, the French virtuosi, always had to develop in relation to the standards of taste and practice upheld by the Royal Academy. French virtuosity remained socially and institutionally distinct from French connoisseurship.78 The French academic model set a powerful example for the rest of Europe, but the English art community failed to live up to this model.79 The lack of a 75

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David Ormrod, “Cultural Production and Import Substitution: The Fine and Decorative Arts in London, 1660–1730,” in Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 210–30. David Ormrod, “The Origins of the London Art Market, 1660–1730,” in Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Michael North and David Ormrod (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 170– 73; S. Foister, “Foreigners at Court: Holbein, Van Dyck and the Painter Stainers Company,” in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed. David Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and more generally, W. A. D. Englefield, The History of the Painter-Stainers Company of London (London: Chapman and Dodd Ltd, 1923). Robert Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 228–42; and for the Restoration era, see Alan Marshall, The Age of Faction: Court Politics, 1660–1702 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 64–7. Hence perhaps the absence of any sustained consideration of the Royal Academy in the two volumes of Antoine Schnapper’s magisterial survey of French virtuosity: Collections et Collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe Si`ecle, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1988–94). Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). The academic tradition dominates the history of connoisseurship in France, as in Nathalie Heinich, Du Peintre a` l’Artiste: Artisans et Acad´emiciens a` l’Age Classique ´ (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993), and Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in EighteenthCentury Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 22–7; but it is also crucial for central Europe after the Thirty Years War: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Court, Cloister

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national academy was perhaps one of the greatest hindrances in developing a connoisseurial standard along the lines of the French model of good taste which tended to dominate European aesthetic standards after the mid-seventeenth century. If it lacked a royal academy of art, England did have a Royal Society after 1660, and to a significant degree, it was the virtuosi of the Royal Society who were also the most prolific writers on artistic taste: they were also some of England’s most prominent collectors, patrons and purchasers of art. Perhaps it is an overstatement to call the Royal Society England’s first royal academy of art, but the early fellows of the Royal Society played a crucial role in setting aesthetic standards after the Restoration, and the Society itself included the improvement of the arts within its purview. Henry Oldenburg encouraged further research and support for such “ingenuous arts [as] do furnish employments for the younger descendents of generous families, as limning, painting, sculpture, chalcography, calligraphy, architecture,” and so forth.80 Oldenburg’s aside that such pursuits were best suited for the younger sons of gentry families was a telling comment that made clear the distinction between the true gentleman and his “genteel” associates in the arts while still affirming that such things were worth the support and esteem of the social elite. John Evelyn, one of the founding fathers of the Royal Society, attempted throughout his life to maintain a balance between the advancement of scientific learning through virtuosic curiosity and the elaboration of a discourse of artistic connoisseurship.81 He strove to construct a vocabulary of distinction that both equaled continental standards and was acceptable to the English virtuosi. Although the most ambitious collectors harbored a desire to understand and possess a wide variety of “curiosities,” there remained a wide diversity of expert knowledges they had to master about each type of collectible or object of curiosity. Thus Evelyn devoted much of his time to writing a variety of different works on the arts and sciences, each drawing on a different repository of expertise: Sculptura (1662) on engraving; a Kalendarium Hortense (1664) and the Sylva (1664) as well as the unfinished Elysium Britannicum on the art of gardening; translations of three works by Fr´eart de Chambray: An Idea of the Perfection of Painting (1668), A Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern (1664) and The Whole Body of Antient and Modern Architecture (1680); and finally, the Numismata

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and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 260, 267–8. [Henry Oldenburg], “Introduction to the eleventh year of these tracts,” Philosophical Transactions 10 (1675), 255; cf. the similar pronouncement of Thomas Sprat in History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (1667; rpt St. Louis: Washington University, 1958), 149. Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns, esp. chap. 2.

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(1697), on the appreciation of coins and medals. In all of these works, Evelyn’s prominence as a fellow of the Royal Society was proudly displayed, and he saw no contradiction between the Society’s role as an academy for the advancement of scientific knowledge and its role as a vehicle for the promotion of artistic good taste. Indeed he felt free to offer relations to the Society’s journal, the Philosophical Transactions, on new artistic methods relating to sculpture and painting which he had learned about from his international correspondents.82 Robert Hooke must also loom large in any account of the role of the Royal Society as an academy of art. When Hooke was a boy he observed the painter John Hoskyns at work and took to imitating his artistry. After his father died and left him a legacy of £100, Hooke began an apprenticeship under the painter Peter Lely, but according to John Aubrey, “Hooke quickly perceived what was to be done; so thought he, why cannot I doe by my selfe and keepe my hundred pounds?” He also studied the art of drawing with Samuel Cowper.83 Hooke continued to cultivate the company of painters, collectors and connoisseurs as a part of his wide-ranging social circle as an adult.84 He was an assiduous attendee of the early auctions in Restoration London and his own collection of prints and pictures was not insubstantial.85 Hooke’s reading included works on art and connoisseurship, such as Charles du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica.86 Perhaps his most important contribution to the virtuoso culture of connoisseurship was his attempts to enrich the visual imagination of his peers. Hooke’s interest in the visual representation of the natural world was such as to encourage him to experiment with a variety of means in which one might do so, not least through the microscope which had supplied him with the inspiration for his famous Micrographia (1665). He also introduced his Royal Society fellows to his optical illusionary “contrivance to make the picture of anything appear on a

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John Evelyn, “An advertisement of a way of making more lively counterfaits of nature in wax than are extant in painting; and of a new kind of maps in a low relievo, both practised in France,” Philosophical Transactions 1 (1665–6), 99–100. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. John Buchanan-Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 394–5 (quote at 394). Margaret Espinasse, Robert Hooke (London: Heinemann, 1957), 119; Robert Hooke, The Diary of Robert Hooke, 1672–1680, ed. Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams (London: Taylor & Francis, 1935), 232 (13 May 1676); 240 (4 July 1676); 290 (12 May 1677); 449 (19 July 1680); Robert Hooke, “Diary” (Nov. 1688–10 March 1690; 5 Dec. 1692–8 Aug. 1693), in Early Science in Oxford, ed. R. T. Gunther, vol. 10 (Oxford, 1935), 111 (4 April 1689); 126 (3 June 1689). Hooke, Diary, 229 (29 April 1676); 235 (3 June 1676); Hooke, “Diary”, 97 (11 Feb. 1689); 106 (16 March 1689). Hooke, Diary, 243 (20 July 1676).

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wall, cub-board, or within a picture-frame.”87 Hooke’s fascination with these sorts of techniques for trompe l’oeil representations was indeed a reflection of a Netherlandish obsession with visual detail and the objective representation of reality in art, but it was hardly opposed to the virtuoso aesthetic.88 To the contrary, these techniques were an important, albeit hard to legitimize with reference to the classical aesthetic, element of virtuoso art appreciation until Richardson began to deride such interests in his works as the fancy of only “wretched connoisseurs” and Shaftesbury placed them outside of his canon of polite painting in the early eighteenth century.89 The connoisseurs of the Stuart age were not so dismissive. Trompe l’oeil painting was all the rage at the court of Charles I and the fashion persisted well past the Restoration.90 Some of the best evidence for the virtuosic fascination with optical illusion is found in the diary of Samuel Pepys, another Royal Society fellow. Pepys delighted in sharing the illusionist effect of the paintings of his friend Thomas Povey, although on one occasion he mused that “pictures of perspective; being strange things,” are so apt to “delude one’s eye, that . . . it would make a man doubtful of swearing that ever he saw anything.”91 Pepys was surely not alone in both his wonderment and his epistemic doubt upon viewing such illusionary pictures, and this may account for the ease with which they were banished from the scope of good taste in the eighteenth century.92 Wonder and doubt could find little justification in the increasingly articulate and increasingly classical discourse of connoisseurship that emerged in the age of Richardson and Shaftesbury.93 The seeds for the classical connoisseurship of the Augustan age were, however, sown within the ranks of the Royal Society itself. The Society was big enough to 87 88

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Anon., review of Roland Fr´eart de Chambray, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting, trans. John Evelyn ([London]: H. Herringman, 1668), Philosophical Transactions 3 (1668), 741–3. Cf. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Houghton, “The English Virtuoso,” 205–9; and contrast Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 66–7. Richardson, Two Discourses, 2:35–6; Shaftesbury, Second Characters, 134–8; Shaftesbury, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (New York: Macmillan, 1900), 247. Smuts, Court Culture, 156. Pepys, Diary, 5:276 (quoted) (21 Sept. 1664); cf. 1:257–8 (3 Oct. 1660); and 4:18 (19 Jan. 1663). On Pepys’s artistic interests, see Walter Liedtke, “Pepys and the Pictorial Arts,” Apollo, n.s. 133 (April 1991), 227–37. For similar views, see William Petty to Robert Southwell, 4 May 1686, Pickadilly, in The Petty–Southwell Correspondence, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne (London: Constable, 1928), 192. They were already the subject of much anxiety in baroque thought, as the remarks of Ren´e Descartes on wonder make clear: The Passions of the Soul (1649), ed. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), arts. 74–78, pp. 59–61.

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include the physician and diplomat William Aglionby, a virtuoso who was also the author of Painting Illustrated (1685) and one of the strongest proponents of a French and Italian standard of taste in pictures in Restoration England.94 The Society also admitted into its ranks Robert Spencer, the Earl of Sunderland (FRS, 1661), an enthusiastic Francophile and an avid collector of paintings from France and Italy.95 Another aristocratic fellow who saw no contradiction between his role as patron of the pictorial arts and patron of the natural and mechanical sciences was James Brydges, the Duke of Chandos (FRS, 1694).96 The fellows of the Society discussed the pictorial arts in their meetings, and they also took it upon themselves to review and discuss works on art and painting in their journal, the Philosophical Transactions.97 Here one could also read an account of the proceedings of the French Royal Academy for Painting and Sculpture in Paris. The Royal Society thus served as an important conduit for the transmission of continental, and especially French, standards of artistic good taste into English culture.98 The journal’s review of Evelyn’s translation of Fr´eart de Chambray’s Idea of Perfection in Painting greeted its appearance with fulsome praise that captured beautifully the tensions operating within the visual culture of virtuosity. The work would, the reviewer thought, animate many among us to acquire a perfection in pictures, draughts and chalcography, equal to our growth in all sorts of optical aydes, and to the fulness of our modern discoveries. Painting and sculpture are the politest and noblest of antient arts, true, ingenuous, and claiming the resemblence of life, the emulation of all beauties, the fairest records of all appearances whether celestial or sublunary, whether angelical, divine or humane. And what art can be more helpful or more pleasing to a philosophical traveller, an architect and every ingenious mechanician? All which must be lame without it.99

Here we find a nonchalant juxtaposition of both an illusionary representation of reality and a classical ideal of beauty; an interest in both the natural and the artificial, the ancient and the modern, the polite and the artisanal, all congealed into one that was characteristic of virtuosic attitudes to the fine arts. From its

94 95 96 97 98 99

I am grateful to Carol Gibson-Wood for discussing William Aglionby with me; Aglionby’s virtuosity would repay further study. J. P. Kenyon, Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, 1641–1702 (1958; rpt Aldershot: Gregg Revivals, 1992), 84–5. C. H. Collins Baker and M. I. Baker, The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, First Duke of Chandos, Patron of the Liberal Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949). Pepys, Diary, 7:51 and n. 4 (21 Jan. 1666). Philosophical Transactions 7 (1672), 5048–9; 19 (1695–7), 181–201; 4 (1669), 953–6; 29 (1714– 16), 300–04. Philosophical Transactions 3 (1668), 785.

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inception, the Royal Society tried to maintain a delicate balancing act between all of these interests.100 Of course, the Royal Society was not a proper academy of art. It made no serious effort to promote artistic practice, and the interest of its fellows in connoisseurship was secondary to the Society’s primary focus on the pursuit of natural philosophy, or what we would today call science. Although the aesthetic, the antiquarian and the scientific interests of the virtuosi were often too intertwined for such matters to be fully sorted out in the acts of the Royal Society, there remained a presumption on the part of the Society’s fellows that natural philosophy somehow got to the truth of the world in a way that was both better and more accurate than through artistic representation. Abraham Cowley’s (FRS, 1661) dedicatory poem to the Royal Society that prefaced Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) contrasted the real knowledge brought to light through Baconian science as opposed to the illusions or copies of reality found in the painted images of Rubens or Van Dyck. Natural philosophy, according to Cowley, “has all the beauties Nature can impart / And all the comely dress without the paint of art.”101 Painting as an art form could be construed by some natural philosophers as the visual equivalent of the obscurantist verbal “eloquence” that so disturbed the rhetorical and the epistemological commitments of the early Royal Society fellows.102 The need for an academy of art along the lines of that established by the French monarchy in 1648 was clearly and consistently expressed by English art lovers from the Restoration until their ultimate success in 1768. Despite occasional rumors to the contrary, royal patronage was not forthcoming. Shaftesbury lamented the lack of a royal academy of arts or some similar organization for the promotion of 100 Much the same can be said about the ways in which the fellows of the Society mingled their interests in philological and antiquarian matters with natural philosophy, on which see Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, 19. Foreign observers noted that this was a defect, as in Antoine Franc¸ois Pr´evost, Le Pour et le Contre, ed. Steve Larkin (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993), no. 13 (5 Oct. 1733), p. 180. 101 Cowley, “To the Royal Society”, in Sprat, History, sigs. B2r, B3v (quoted). 102 Sprat, History, 40, 111–13. Historians of science have long been concerned with the rhetorical conventions of the early Royal Society. Some key works include: Peter Dear, “Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 76 (1985), 145–61; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); but above all, Richard Foster Jones, “Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century” and “The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration,” both in his The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951), 75–142.

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artistic good taste in the first decades of the eighteenth century.103 Some private academies claimed to have royal backing, but they were obviously ephemeral operations and, like most such projects, they did not last long.104 Shaftesbury’s support for the establishment of a royal academy in William III’s reign might have had some support at court, for in February 1698 a rumor began to circulate that the king had resolved to finally establish an academy of painting with twelve fellows and an endowment for scholarships to support proper training in the art of painting for the young. This proposal did not become reality, however. It may have been frustrated by the opposition of the court portraitist Godfrey Kneller, whose primary practice would not have found favor within Shaftesbury’s aesthetic. Kneller was an influential figure at William’s court and it seems that the proposal was doomed without his support.105 Hence the gap was filled primarily by private academies, societies and clubs devoted to art appreciation.106 Beginning in the reign of Charles I, private academies for the instruction of English elites in the essentials of the civilized nobility began to flourish under the pressure of demand to keep up with the achievement of aristocrats on the continent. Francis Kinaston’s “Musaeum Minervae” established in Covent Garden in 1636 offered instruction in skills such as navigation, horse riding, fortification and architecture as well as painting.107 The former courtier and art collector cum purchasing agent Sir Balthazar Gerbier set up his own academy soon after the regicide in which the study of fine arts such as “drawing, painting, limning and carving” was on the agenda.108 But it was not until after the Restoration that the rage for instruction in the arts of painting began to take off in earnest. 103 Shaftesbury, Second Characters, 24. 104 Pears, Discovery of Painting, 122. 105 Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1857), 4:343 (12 Feb. 1697–98); Bignamini, “George Vertue, Art Historian and Art Institutions in London, 1689–1768,” 25–7. 106 Bignamini, “George Vertue, Art Historian and Art Institutions in London, 1689–1768,” and “The ‘Academy of Art’ in Britain before the Foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768,” in Anton W. A. Bochco and others, eds., Academies of Art between Renaissance and Romanticism, Leeds Kunsthistorisch Jaarboeck 5–6 (1986–7) (The Hague: SDU Uitgeverij, 1989), 440–42; Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 11, 63, 442. 107 [Francis Kinaston], Constitutions of the Musaeum Minervae (London: Thomas Spencer, 1636), sigs. ¶2v and A2r; see also Caudill, “Some Literary Evidence of the Development of English Virtuoso Interests in the Seventeenth Century,” 286–93. 108 Balthazar Gerbier, The Interpreter of the Academie for Forrain Languages, and all Noble Sciences, and Exercises (London [Paris?], 1648) (Thomason Tracts; 119:E.783[3], 119:E.783[4]), 3–4; see also Pevsner, Academies of Art, 124; Caudill, “Some Literary Evidence of the Development of English Virtuoso Interests in the Seventeenth Century,” 293–305.

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The foundation of the Society of the Virtuosi of St. Luke in London in 1698 marked the establishment of the first private society in England devoted entirely to the connoisseurship of the fine arts. Sometimes known as the “Rose and Crown Club,” presumably after the Rose Tavern where its meetings were first held, the Society of the Virtuosi may have been formed as a second best option after the proposal for a royal academy failed. As befits a society dedicated to the promotion of classical standards in the arts, it claimed a much older heritage. Just as the literary clubs of Augustan London sought to associate themselves with Ben Jonson and the leges conviviales of his Apollo Club, so the Society also traced its origins back to the supposed informal gatherings of art lovers organized by Anthony Van Dyck in early Stuart London.109 The Society was by no means comprised of artists alone: art dealers and printsellers, a goldsmith, a banker and a mathematical instrument maker were among the members. The original members of the Society did include a number of important artists of early eighteenth-century England, including Grinling Gibbons, John Closterman, Henry Cook, Michael Dahl, and Christopher Wren. Gibbons and Wren were rather older than the rest, while Closterman was closely associated with Shaftesbury’s new virtuoso circle.110 The point of the Society was not to promote artistic practice, however: its purpose was to bring together like-minded virtuosi, some of whom were artists but many of whom were not, to partake in a common discourse of artistic appreciation and criticism. The Society also took a regular collection in order to purchase works of art for the group. The pictures were not held by the Society, but rather were given to one of its members in an annual lottery.111 Although the Earl of Shaftesbury was not a member—perhaps due to his reluctance to consort with practicing artists—nevertheless the Society’s aims were well in line with his plans for the promotion of the fine arts within Britain. The Society then was a crucial bridge between the old virtuosity of the later Stuarts and the new artistic culture of the Williamite regime. The Society’s influence on connoisseurship in the eighteenth century was substantial. It continued meeting until 1743 and its future ranks included the painter James Thornhill, also the father-in-law of William Hogarth,

109 On the Jonsonian heritage, see Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), no. 9 (10 March 1711), 1:43; no. 72 (23 May 1711), 1:310; The Censor, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (London: Jonas Brown, 1717), 1:3 (15 April 1715). On Van Dyck and the Society of Virtuosi, see BL, Add. MS 39167, fo. 74r; George Vertue, Vertue Notebooks, Walpole Society, 5 vols., nos. 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930–47), 3:120, 140. 110 Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar, English Art, 1625–1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 189–90; Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, IN: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 107, 170–71. 111 BL, Add. MS 39167, fo. 78r.

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and George Vertue, whose notes provided Horace Walpole with much of the data for his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–80).112 Conspicuously absent from the ranks of the Society of the Virtuosi of St. Luke was Godfrey Kneller. As the Principal Painter at the royal court, Kneller’s participation in an artistic society offered a significant degree of cultural cachet to any such gathering. Kneller served as the chief portrait painter for the Kit Kat Club, an organization devoted to artistic and literary patronage as well as the promotion of Whig politics.113 Kneller also presided over feasts on St. Luke’s Day (October 11) in honor of the painter’s art hosted by the Painter Stainers’ Company in the company of other peers and gentry, along with fellow artists such as John Closterman.114 Kneller founded his own academy in London on Great Queen Street in 1711. Here the English “superiority . . . in the art of portrait or face-painting” was unabashedly celebrated and encouraged, and it attracted the “most eminent painters in London” as well as a number of aspiring young artists, including George Vertue. There was some overlap in membership between the Society of the Virtuosi and Kneller’s academy—Michael Dahl frequented both groups—but Kneller took up the cause of practical artistic education in his academy while the Virtuosi were content to remain devoted to the promotion of connoisseurship and art patronage.115 One notices a rift emerging in the early eighteenth century as the associational culture in the English art world became richer than it had been previously. Clubs like the Society of Virtuosi, the Whig Kit Kats, or the Tory Brother’s Club remained closer to Shaftesbury’s ideal of connoisseurship by remaining aloof from actual artistic practice, while Kneller’s academy, as well as those run by others such as Louis Ch´eron, John Vanderbanck, and James Thornhill, went about teaching the practical art of painting.116 The practical academies left native English portraiture at the center of English art in a way that did not sit well with those devoted to Shaftesbury’s insistence on the primacy of history painting on a continental model. This was the art world into which the young William Hogarth

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BL, Add. MS 39167, fo. 75v. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 40–43; David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 1. On the interrelationship between the Kit Kats and government places, see Catherine Howells, “The Kit-Cat Club: A Study of Patronage and Influence in Britain, 1696–1720” (PhD diss., UCLA, 1982). 114 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS L.c. 2941 (18 Oct. 1705). 115 Spectator, no. 555 (6 Dec. 1712), 4:495 (quoted); Vertue, Notebooks, 1:2. 116 On the Brother’s Club’s connoisseurial pretensions, see BL, Add. MS 4299, fo. 125r; for a less exalted view, see Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 1:294; on the successors to Kneller’s academy, see Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997), 66–8.

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entered as he began his artistic career, and the division between art lovers and practicing artists he found here set the stage for the monumental struggles the older Hogarth would wage against the connoisseurs and academic dictators of artistic good taste. Without a formal royal academy, however, all of these early eighteenth-century artistic support groups took on the appearance of an informal gentleman’s club more so than the strictly organized Royal Society.117 Societies like the Kit Kat and the Virtuosi of St. Luke met in taverns and the rituals of feasting and toasting were as important to their being as was the encouragement of connoisseurship. In this respect, then, the early artistic clubs and societies that preceded the Royal Academy could not help but participate in the wider world of English commercial society. The virtuosi were no less susceptible than anyone else in early modern society to the pressures and influences of commercialized social relations.118 The virtuosi, like many of their peers among the English elite, could not resist the pull of London as a center for conspicuous connoisseurship.119 Although the town houses of the West End in particular could serve as a sort of aristocratic refuge in a metropolitan context, for the most part the London virtuosi were forced to hone their connoisseurial talents at the auctions and in the coffeehouses rather than in the courts, academies, and salons that dominated the art worlds of the continent (see Figure 1).120 This peculiar combination of aspirations to a continental aesthetic in the context of a commercial society and a relatively open aristocracy provided the context in which English art connoisseurship emerged over the course of the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century.121

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One should not push the contrast too far, however, for the Royal Society displayed many of the characteristics of a gentleman’s club: Quentin Skinner, “Thomas Hobbes and the Nature of the Early Royal Society,” Historical Journal 12 (1969), 217–39; cf. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 118 Brian Cowan, “The Social Life of Coffee: Commercial Culture and Metropolitan Society in Early Modern England, 1600–1720” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2000), esp. chaps. 3 and 4. 119 F. J. Fisher, “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in his London and the English Economy, 1500–1700 (London: Hambledon, 1990), 105–18. 120 Brian Cowan, “Arenas of Connoisseurship: Auctioning Art in Later Stuart London,” in Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Michael North and David Ormrod (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 153–66; cf. also Mark Girouard, “Coffee at Slaughter’s: English Art and the Rococo,” in his Town and Country (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 15–34. 121 The obvious allusion here is to E. P. Thompson’s still trenchant observations on the nature of long-term trends in English state and society: “The Peculiarities of the English,” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 245–301.

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Figure 1. Coffeehouse connoisseurship. Note the figures discussing the pictures on the wall by candlelight. The pictures include a landscape, a portrait (perhaps William III), and a genre piece. British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, body color (Anon., English, c.1705) [1931-6-13-2].

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iii. conclusion It is easy to overstate the arguments suggested here. One can exaggerate the peculiarities of English connoisseurship from its continental neighbors. There were significant correspondences between Dutch and English curiosity, for example. As in England, the Dutch merchant community maintained an important link to its virtuoso community, and in both cases there was less fear of aristocratic d´erogance to hinder these connections than was the case elsewhere in Europe.122 Furthermore, in both Britain and the Netherlands there had developed a tradition of the mercator sapiens, the learned merchant, and mercantile knowledge was solicited, accepted, and evaluated by both Dutch and English virtuosi as potentially useful for the advancement of learning.123 But Britain, unlike the Netherlands, was a net importer of artistic talent until well into the eighteenth century, and although this situation hindered the development of a “British school” of art, it did leave connoisseurs there with a greater freedom to choose between various models of artistic excellence from ancient Greece and Rome to modern Italy, France or, less often, the Netherlands. Even in France, the aesthetic hegemony of the Royal Academy was by no means absolute. The courtly model of connoisseurship established by the Academy was always prone to potential challenge from the independent aristocratic salons, or, indeed, from the commercial culture of the Parisian art market itself.124 Popular demand for portraits, genre paintings and landscapes remained strong even in the heartland of academic power and French collectors also remained deeply

122 Cf. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 147–9; Richard Grassby, “Social Status and Commercial Enterprise under Louis XIV,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 13 (1960), 19–38; and Daniel Roche, “N´egoce et culture dans la France du XVIIIe Si`ecle,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 25 (July–Sept. 1978), 375–95. 123 On merchant connections with Dutch virtuosity, see Leo Noordegraaf and Thera Wijsenbeek-Olthuis, “De wereld onsloten: aanvoer van rariteiten naar Nederland,” in De wereld binnen handbereik: Nederlandse kunst- en rariteitenverzamelingen, 1585–1735 (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1992), 39–50. See also Karel Davids, “Amsterdam as a Centre of Dutch Learning in the Dutch Golden Age,” in Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe, ed. Patrick O’Brien, Marjolein ‘t Hart, Derek Keene, and Herman van der Wee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 305–23. For England, useful information can be gleaned from Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 350–60. 124 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Neil De Marchi and Hans J. van Miegroet, ´ “Rules versus Play in Early Modern Art Markets,” in Recherches Economiques de Louvain, ed. Victor Ginsburgh, 66 (2000), 145–65.

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influenced by their own virtuosi, the curieux.125 Absolutism in matters of good taste, as in matters of governance, always worked better in theory than in practice. It is just as easy to overstate the case for continuity between seventeenthcentury virtuosity and eighteenth-century connoisseurship, and I do not wish to replace a simple theory of change with an equally simple theory of stasis. The eighteenth-century art world and its markets were more densely populated than their predecessors. The aesthetic language was richer, the money circulated faster and in greater quantities, and the public interest in painting was wider in the world of Hogarth than it had been in the age of Evelyn, let alone Arundel. The eighteenth-century elite discourse on taste developed in response to the emergence of a commercialized “middle-brow” art market that just did not exist in the early seventeenth century.126 Just as importantly, the intellectual reception of art works did change substantially as Stuart England became Hanoverian Britain. The early eighteenthcentury proponents of “politeness”, especially the essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, as well as the third Earl of Shaftesbury, satirized and castigated the virtuosi of their day, even as they sought to reshape the aesthetic values and the collecting practices of those same virtuosi. Shaftesbury was particularly caught between deriding the virtuosi of his day as “inferior” and seeking to reclaim the word as a synonym for the “man of taste” and a lover of the arts, or in Richardsonian terms, a connoisseur.127 Addison and Steele were more straightforward in deriding the virtuosi, but they did so only by caricaturing them and reducing their interests to the natural sciences. In the meantime, they began to reconstruct their own vision of the “man of taste” in more resolutely neo-classical terms.128 The early eighteenth-century discourse of politeness ripped open a division between ancient connoisseurship and modern pedantry that had been tenuously held together in the previous century by the virtuosi. Nevertheless, the considerable overlap between virtuosity and connoisseurship that I have argued for here should force us to rethink some of the common

125 Pierre Goubert and Daniel Roche, Les Fran¸cais et l’Ancien R´egime 2: Culture et Soci´et´e, 3rd edn (Paris: Armand Colin, 2000), 269–79; Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, Amateurs et Curieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1987); Schnapper, Collections et Collectionneurs. 126 Cf. Carol Gibson-Wood, “Picture Consumption in London at the End of the Seventeenth Century,” Art Bulletin 84/3 (Sept. 2002), 491–500, and R. Malcolm Smuts, “Art and the Material Culture of Majesty in Early Stuart England,” in The Stuart Court and Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 86–112. 127 Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), ed. Lawrence Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 62–3, 148–50, 405–8, quote at 405. 128 Cf. Steele’s satire of natural science collecting in The Tatler, 1:251–5; 3:133, 153–5, 219 with Addison’s man of taste in The Spectator, 3:527–31. The Spectatorial engagement with virtuoso culture is a topic worthy of study in its own right.

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categories and periodizations built into the history of the reception of art in early modern England. If there was no transformation of an indiscriminate virtuoso appreciation of art for curiosity’s sake into a discerning, classically orientated connoisseurship in the early years of the eighteenth century, then what do we make of the works and writings of Jonathan Richardson and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, which have garnered so much attention from historians of eighteenth-century connoisseurship?129 Did they mark the aesthetic sea change that one seems to detect from these accounts?130 Few would want to deny the importance of the Augustan era as a transformative moment in English visual culture: by the first few decades of the early eighteenth century, it was clear that the old tensions within virtuoso culture could hold no longer. The Royal Society could no longer function as an omnibus academy for natural sciences as well as the fine arts. There were now newer, different institutions, societies and academies for artistic practice as opposed to art appreciation. The Shaftesburian and Richardsonian men of taste could define their aesthetic interests as increasingly distinct from virtuosic pedantry, and they did so in terms that were much more closely in line with the prevailing continental standards of artistic value. The cultural fault-lines between antique and modern taste were more clearly defined, the former being the exalted province of the tasteful connoisseur, while the latter was looked down on as the foolish preserve of the now-denigrated virtuoso. By 1749, the Earl of Chesterfield could advise his son not to push his interest in the arts too far, for “beyond certain bounds,” he warned, “the man of taste ends, and the frivolous virtuoso begins.”131 The pejorative use of the term ‘virtuoso’ resonated strongly when contrasted with newer concepts of taste and connoisseurship in the eighteenth century, but it depended upon a redefinition of virtuosity as a code for the frivolous and pointless pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, a view which was crucial in shaping the views of Houghton on seventeenth-century virtuoso culture. Yet it may be worth considering the ways in which the positive influence of virtuosity on English attitudes towards the arts persisted. Arthur Pond (FRS, 1752), a prominent mid-eighteenth-century painter and art dealer, offers an instructive 129 The pathbreaking nature of Richardson’s connoisseurship is emphasized most strongly in Gibson-Wood, “Jonathan Richardson and the Rationalization of Connoisseurship”, and in her Jonathan Richardson, 13–14; on the importance of the early eighteenth century more generally, see Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting; Solkin, Painting for Money, and esp. Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts”. 130 See, for example, the conclusion that connoisseurship displaced curiosity in Arthur MacGregor, “The Cabinet of Curiosities in Seventeenth-Century Britain,” in The Origins of Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 213; and Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 256. 131 Chesterfield, 27 Sept. 1749, no. 110, in Letters, 1:251.

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example of the endurance of virtuoso culture into the mid-Georgian golden age of the culture of politeness. Pond was a fellow of the Royal Society as well as of the Society of Antiquaries. His own collection included the old master paintings valued so highly by the polite men of taste, but also the natural curiosities esteemed by the virtuosi.132 The virtuoso did not die at the close of the seventeenth century and his influence did not wane in the Georgian age. Neither did virtuosic connoisseurship evolve into an anodyne and respectable aspect of a broader culture of politeness. It remained controversial: the expansive interests of latterday virtuosi such as Horace Walpole and William Beckford continued to draw the ire of critics like Thomas Babington Macaulay and William Hazlitt.133 Perhaps what we see happening in the early eighteenth century is the emergence of yet another new round in a continuing debate over what should constitute the essence of a real connoisseur and who should be qualified to pronounce upon what is, and what is not, good art. It has been a never-ending debate.

132 Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); for a wider-ranging study of eighteenth-century virtuosity, see Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 133 Macaulay, “Horace Walpole,” in Critical Essays by Thomas Babington Macaulay, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1908), 1:331–65; William Hazlitt, Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1824), 134–6, 139. Walpole is presented as a virtuoso collector in Morris Brownell, The Prime Minister of Taste: A Portrait of Horace Walpole (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), as is Beckford in Bet McLeod, “A Celebrated Collector,” in William Beckford, 1760–1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, ed. Derek E. Ostergard (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 155–75.

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DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000125 Printed in the United Kingdom

beyond hegel’s end of art: schadow’s mignon and the religious project of late romanticism cordula grewe Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

This article explores the cultural controversy about the relationship between painting and poetry sparked by Wilhelm von Schadow’s 1828 rendering of Mignon, a famous literary heroine in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Following closely a position introduced by Lessing and endorsed by Goethe, and using it to advance his general thesis about the end of art, Hegel argued that Schadow’s image transgressed the proper borders of its medium by attempting to translate the poetic into the visual. Schadow, by contrast, insisted on the crucial regenerative role of art in society and art’s religious mission, thereby giving an emphatically Christian tenor to the Romantic injunction to strive after the infinite. Animated by these convictions, Schadow turned Goethe’s heroine into an allegory of Romantic art, thus “Christianizing” Goethe’s neoclassical sensibility. The controversy provoked by Schadow’s Mignon provides an opportunity to explore late Romantic aesthetics and the cultural and political meaning of art within the context of the Prussian Restoration, as well as to reconsider the relationship between this putatively conservative sensibility and “modernism.”

In 1828, Mignon made a sensational, though belated, entry at the biannual exhibition of the Berlin Academy of Art, where the painting, as one Carl Seidel assured the readers of the Berliner Kunst-Blatt, “was awaited with extraordinary longing by the whole of the art-loving community.”1 A depiction of the main heroine of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, first published thirty years earlier,2 the painting showed a dark-haired, pale young woman lost in thought, a fragile apparition who tenderly holds a Renaissance guitar, her delicate, 1

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Carl Seidel, “Ueber W. Schadow’s Mignon, und u¨ ber einige andere nachtr¨aglich eingesandte Kunstwerke der diesj¨ahrigen hiesigen Ausstellung,” Berliner Kunst-Blatt 1/10 (Oct. 1828), 279. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Eric A. Blackall (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1989), 315. Further quotation in the text is from this edition.

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Figure 1. Wilhelm Schadow: Mignon, 1828. Oil/Canvas. 119 × 92 cm. Museum der bildenden K¨unste, Leipzig/Maximilian Speck von Sternburg Stiftung.

elongated fingers hovering over the strings in suspended motion (Figures 1 and 2). Dressed as an angel, the figure seems more suspended from the prominent golden wings attached to her costume than supporting them. Against the palpability of the lifelike feathers, Mignon’s own body appears ethereal, almost absent, an insubstantial form circumscribed by the flowing white garb that shrouds it. Fresh from the studio of Wilhelm Schadow (1788–1862), this melancholic

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Figure 2. Copy after Wilhelm Schadow: Mignon, c.1828. Oil/Canvas. 39 × 25 cm. SPSG Berlin-Brandenburg (Schinkel-Pavillon).

depiction of Goethe’s famous literary character unleashed a heated debate about the relationship between painting and poetry. For Schadow’s contemporaries, the extreme positions on this question were represented on the one hand by Horace’s maxim ut pictura poesis—“as is painting so is poetry”—and on the other by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s anti-Horatian insistence on medium specificity, powerfully articulated in his 1766 Laoco¨on: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.3 While apologists of Horace’s

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laoco¨on: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans., with an Introduction and Notes, by Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984; 1st edn 1962). Two classical studies of this debate are

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saying proposed an extended analogy, if not an identification, between the two media, defining painting as mute poetry and poetry as a speaking picture, Lessing attacked this position for ignoring the principal difference between poetry as a temporal art and painting as a spatial art. Following Lessing, most critics held the figure of Mignon to be an unsuitable subject for the fine arts. No less a luminary than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel objected in this sense to the concept of Schadow’s painting. For him, the genuinely poetic, multifaceted character of Mignon “may well be posed to our imagination, but painting cannot do what Schadow intended, namely display it simply by Mignon’s figure and expression without any definiteness of situation and action.”4 The wide-ranging attention lavished on Schadow’s Mignon clearly testified to the prominent position that its maker, son of the famous neoclassicist sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, occupied in the German art scene.5 It likewise reflected the cult status of the character’s original creator, 79-year-old “Olympian” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose Wilhelm Meister still enjoyed great fame and influence among the younger generation of writers. Yet the sheer prominence of the artist and author involved hardly suffices to explain the keen critical attention paid to the image. Rather, the controversy really centered on Schadow’s visual depiction of a literary character. However, we would miss the meaning of this debate if we followed the tendency of art history scholarship to treat the question of media specificity solely in terms of the intrinsic properties of the media themselves.6 Even though questions of art’s representational potential were vital issues within early nineteenthcentury aesthetic discourse, the explosive nature of Schadow’s Mignon grew out of the larger political implications underlying these debates. In particular, Schadow’s emphatic affirmation of Romantic theories of art was closely linked to contemporary politics of religion, and thus touched upon a burning topic that

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Rensselaer W. Lee, “Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” Art Bulletin 22/1 (March 1940), 197–269, and Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Parts 1 and 2, Journal of the History of Ideas 12/4 (Oct. 1951), 496–527, and 13/1 (Jan. 1952), 17–46. On the influence of Lessing’s Laoco¨on, cf. Gottfried Willems, Anschaulichkeit: Zu Theorie und Geschichte der Wort-Bild-Beziehungen und des literarischen Darstellungsstil (T¨ubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; 1st edn 1975), 857. Cf. Cordula Grewe, “Wilhelm von Schadow (1788–1862),” in Lexikon der D¨usseldorfer Malerschule, 1819–1918, vol. 3 (Munich: Bruckmann KG, 1998), 180–85 (cf. for further literature). E.g. Jochen H¨orisch, “Ut poesis pictura: Korrespondenzen zwischen der D¨usseldorfer Malerschule und der romantischen Dichtung,” in Die D¨usseldorfer Malerschule, exhibition catalogue, ed. Wend von Kalnein (Mainz: Zabern, 1979), 41–7.

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possessed the highest socio-cultural significance in nineteenth-century Prussia. Yet modern scholarship has failed to pursue this avenue of critical inquiry, not least because of the spell of Lessing’s semiotics. This spell gained further strength through the modern paradigm of secularization, or, as Max Weber has called it, the “disenchantment of the world”, which came to dominate twentiethcentury (art) historical scholarship. Most scholars have dismissed the expression of religious belief in the work of Schadow and his pupils as anachronistic, identifying modernity instead exclusively with secularization and secularization with the bourgeois project.7 Yet, as the debates around the images of Mignon prove, questions of religion and confessional identity remained a significant factor in nineteenth-century aesthetics and art theory. This essay aims to recover the potent frame surrounding the making and criticism of these images, and to lay bare the theoretical skeleton behind Mignon’s missing smile. In my eyes, the smooth surface of her representation and the gentleness of the motif thinly veil a fervent and provocative counter-attack against Goethe’s neoclassicist paradigm as much as against Hegel’s notion of the end of art. Appropriating Mignon, Schadow created an allegory of art that avowed painting’s speculative power as an organon—or at least an analogon—of higher knowledge, the epitome of which, for him, was theology. Simultaneously, the allegory maintained the supreme role of Christianity for human creation. From behind the soft sadness of Mignon’s enigmatic figure, an explosive politics of religious representation shines through. Before we can examine Schadow’s image itself, we need to look back to the textual roots from which all of Romantic art sprang, namely to the theological, literary and philosophical debates of the late eighteenth century. To begin our archaeological work, let us turn to the year 1795, the year Goethe first published Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Centering on the formative emotional experiences of its young hero, the novel opens with Wilhelm detaching himself from the safety but narrowness of his bourgeois home in order to join the realm of the theater. Here he hopes to see the world and to find the path to his true self. In contrast to his expectations, however, Wilhelm undergoes a series of initially promising but ultimately disappointing encounters with the illusory world of acting and actors. Equally unsatisfying, but crucial to his further development, are the love affairs which our apprentice entertains on his path. Finally, Wilhelm becomes acquainted with the enlightened, although not fully transparent, Turmgesellschaft, the secret society of the tower. In this circle he finds

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E.g. Wolfgang H¨utt and Joachim Grossmann; for further discussion and literature, see Cordula Grewe, “Historie ohne Handlung: Zur Transzendierung von Zeitlichkeit und Geschichte,” in Kunst/Geschichte: Zwischen historischer Reflexion und a¨ sthetischer Distanz, ed. G¨otz Pochat and Brigitte Hagenlocher-Wagner (Graz: Akademische Drucku. Verlagsanstalt, 2000), 61–78, and Grewe, “Wilhelm von Schadow”.

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the woman with whom he will share his life, the enlightened Natalie. Marked by an apparent disunity and a meandering plotline, which abounds in coincidences and incursions of the rationally improbable or unacceptable, the novel combines the general theme of Bildung (self-cultivation), the rejection of illusions about what we are or should be, and a discourse on the nature of art. Despite the trope of irony as a constitutive element of the novel, as well as the cool detachment with which Goethe describes his hero, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is held to be an outstanding example of the classic German Bildungsroman, or novel of personal development.8 More than any other character in the novel, it was the mysterious figure of Mignon that captured the audience’s imagination. Wilhelm encounters her early on in the novel, an androgynous being, a boy-like girl-child, who becomes his faithful companion until he enters the enlightened but cold world of the Turmgesellschaft. Mignon, existing mainly in the realm of art, artificiality, and Schein, cannot survive in this world of Bildung and bourgeois socialization marked by clearly defined gender roles and a rigid binary social and philosophical structure.9 Significantly, Mignon’s death follows a process of transformation that strips her of her androgynous character and turns her into a young maiden. Wilhelm Meister spoke so powerfully to the younger, Romantic, generation that Friedrich Schlegel even counted the novel among “the greatest tendencies of the age,” the other two being the French Revolution and Fichte’s philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre).10 Yet despite this enthusiastic reaction, the Romantics did not embrace Goethe’s book without qualifications. While certain aspects of Wilhelm Meister corresponded intimately with a Romantic sensibility—especially its fragmentary, arabesque form of story-telling, its symbolic richness and its affirmation of the aestheticization of life—other elements clearly resisted or even assaulted Romantic poetic theory. The veil concealing the gap between the older poet and his young admirers was torn away by the Romantic reading of Mignon, a reading that would be at the core of Schadow’s reworking of the figure. The reading of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as the Bildungsroman par excellence quickly became the starting point for an interpretive tradition that

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Goethes Wilhelm Meister: Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Lehr- und Wanderjahre, ed. Klaus Gille (K¨onigstein/Ts.: Athen¨aum, 1979), vii–xiii, 151–2. Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit, KS: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 107–24. Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 251, fragment no. 216. Cf. further Clemens Hesselhaus, “Die Wilhelm-Meister-Kritik der Romantiker und die romantische Romantheorie,” in Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. Hans Robert Jauss (M¨unchen: W. Fink, 1969), 113–27.

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treated Mignon, as well as the other characters, as Bildungsfaktoren (pedagogical instruments) in the hero’s personal and emotional development.11 Yet Romantic interpretations, as advanced by Novalis or Friedrich Schlegel, opposed this approach. Instead, they understood the novel in allegorical terms, viewing Mignon as a hieroglyph for the Romantic poetic itself and, in this capacity, as the representation of the realm of the aesthetic in general. A tradition arose that considered the novel itself to represent the triumph of prosaic bourgeois values over the Romantic longing for an enchanted world. Mignon’s vanishing began to symbolize the death of Romantic poetry itself. Consequently, Mignon’s death elicited harsh criticism from those who upheld Romantic values. Outraged, Novalis in 1802 accused Goethe of “artistic atheism.” “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, or the pilgrimage to the patent of nobility,” he exclaimed angrily, and declared the novel a basically unfortunate and foolish book, in the highest degree unpoetic in its spirit, “no matter how poetic the presentation is.”12 “Spirit” here meant for Novalis poesy and religion, both of which he saw Goethe satirizing. His criticism points to the unbridgeable gap that separated Goethe, despite poetic similarities, from the Romantics, a gap that would deepen in the decades to come: namely, their respective stances on Christianity. In his fifth lecture on German science and literature, Adam M¨uller underlined Novalis’s reproach. “The single objection,” M¨uller emphasized, “that can be raised against Goethe: The omnipresence of Christianity in history and all forms of poesy and philosophy remains concealed even to Goethe.” This failure is Goethe’s Achilles’ heel. “In the presence of the most sacred alone can one modestly confront [Goethe], to whom one would devoutly subordinate oneself in all other circumstances, and imbue [Goethe’s] own meaningful works with the holy sense that he himself clearly disavows.”13 Goethe neither forgave nor forgot M¨uller’s allusion to his lack of faith, and included him in his attacks on Romanticism’s Catholicizing tendencies, calling the writer a “quite fine, but falsely developed talent.”14 In the end, he declared that this wrong turn led to decay and even sickness. In a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann on April 2, 1829, Goethe famously proclaimed: “I call the classic healthy, the romantic sickly,” shifting the definition from outer form to an inner state or condition. “In this sense, the Nibelungenlied is as classic as the Iliad, for both are vigorous and healthy. Most modern productions are romantic—not

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Julia K¨onig, Das Leben im Kunstwerk: Studien zu Goethes Mignon und ihrer Rezeption (Frankfurt et al.: P. Lang, 1991), 1. Quotes from Novalis’s publications and notes between 1798 and 1802, reprinted in Goethes Wilhelm Meister, ed. Gille, 55–60. Novalis and M¨uller, quoted in ibid., 60, 78 (emphasis in original). Goethe to Zelter, Oct. 20, 1831, quoted in ibid., 74.

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because they are new; but because they are weak, morbid, sickly. And the antique is classic—not because it is old; but because it is strong, fresh, joyous, and healthy.”15 With this emphatically normative approach, Goethe torpedoed the Romantic evaluation of art, which judged the vitality of an artwork by its Christian spirituality rather than its formal perfection. Yet as much as Goethe tried to contain the Romantic disease, he could not prevent it from spreading to the arts. Instead, when the generation born in the years of the French Revolution entered the academies, many felt drawn to the “mock-medieval, catholic-christianising taste” which Goethe’s secretary, Heinrich Meyer, had branded so disgusting in Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck.16 Schadow, too, was attracted to this new taste, which seemed to answer to his burning desire for a regeneration of art. Certainly, Goethe shared this concern. Yet while the poet anticipated a revitalization of art from within art, the painter believed that it would be possible only through an all-encompassing revival of religiosity and the Christian faith, and grounding in history. To Schadow, the rebirth not only of art but of society itself seemed at stake. Convinced that he lived in a time of decay and decadence, the painter found little guidance in academic rules of beauty and neoclassicist norms of artistic production, which seemed but empty shells, iridescent and tantalizing but without spiritual substance. In 1810, dissatisfied by the teaching of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, Schadow left the Prussian capital for Rome. Yet his destination was not Goethe’s Rome, the city of antiquity, but the Eternal City, the heart of Christianity. No sooner had he arrived, in January of 1811, than he met a group of fellow expatriates who shared his yearning for a rebirth of the aesthetic based on the reenchantment of form. Like Schadow, these young men had felt deeply disgruntled by the spirit of the modern academy. In 1809, their discontent led them to found a secessionist association dedicated to the patron saint of painters, St. Luke, and to leave the Viennese academy for Italy where they hoped to find a nourishing soil for their program of religious revivalist art.17 Led by Franz Pforr (1788–1812) and Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869), the Lukasbr¨uder, as they called themselves, developed a new aesthetic paradigm, a model based no longer on the emulation of antiquity but on that of the old masters. In the “primitivism” of medieval art, above all in Raphael and Albrecht D¨urer, the Lukasbr¨uder found

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 1823–1832, trans. John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 248. English quoted in Keith Andrews, The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1964), 41. A classic study in English is Andrews, The Nazarenes. For newer literature, see Mitchell Benjamin Frank, German Romantic Painting Redefined: Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001).

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the pious purity they were looking for. Their medievalism entailed a dramatic redefinition of the beautiful: not artistic merit but spiritual content was the foremost criterion for an artwork’s value, and thus the young artists hailed the truth, purity, childlike simplicity, and genuine character of the medieval masters, which Friedrich Schlegel had so vividly extolled in his Descriptions of Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands in the Years 1802–1804.18 In the early Roman years, the artists adopted a distinctive habit as an outward sign of their shared artistic program: dressed in the German cloak and wearing their hair long, parted in the middle, they quickly became the target for mockery, becoming known as I Nazareni, the Nazarenes. This nickname stuck when the movement began to gain momentum beyond the confines of the Brotherhood and spread throughout Europe, becoming what Heinrich Heine called Nazarenism. The encounter with the Brotherhood proved momentous for Schadow’s further development. After his arrival in Rome, he had first fallen into an artistic, mental, and spiritual crisis, from which he found an escape in the Brotherhood’s program of art as the handmaiden of religion. This did not mean that Schadow would not search for his own indigenous style. Indeed, he developed a stylistic idiom that balanced Overbeck’s radical idealism with naturalism, that is, the delineation of essential form through line with the corporeal sensuality of color. In particular, Schadow advocated fusing the ideal form derived from the old masters with the observed physiognomy of portraiture. Yet, despite these deviations from Overbeck’s radical idealism, he fully subscribed to the Brotherhood’s ideal of a particular “Christian beauty,” a beauty embedded in expressive form rather than technical perfection. Two years after his arrival, in 1813, Schadow officially joined the Brotherhood of St. Luke, taking the union’s oath to practice art as a permanent striving for Truth, a truth to be found in God. Under the influence of Overbeck, this search led Schadow to convert from Protestantism to Catholicism in the following year. Schadow’s own letters leave no doubt about the profundity of his decision, a decision which had far-reaching consequences in a climate where confessional identity still carried deep social and political implications. Indeed, the frequent occurrence of conversion among the Lukasbr¨uder drew much attention and criticism. In his attack on the Romantic School Heinrich Heine made Catholicism, with its damnation of the flesh, responsible for the impoverished nature of Romantic art, this “melancholy passion-flower of Germany” which surrendered freedom to the “old prison-house of the soul.”19 Yet, ignoring the explosive 18 19

The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel, trans. Ellen J. Millington (London: H. G. Bohn, 1849), 1–148. Heinrich Heine, “The Romantic School (1836),” in John Burt Halsted, Romanticism (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 60–71.

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nature of Schadow’s conversion, critics and scholars have interpreted his decision again and again as mere “faddishness,” as one more example of the Romantic notion of Kunstreligion, of art as religion.20 Schadow, however, was himself always outspoken against an aesthetic conception of religion, which he associated with early Romanticism. Indeed, in his 1854 novel The Modern Vasari, he accused early Romanticism of having perceived only Christianity’s beauty but not its eternal truth and redemptive power. The early Romantics, he charged, had thus used the Christian revelation merely as a treasure trove of forgotten ideas and sensations, the same way as “their predecessors [had used] the ancient myths.”21 Schadow’s position marks a crucial difference between early Romanticism and its later articulations, namely the fundamental shift from a radically subjective, even antinomian religiosity associated with Kunstreligion to a more orthodox, theistic understanding of Christianity that emphasized the historical and institutional framework of religion. The development of Friedrich Schlegel’s thought dramatically expressed this shift.22 In his early years, as a central member of the Jena circle, Schlegel exemplified the hopeful belief in a synthesis of man and nature, of finite and cosmic spirit, through a creative process that is endlessly inventive, constantly generates new forms and never takes on definitive embodiment. Yet, around 1800, Schlegel became skeptical of what M. H. Abrams, following Thomas Carlyle, has famously called “natural supernaturalism,” the pantheist belief in the immanence of God in nature.23 He began to search for a framework that would provide a stable structure for the endless process of Universalpoesie, a search which ultimately led him to the Catholic faith. His conversion to Catholicism in 1808 rang in a new phase of Romanticism, one which seasoned the concepts of early Romanticism with a new and powerful dose of medievalism. Once again, Schlegel became the center of a coterie of like-minded spirits, the Nazarenes among them. Schlegel’s change of heart is frequently dismissed as the reactionary downfall of German Romanticism that brought the movement’s innovative aesthetic

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Hermann Neumann, “Rom und die D¨usseldorfer Malerschule,” Internationale Revue, Monatschrift f¨ur das gesammte geistige Leben und Streben der außerdeutschen Kulturwelt 1 (Vienna, July–Dec. 1866), 397; Klaus Lankheit, Das Freundschaftsbild in der Romantik (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1952), 157. Among those Romantics whom Schadow exempted from his critique were Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Sch¨utz. Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow-Godenhaus, Der moderne Vasari: Erinnerungen aus dem K¨unstlerleben (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1854), 175f. Claudia Brauers, Perspektiven des Unendlichen: Friedrich Schlegels a¨ sthetische Vermittlungstheorie. Die freie Religion der Kunst und ihre Umformung in eine Traditionsgeschichte der Kirche (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1996). M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1st edn (New York: Norton, 1971).

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principles crashing down with it. Yet the tendency in modern scholarship to acclaim early Romanticism’s modernity and modernism against its allegedly stagnant and retrograde later manifestation overlooks the extent to which the later phase remained within the Romantic problematic, as much a response to an internal logic as it was a reaction to external challenges. It responded to the dreadful realization that, contrary to the belief of the early Romantics, a complete union of autonomy and expression, of subjectivity and nature, could not be achieved through an endlessly original creative power. By the time Schadow and his fellow Lukasbr¨uder absorbed Romantic metaphysics, leading figures like Schlegel had already perceived the contradiction between Universalpoesie and the goal of synthesis. Thus, the turn to the Christian tradition reflected the disillusioned realization that a subjectivity that is inspired untiringly to generate new forms is one that, by definition, can never reach a form that truly expresses itself. Instead of dismissing the Christian turn as a complete break with Romanticism’s modernist beginnings, I propose to understand these more orthodox forms of spirituality as a continuous engagement with Romantic aesthetics and Idealist epistemology. Indeed, Schadow himself understood the Nazarene project of reenchantment as an avant-garde secessionist rebellion against a stifling, decadent and shapeless present. And he regarded this project, even toward the end of his life, still as ongoing. In this sense it seems appropriate to read Schadow’s position as the attempt to retool the early Romantic notion of Universalpoesie into an ever-becoming search for final shape, a shape that could be encompassed in a vision of things, or a work of art, or a way of living, or all of these together. Even though Schadow yearned for a new Christian era, his Romantic heritage prevented him from constructing the desired religious revival as a historically unmediated, affirmative fiction of return to a pre-modern context. A “reform conservative”24 in his political outlook, Schadow developed his position in closest, even though negatively polarized, relation to the revolutionary and progressive forces of his time. Occupying the same space of modernity as his adversaries, Schadow consequently did not turn to tradition, artistic or religious, unthinkingly. Rather, his artistic practice functioned as a conscious, reflective process that aimed to reconstruct a common ground once lost. Undoubtedly a critic of the project of modernity, Schadow nevertheless acknowledged the conditions of that modernity as part of his own project of reenchantment. He emerges as an anti-modernist modern, a theme to which I will return at the end of my essay. 24

Cf. David E. Barclay, “Ein deutscher ‘Tory democrat’? Joseph Maria von Radowitz (1797–1853),” in Konservative Politiker in Deutschland: Eine Auswahl biographischer Portr¨ats aus zwei Jahrhunderten, ed. Hans-Christof Kraus (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 1995), 37– 67.

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Even though Schadow decisively rejected the concept of Kunstreligion and defined aesthetic experience as subservient to devotional practice, he nevertheless remained indebted to the irenic tendencies of early Romantic religiosity. As the century proceeded, he saw his project of religious renewal more and more endangered by the rapidly intensifying deterioration in confessional relations. When Schadow returned to Berlin in 1819, he witnessed the long-standing friction between the Catholic and Protestant parts of the population growing into open hatred. It is not surprising that the confrontation between the confessions was particularly acute in Prussia. After all, the northern state, which considered itself the supreme defender of Protestantism, had acquired the Catholic Rhineland in 1815. The subsequent efforts to absorb its Catholic population into Protestant Prussia, which Rhinelanders perceived as political oppression and Protestant proselytizing, created a perennial flashpoint that reverberated throughout the realm. By 1830, the century had entered a second confessional age.25 As a Catholic convert, Schadow was all too aware of the hostile climate, which prompted repeated pleas to Ludwig of Bavaria to call him to Munich and, in 1846, a disheartened request to Overbeck to find a position in Rome for his son-inlaw, whose conversion had destroyed his relationship with his family as well as his professional opportunities.26 Ironically, Schadow’s conversion also became a catalyst for his career when in 1825 the Prussian government began to search for a new director for the D¨usseldorf Academy of Art, established in 1819 as part of the cultural program launched by the Prussian government in the newly acquired Rhenish territories. Schadow emerged as the perfect candidate: as a Catholic convert, his appointment represented a much-welcomed gesture of appeasement; as a renowned teacher and prominent artist, he promised to be a successful leader. And indeed, within a few years of his appointment Schadow had turned the run-down provincial institution into an internationally renowned academy. Under his tutelage, the student body quickly developed a recognizable style, gaining fame as the D¨usseldorfer Malerschule (D¨usseldorf School of Painting). Exhibited with great success at the biannual Salon of the Berlin Academy, the school drew wide-ranging attention, including Hegel’s. In 1843 the Prussian government would honor Schadow’s

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Olaf Blaschke, “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000), 38–75. W. Schadow to Ludwig of Bavaria, Jan. 20, 1819, Bayrisches Hauptstaatsarchiv/Geheimes Hausarchiv der Wittelsbacher, Nachlaß Ludwigs I. von Bayern, No. 90/1/3. W. Schadow to J. Fr. Overbeck, June 29, 1846, Bibliothek der Hansestadt L¨ubeck, Referat f¨ur Sammlungen und alte Best¨ande, Nachlaß Overbeck, No. 120, 1–12. See further Cordula Grewe, “Die klugen und t¨orichten Jungfrauen: Wilhelm von Schadows Parabeln auf konfessionelle Vers¨ohnung und soziale F¨ursorge, 1835–1842,” Pantheon 57 (1999), 127–50.

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Figure 3. Wilhelm Schadow: Poesie, 1826. Oil/Canvas. 227 × 147 cm. SPSG BerlinBrandenburg.

achievement by ennobling him. Henceforth known as Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow-Godenhaus, he was the first Prussian artist ever to be so honored.27 It seems hardly a coincidence that Schadow should begin the designs for the only two secular allegories in his entire oeuvre in 1825, at this crucial moment in his career. Finished in 1826 and 1828 respectively, his depictions of Poetry (Figure 3) and Mignon were visual articulations of his artistic principles.28 In theoretical terms, this meant an affirmation of the religious nature of all art, which Schadow

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Charlotte von Schadow to Julius H¨ubner, Spring 1841, Heinrich-Heine-Institut D¨usseldorf (hereafter HHI), Autographensammlung (W. Schadow), no. 48.3460/20. For a discussion of Poetry, cf. Grewe, “Historie ohne Handlung,” 61–78.

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understood as the materialized allegory of the infinite, as a divine hieroglyph. Artistically, he advocated in these paintings a formal expression that fused an idealized notion of form with a naturalist idiom based on the close observation of nature and especially the study of the life nude. Having finished his Mignon, Schadow followed up on the visual articulation of his artistic principle with a theoretical statement on the education of artists, published in the Berliner Kunst-Blatt in the same year.29 Both allegories represented Schadow’s attempt to enact Adam M¨uller’s call to Christianize Goethe’s works. Prior to Schadow, the fine arts, in contrast to the literary field, had paid relatively little attention to Mignon. Indeed, insofar as Mignon’s tale was visualized, it was primarily by means of book illustrations.30 Accordingly, Schadow’s two life-size representations of Mignon generated a high level of interest. The first version of the figure, rendered in the fashion of three-quarterlength portraits, had been commissioned by Maximilian Speck von Sternburg, a famous art collector from Leipzig (Figure 4).31 For his depiction the painter chose the moment in the novel when Mignon exchanges her exotic male costume for an angelic garb. This fundamental turning point in Mignon’s life, which also heralds her death, is embedded in a charade that Wilhelm’s future wife, Natalie, stages during a children’s birthday celebration. Part entertainment, part pedagogical play, the masquerade serves to encourage disbelief in supernatural beings, unmasking angels as real persons dressed up. Natalie assigns Mignon the central role in her charade: the role of an angel who appears to reward the children with gifts. She later describes Mignon’s appearance: Mignon . . . was clothed in a long, thin white garment with a girdle of gold around her chest and a golden crown in her hair. I first thought I would omit the wings, but the women who dressed her insisted on a pair of big golden wings with which she could demonstrate their skill. And so the miraculous vision appeared, a lily in one hand and a little basket in the other, right in the midst of the girls, and surprised me as well. “Here comes the angel!” I said. All the children made as if to withdraw, but then finally shouted: “It’s Mignon!” though still not venturing any closer to the wondrous sight. . . . When their curiosity was satisfied and the first impressions of her appearance began to fade, they wanted to undress

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Wilhelm Schadow, “Gedanken u¨ ber eine folgerichtige Ausbildung des Malers” (1828), reprinted in Athanasius Graf Raczynski, Geschichte der neueren deutschen Kunst (Berlin: Printed by Author, 1836), vol. 1, pp. 319–30. Cordula Grewe, “Mignon als Allegorie des Poetischen: Goetherezeption und Kunsttheorie in der Malerei der Sp¨atromantik,” in Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik, ed. Walter Hinderer (W¨urzburg: K¨onigshausen and Neumann, 2002), 307–43. Cf. on Speck von Sternburg’s collection, which forms the core of the Museum f¨ur bildenden K¨unste in Leipzig, Maximilian Speck von Sternburg: Ein Europ¨aer der Goethezeit als Kunstsammler, exhibition catalogue, ed. Herwig Guratzsch (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1998).

schadow’s mignon and the religious project of late romanticism

Figure 4. Charlotte Speck von Sternburg: Mignon (after Schadow), 1827. Engraved by Selb. Lithograph. 32.8 × 22.4 cm. First reproduced in Verzeichnis Speck von Sternburg (1827), 42–3. Museum der bildenden K¨unste, Leipzig.

her. But she would not allow this. She took up her zither, climbed up on this high desk, and sang with unbelievable grace and appeal this song: So let me seem till I become . . . . (pp. 315–16)

Translating this description into paint, Schadow chose a moment that not only was key to the novel but also, as I will show, lent itself ideally to repainting Goethe’s original intentions. Schadow likely finished the first version of his Mignon toward the end of 1827, but no later than January 1828. Immediately afterwards, he painted a second version commissioned by the poet Michael Beer. Even though the painting is nowadays lost, we know through descriptions and a small-scale copy (Figure 2) that Schadow expanded the original composition to a full-length figure, adding

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a scroll inscribed with the first lines of Mignon’s song, “So let me seem till I become.” Schadow began work on the second Mignon in February 1828. Three months later Beer received news from his D¨usseldorf friend, the poet Karl Leberecht Immermann, that the painting was almost completed.32 The following month, the finished work was presented at an exhibition in D¨usseldorf before it traveled to the exhibition of the Berlin Academy. From the moment of its first public display, Schadow’s image of Mignon elicited a vivid, yet controversial, response. The critical reviews contributed crucially to its further fate, as Michael Beer had initially commissioned the second version with the intention of giving it to the author of Wilhelm Meister himself. However, a disapproving review by one Romeo Maurenbrecher, published in Schorn’s eminent Kunst-Blatt on October 9, 1828, caused Beer embarrassment and made him unsure whether to go ahead with his plan. He expressed his doubts to Immermann, who replied on April 22, 1829: Schadow will answer you himself in regard to Mignon. In my opinion (because Goethe has certainly read the essay in the Kunst-Blatt) a fatal misunderstanding could easily occur from the sending, and you should be prepared to receive no more from G. than a courteous thank-you letter for the valued gift. On the other hand, I do not see how this matter could be done away with without offense, as M¨uller likely has already told Goethe of your intentions.33

At the time when Immermann answered his friend’s letter, the rumor mill was already grinding. No later than January of 1829, the poet and journalist Amalie von Helvig believed an allegedly reliable source “that Goethe himself declared that he was completely in agreement with the artist’s interpretation, and that he has become so attached to the painting that he would be reluctant to part with his valued gift for even a short period of time.”34 Yet the correspondence between Immermann and Beer, dating from April of the same year, suggests that Goethe had not yet been presented with the Mignon. Nothing is known about the poet’s final verdict on the Mignon, or whether he actually ever received his gift.35

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Michael Beer’s Briefwechsel, ed. Eduard von Schenk (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1837), 27–9, 35–42, 47–50. Karl Leberecht Immermann, Briefe, ed. Peter Hasubek (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978), vol. 1: Briefe von 1804–1831, 733. Amalie von Helvig, “Ueber die Kunstausstellung zu Berlin im Oktober 1828,” Kunst-Blatt 10/8 (Jan. 29, 1829), 33. Given the absence of any reference in Goethe’s own writings, he most probably did not receive the painting. The poet admired Beer’s Paria, and in early 1828 Beer sent him another drama, Struensee. Perhaps, as Goethe biographer Nicholas Boyle suggests, Beer did not want to risk losing Goethe’s good opinion. I want to thank Professor Boyle for sharing his opinion with me (private conversation, Sept. 19, 2003).

schadow’s mignon and the religious project of late romanticism

This fictive appropriation of Goethe for the cause of late Romantic art and theory once more illustrates the hopes of the close circle surrounding the poet and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel that Goethe would endorse their work and ideas. Amalie von Helvig’s imaginary report on Goethe’s reaction seems even more piquant when one takes into account the latter’s opinion of her taste in art. In a response to Helvig’s description of the famous collection of early German and Netherlandish paintings held by the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisser´ee of Cologne, Goethe expressed his disdain for her attitudes: “I have been pestered about these paintings for three years now. Then you come and prattle on about Hemmelink and van Eyck until I see blue and brown spots before my eyes. . . . Finally, Madame Helvig comes along and presents such a poetic description that I am overcome with disgust.”36 This remark exemplifies Goethe’s position vis-`a-vis the ideology of the Boisser´ees’ collecting activities. While the poet came to appreciate the aesthetic value of their medieval art, he resisted the collection’s implicit dogma, which equated German art with Christian content, and established the latter as the guarantor of art’s political and cultural relevance. Instead, Goethe adopted a method similar to Herder’s comparative analysis of different cultures, and approached medieval art as analogous to Greek works. He claimed that the medieval masterpieces, like their Greek counterparts, have to exhaustively contain their explanation within themselves.37 With this approach, Goethe vehemently opposed the Romantic interpretations of Friedrich Schlegel, whom Ernst Osterkamp has identified as the “implicit opponent” of Goethe’s description of old German painting. In his writings on art, Schlegel aimed to restore the objects’ religious meaning and to construct them as exemplary models for the contemporary artist. In Goethe’s review of the Boisser´ee collection, in contrast, the medieval artwork, immersed in history in and through the museum, gained independence as an autonomous aesthetic object. Modifying his classical ideal of beauty, Goethe shifted his focus from a purely formal to a structural model, claiming analogies between artistic principles underlying the production of Greek, medieval and Renaissance art respectively: to achieve a harmonious perfection of the given—local and national—possibilities in beautiful form. Through this historicist move, Goethe could praise early 36

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Quoted in Ernst Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde: Studien zum Verfahren Goethescher Bildbeschreibungen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 231. For a discussion of the Boisser´ee collection, cf. Kunst als Kulturgut: Die Bildersammlung der Br¨uder Boisser´ee, ein Schritt in der Begr¨undung des Museums, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto P¨oggeler (Bonn: Bouvier, 1995). Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, “Goethe und das ‘Geschm¨acklerpfaffentum’: Der Widerstand gegen die neue Religiosit¨at,” in Kunst als Kulturgut, ed. GethmannSiefert/P¨oggeler, 222.

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German and Netherlandish art as a historical achievement, while simultaneously denying its fructifying function for contemporary art, as envisioned by Schlegel. Historicizing and integrating medieval art into the timeline of art-historical development was an important means to this goal.38 In Goethe’s eyes, this historicism did not seem to undermine the idea and ideal of a timeless aesthetic value system. Rather, like his great predecessor Johann Joachim Winckelmann, he granted a qualified appreciation to various periods of art, while measuring them ultimately against absolute standards that go beyond all history. This allowed him to dismiss the connection between art history and art theory that Schlegel had established and to counter Schlegel’s effort to deduce the theory of art from its history.39 It was Schlegel’s influence that Goethe wished to destroy. And yet the Romantics nevertheless held on to their quest of appropriating and converting Goethe, as the letters of the Boisser´ees illustrate as vividly as Schadow’s Mignon and its review by Helvig. As mentioned earlier, the strong resonance elicited by Schadow’s Mignonimages focused, beside discussions of stylistic features, on questions of medium specificity. In 1837, the poet Karl Gutzkow summarized the gist of the debate in a general critique of the literary dimension in D¨usseldorf School painting. D¨usseldorf artists, Gutzkow contended, did not lack ideas or enthusiasm but rather opposed the renewal of the line “set by the wise genius between word, chisel, and paint.”40 The genius Gutzkow referred to was, of course, Lessing. And the line set by the German dramatist referred to the laws of genres, which he had laid down in his Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. In his attempt to ground the generic boundaries of poetry and visual art on “first principles,” Lessing focused on the question of their temporal and material limitations, distinguishing between “a successive and a simultaneous view.”41 This position was crucial for the classicism of Goethe, who celebrated Lessing in his autobiographical work Poetry and Truth: One has to be a young man to visualize what an effect Lessing’s Laocoon had on us, this work swept us away from the regions of meager contemplation and onto the open terrain

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Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde ; Gethmann-Siefert, “Goethe und das ‘Geschm¨acklerpfaffentum’”, 222f. Frank B¨uttner, “Abwehr der Romantik,” in Goethe und die Kunst, ed. Sabine Schulze (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1994), 456–67, at 466. Karl Gutzkow, “Wilhelm von Schadow (1837),” in Gesammelte Werke, 2nd edn, vol. 2: ¨ Offentliche Charaktere (Frankfurt am Main: Literarische Anstalt, 1845), 302–18, here 318. Cf. Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” in Was ist ein Bild?, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994), 11–38, quote at 38. Cf. furthermore W. J. T. Mitchell, “Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 95–115.

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of thought. The saying “Ut pictura poesis,” so long misunderstood, was now suddenly set aside, and the difference between the pictoral [sic] and the verbal arts clear. The peaks of both now appeared separate, however closely they touched at the base. The graphic artist was to stay within the bound of beauty, while the verbal artist, who cannot dispense with significance of whatever kind, might be permitted to roam beyond them. The former aims at an external sense, which beauty alone can satisfy, the latter at the imagination, which is quite able to come to terms with ugliness. . . . We cast off all previous critical instructions and judgments like a worn-out coat, we considered ourselves delivered from all evil, and we felt justified in looking down somewhat pityingly at the otherwise very magnificent sixteenth century.42

Certainly, Goethe’s own comparative distinctions between poetry and the visual arts resulted in a theory of reception that was less strict in its division between simultaneous and successive modes of apprehension and assumed a connection, if not even a union, between the two in the actual process of an artwork’s appropriation by the viewer.43 Despite these insights into the multifaceted nature of perception and apprehension, the poet adhered to Lessing’s rejection of border crossings between media, and insisted: “One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.” Goethe thus regarded it as the artist’s duty, merit and dignity to know “how to separate his own branch from [the other branches of art], and to isolate it as far as may be.”44 Like Gutzkow, most critics adhered to Lessing’s notion of painting’s mediumspecific limitations, and declared the figure of Mignon to be an unsuitable choice of material for the fine arts. In their opinion, a painter could not illustrate the transition between a boy-like girl-child and a woman, nor the nascence and development of character, let alone the contradictions inherent in the subject, just by presenting the viewer with the single image of a seated woman.45 As Carl Seidel pointed out, the figure of Mignon was such an individualized poetic image that its singularity precluded the generalization of a literary character that is necessary to the art of painting.46 Schadow’s critics concurred that his attempt to impart a form to the character of Mignon that was in keeping with Goethe’s

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, Part One to Three, trans. Robert R. Heitner, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, in Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York: Suhrkamp, 1987), Book 8 (c.1811), 238. Wilhelm Vosskamp, “Goethes Klassizismus im Zeichen der Diskussion des Verh¨altnisses von Poesie und bildender Kunst um 1800,” in Goethes R¨uckblick auf die Antike, ed. Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi (Bielefeld: E. Schmidt, 1999), 113–21. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Introduction to the ‘Propyl¨aen’ (1798),” in Goethe on Art, trans. and ed. John Cage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 11. A. Wendt, “Kunstnachrichten aus Leipzig,” Kunst-Blatt 9/102 (Dec. 22, 1828), 405–6, esp. 405. Seidel, “Ueber W. Schadow’s Mignon”, 284.

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prose was a failure. As further proof for their conclusion, they also pointed to the impossibility of recognizing or understanding the theme of the painting without the aid of its title. This line of argument raises the question whether Schadow indeed attempted, as his critics assumed, to depict the madness of disparity, which for Goethe made up the essence of Mignon’s character. Was the painter in fact interested in the transition from child-wife to doomed virgin, from androgynous girl to young woman? Or were the critics, as I would like to suggest, so occupied with reading the image’s surface, seemingly a mirror of Goethe’s text, that they failed to recognize the new spirit hiding behind the veil of the familiar, a spirit utterly foreign to the poet’s original conception? And indeed, what was at stake for Schadow was not the creation of a fitting but subservient illustration of another man’s imagination, but the transformation of the model’s poetics into the spirit of Christian poetry. To this end the painter employed a series of subtle but effective strategies, all of which were purely pictorial, which ultimately removed Mignon from her textual context and inserted her firmly into the tradition of Christian painting. Many critics intuited Schadow’s intention without, however, drawing further conclusions. In his hostile review Romeo Maurenbrecher, for example, asked “why our ingenious Schadow has conceived precisely this critical moment from Mignon’s picture-rich life, a moment in which even Mignon discards her entire individuality, in which Mignon ceases to be Mignon.”47 Similarly, Kunst-Blatt critic A. Wendt, writing on Speck von Sternburg’s collection near Leipzig, believed that the painting indeed failed as a depiction of Mignon, but excelled as an “ideal image that becomes more and more attractive with every passing moment.”48 Obsessed with looking at the picture through the lens of poetry, critics then—as art historians now—have failed to follow this intuition and to pursue the ways in which Schadow created an independent image with a transfigured meaning. Only by inverting the perspective and looking at Schadow’s work as an act of appropriation rather than illustration can we see what he in fact aimed at: the creation of an allegory of art, and, more specifically, of Romantic art. A crucial step toward allegorizing Goethe was the elimination of Mignon’s androgyny. In contrast to Goethe’s conception of the figure, Schadow purged Mignon’s character of all traces of ambiguity, dissonance, or contradiction, in short of any element related to her “madness of disparity.” This exorcism of

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M., “Gem¨aldeausstellung in D¨usseldorf im August 1828,” Kunst-Blatt 9/81 (Oct. 9, 1828), 323. According to Siglen index of Cotta-Archive Marbach, “M.” is Romeo Maurenbrecher; see also Immermann, Briefe, ed. Hasubek, 1:733, and ibid., vol. 3 part 1: Nachtr¨age: Kommentar zu den Briefen 1804–1831, ed. P. Hasubek with help from Marianne Kreutzer (1987), 535. Wendt, “Kunstnachrichten aus Leipzig”, 406.

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Figure 5. Wilhelm Schadow: Pietas and Vanitas, 1841. Oil/Canvas. 194 × 144 cm. Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn.

gender confusion was necessary to transform Mignon into a genuine allegory, as the conventions of Western art defined personifications and allegories to be female figures. Such deliberations would again dominate Schadow’s design for his grand allegory of Christian charity, his 1841 painting of Pietas and Vanitas (Figure 5). Here too, the choice of female models did not primarily respond to the politics of gender, as some feminist scholars have suggested, but developed out of the complex iconographical tradition that Schadow activated in this pronounced statement on the social question.49 With the androgynous element Schadow also erased any sexual connotation, which the reader—like Wilhelm Meister himself—could associate with the sexually bewildered and bewildering body of a boyish girl on the brink of puberty.50 Purging Mignon of her sexual appeal as child-wife, Schadow could proceed with her metamorphosis into a true angel, 49 50

Grewe, “Die klugen und t¨orichten Jungfrauen”, 127–50. Michael Wetzel, Mignon: Die Kindsbraut als Phantasma der Goethezeit (Munich: M. Fink, 1999).

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and as such into an allegory of Christian art. The purging of Mignon’s androgyny thus facilitated not only the conversion of her image into allegory, but also its transformation into an unmistakably Christian image. In a second step, Schadow furthered this process of Christianization by the conscious negation of all narrative elements. The isolation of the figure from its original context heightened its symbolic aura and prepared the ground for a subtle play with the rich matrix of iconographic traditions. Based on the Nazarene notion of religion as the only true basis of all artistic creativity, the isolation of the figure from its original context served to distil Mignon’s religiosity as the very essence of her entire existence. Schadow eliminated Natalie, the children and the birthday party and inserted Mignon’s appearance instead into an anti-realist space. In so doing, he replaced the reproduction of a concrete, three-dimensional space with a stage-like, symbolically charged setting. The relation between the inside and the outdoors remains vague. In a departure from Goethe’s text, green velvet curtains sweep to the sides, opening the view onto a deep blue sky. The transition from one space into the other, separated by the curtains, lacks definition. The space seems flattened and compressed, blurring the distinction between interior and exterior, between close and far away. The swept-back curtains function as a significant artistic reference, for they allude to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, in 1828 undoubtedly one of the bestknown works of all of Western painting. Throughout the nineteenth century, Raphael’s images and especially his Madonnas enjoyed great popularity and widespread circulation as engravings. In 1816, a new print after the Sistine Madonna, engraved by one Johann Friedrich Wilhelm M¨uller (Figure 6), had appeared which received a glowing review by none other than Goethe himself in 1817.51 Schadow could confidently assume that his reference would be understood. The allusion to the Sistine Madonna was as much a self-referential gesture as an art-theoretical statement. On the one hand, it asserted Raphael as a major artistic source of Nazarene historicism and Schadow’s own style; on the other, it affirmed the Christian connotations of the act of painting itself, as the Romantics had constructed Raphael as the St. Luke of the Renaissance. For Schadow, the emulation of Raphael implied an understanding of art making as a form of prayer. At the same time, Raphael’s style, in which “the Christian spirit . . . enjoyed the most perfect outer appearance,”52 incarnated the fusion of spirit and flesh that

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Raffael und die Folgen: Das Kunstwerk in Zeitaltern seiner graphischen Reproduzierbarkeit, exhibition catalogue, ed. Corinna H¨oper (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 93–5. Wilhelm von Schadow, Ueber den Einfluss des Christenthums auf die bildende Kunst: Vorlesung gehalten am 30. September 1842 vor der General-Versammlung des Congr´es Scientifique zu Strassburg (D¨usseldorf: Julius Buddeus, 1842), 5.

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Figure 6. Johann Friedrich Wilhelm M¨uller: The Sistine Madonna, 1816. Copper engraving. 76.9 × 55.7 cm. Museum der bildenden K¨unste, Leipzig/Maximilian Speck von Sternburg Stiftung.

Schadow wished to recreate with his idealist-naturalist idiom. In this sense, the curtain functioned as an artistic as much as a spiritual metaphor, melding the natural with the ideal, the physical with the spiritual, and consequently the earthly scenery with a heavenly realm. Thus, the dualism of immanence and transcendence, enacted on the iconographic level through the reception of Raphael, repeated itself in Schadow’s style and emulative references.53 What significance the confessional nature of his image carried for Schadow becomes evident in his correspondence with his close friend Joseph Fraenkel, a 53

The cropping of the scene and the symbolic details further enhance the anti-realist feel and the transcendental qualities of the depiction. For a detailed discussion, cf. Grewe, “Mignon als Allegorie des Poetischen”, 322f., 330f.

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well-known Berlin banker, whose daughter had modeled for Schadow’s Poetry (Figure 3). Fraenkel suggested that Schadow paint Mignon with Psyche-like wings. In this case, the image would have visualized the Plotinian doctrine of the soul embedded in her song “So let me seem till I become.”54 Instead, Schadow insisted on feather-wings, which alone would symbolize what Seidel described as Mignon’s “strict Catholic devoutness.”55 In Schadow’s image, the representation of longing becomes an incunabula for the essence of Christianity itself. Mignon incarnates what August Wilhelm von Schlegel had defined in his first lecture on dramatic literature as the marker of the Christian religion, that “distinct consciousness that the happiness after which we are here striving is unattainable; that no external object can ever entirely fill our souls; and that every earthly enjoyment is but a fleeting and momentary illusion.”56 Longing becomes the expression of the timeless and universal condition of the Christian mind. Even though Schadow remains faithful to Goethe’s description, he retools the meaning of the image completely. In this battle over the nature of art, medium played an important role. I propose that Goethe’s and Schadow’s two versions of Mignon reiterate the discourse about sculpture and painting advanced around 1800. In this context Goethe reasserted his neoclassicist convictions by having Mignon die into sculptural representation at the end of his novel. Her body is mummified, rendered statue-like, transformed by the embalmers’ skills into an artificial appearance of eternal youth. Mignon becomes her own funeral sculpture, resembling the marble of her sarcophagus. While “art could not give permanence to her spirit, it could employ every skill to preserve her body and save it from decay,” Goethe’s Abb´e assures us.57 Isolating Mignon from Goethe’s narrative, Schadow instead stages a Christian ending, with Mignon’s longing suggesting not the earthly death of her body but the heavenly ascension of her soul. Mignon’s alter ego is no longer the cold body of sculpture, but the ephemeral vision of weightless pigment. Showing Mignon at the end of her metamorphosis, as a young woman who has completed her angelical transformation, inverts Goethe’s death motif, sublating the figure’s dying in her transfiguration as an angel.58 54 55 56 57 58

Hannelore Schlaffer, “Das Ende der Kunst: Neuplatonismus,” in Wilhelm Meister: Das Ende der Kunst und die Wiederkehr des Mythos (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980), 40–79. Seidel, “Ueber W. Schadow’s Mignon”, 280. See furthermore Schadow’s answer to Fraenkel, Nov. 26, 1828, HHI, no. 20.574/6. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (New York: AMS, 1833; rprt 1973), 26. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Blackall, 353; MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity, 119–24. Monika Fick, Das Scheitern des Genius: Mignon und die Symbolik der Liebesgeschichten in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren (W¨urzburg: K¨onigshausen & Neumann, 1987), 245.

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The contrast between Mignon as sculpture and Mignon as painting directly referred to the historical associations of these genres advanced by German aesthetics. Sculpture, in this common view, embodied the refined and ennobled sensuality which thinkers from Winckelmann to Hegel saw as the essence of the ancient world. Painting, in contrast, was seen to represent the more spiritual nature of Christianity. This binary thinking, which pitched the classical against the romantic and associated the latter with modernity, was to receive its ultimate systematic formulation in Hegel’s philosophy of art. Against the backdrop of his phenomenology of spirit, Hegel defined art as “the first reconciling middle term between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and transitory, between nature and finite reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking.” In the process of unfolding, art passes through three stages, which represent three possible relations of the Absolute Idea—the World Spirit—to its embodiment: the symbolic, the classical, and the romantic, represented respectively by architecture, sculpture, and, under the rubric of the romantic, painting, music, and poetry. While architecture epitomizes for Hegel the category of the “symbolic”—within the Romantic context a rather confusing choice of terminology—as the first, most primitive, stage, sculpture functions as the embodiment of the classical par excellence. Yet while classical art as a conceptually adequate representation of the Ideal represents the consummation of the realm of beauty—“Nothing can be or become more beautiful!”—this moment of perfect unity of content and form— or, in Hegel’s words, Idea and shape—could not provide the final adequate shape to the infinite subjectivity of the Idea and its absolute inwardness. Consequently, the classical yields to the romantic, which turns from the world of the senses to the inner spiritual world. The moment of this shift coincides with the rise of Christianity. It is also the moment when art begins to become defective again, for bodily media are insufficient for the object of Christian art, the infinite spirit. The further the Absolute Idea realizes itself, the less material its shape has to become.59 Ultimately, the logic of Hegel’s phenomenology meant that art, by the time Romanticism came into being, could no longer be the most adequate expression of the World Spirit, a role that the philosopher believed had moved decisively to philosophy. Yet absorbing the Romantic schema into his concept of the Absolute Idea, Hegel nevertheless appropriated not only the definition of classical and romantic given by the Romantics, but also their valorization of the latter as modern, Christian, and, compared to the classical, a higher stage within the development of human possibilities. Read within this framework, the radicalism 59

Quotes from Hegel in Aesthetics, trans. Knox, 8, 517. Cf. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Ch. 3: The System of Art (Hegel),” in Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 135–81.

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of Schadow’s decision to replace the sculptural with the pictorial becomes evident. It erased Goethe’s fundamental belief in a classicist aesthetic, that is, the potential for a seamless fusion of mind and matter in one bodily form. In so doing, Schadow affirmed the allegorical against Goethe’s notion of the symbol. Since the 1780s, the battle over symbol and allegory had been a constant and central element of German aesthetic discourse. In this debate, Goethe opted for the symbol as the highest ideal of artistic expression. With ancient art, his unsurpassed model, in mind, he defined the symbol as a self-contained and self-determining whole that presents a harmonious unity of form and content. The beauty and meaning of the symbol thereby derive from its capacity to give expression to an internal purpose without ever relating to anything outside of itself. Possessing what Kant had defined as “purpose without purposiveness,”60 Goethe’s symbol is, as Tzvetan Todorov stresses, radically “intransitive”: it retains its opacity and density, as signification is only secondary to its end.61 And yet it is precisely this opacity that gives us pleasure, as it speaks to our perception and intuition rather than to our power of thought alone and allows for a never-ending process of interpretation. For Goethe, the perfect artwork had to be something that did not gesture beyond itself, but was “in sich vollendet,” that is, perfect in itself.62 Allegory, in contrast, existed in Goethe’s eyes only in and through its relationship to the outside. Neither self-contained nor self-determining, allegory is marked by a discord between form and content, with signification as its primary purpose of existence. In Goethe’s aesthetic system, allegory functioned as the defective counterpart to the symbol’s intrinsic organic fullness. And he associated this flawed form of representation with the Romantic conception of art as a means of establishing a bond between the world and the beyond. Deeply opposed to the religious underpinnings of this understanding of representation, Goethe denounced the Romantic position as a violation of the autonomy of art. In so doing, he aimed to destroy the very basis of Romantic aesthetics, its conception of expressive form itself. With his Mignon, however, Schadow avowed the Romantic position that representation ought to bring immanent reality into contact with the numinous in the realm of art, thereby forsaking the world of the flesh as an inadequate expression of this higher reality. The corporeality of form is but an outline, a fragmented vision, of the divine. As such, the visual insubstantiality of the

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Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 105–20. Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 173–6. This notion was first developed by Karl Philipp Moritz; for a discussion of Goethe’s symbol theory in relation to Moritz’s thought, cf. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 147–64.

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pictorial embodies the very nature of Christianity itself, as for the Christian, “everything finite and mortal is lost in the contemplation of infinity.”63 Locating the ultimate point of reference outside of human experience, the Romantics assumed that a true artwork always has—depending on the recipients’ viewpoint—either a surplus or a shortage of meaning that, in turn, eternally evades its total expression as pure form. This attitude formed the very basis of Schadow’s work and art theory, in which Meyer had early on detected a propensity toward “mystical allegories.” Even though Meyer did acknowledge Schadow’s ability “to imbue his figures, at least his female figures, with beauty and tenderness, and occasionally [to make] laudable use of motifs that one must admit are estimably na¨ıve,” this comment cannot but be read as a sharp critique. For the allegorical mode clearly violated Goethe’s rules On Subject Matter in the Fine Arts (1798), according to which all topics are unsuited to the fine arts “that do not speak for themselves, that cannot, in their complete totality and full meaning, be brought before the eye of the beholder.”64 In Berlin, Goethe found in Hegel a powerful ally for his anti-Romantic project. As in Goethe’s case, Hegel’s initial rejection of early German and Netherlandish art had been transformed into a historicist appreciation of its qualities through the Boisser´ee collection. Like Goethe, Hegel disagreed with the project of a national-Christian art, and sharply opposed the revival of historical styles as a means to produce and direct the art of the future.65 Undoubtedly, Hegel did not want to introduce the new Bildungsroman, or Goethe’s ideal of Iphigenia, into the salons of Berlin. Rather, he implicated Goethe in his efforts to assign art a concise but restricted place in his conception of a state built upon the rational comprehension of the world.66 Sharing Goethe’s aversion to the “bigoted nonart” of the Nazarenes, Hegel’s comments on the D¨usseldorf School of Painting, the latest offspring of this “non-art,” formulate an anti-Romantic art program. In contrast to Goethe’s scattered, often aphoristic, and rather unsystematic writings on art, Hegel incorporated his criticism of contemporary art into his overarching philosophical system. For him, the products of the D¨usseldorf School of Painting were a vivid example of the Romantics’ failure to understand the role of art under the conditions of modernity. Theorizing the triad of art, religion, 63 64

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A. W. von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, ed. Black, 26. ¨ W. F. K., “Neu-deutsche religios-patriotische Kunst,” Uber Kunst und Altertum in den ¨ Rhein- und Mayngegenden 1/2 (1817), in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Asthetische Schriften, 1816–1820,ed. Hendrik Birus (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), 105–29, quote at 120. Goethe’s On Subject Matter in the Fine Arts is quoted from B¨uttner, “Abwehr der Romantik”, 460. W. F. K. is the abbreviation for “Weimarische Kunstfreunde.” Gethmann-Siefert, “Goethe und das ‘Geschm¨acklerpfaffentum’”, 227. Otto P¨oggeler, “System und Geschichte der K¨unste bei Hegel,” in Kunst als Kulturgut, ed. Gethmann-Siefert/P¨oggeler, 1–26, esp. 20.

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and philosophy, Hegel associated the complete form of art exclusively with Greek art, because he viewed art as the Greek form of religion. With the dwindling of the Greek religion of art and the rise of Christianity, however, art ceases to be an essential reality for religion. For manifest, revealed religion, art is but an inadequate expression.67 Within the genres of art, poetry, not painting, represented for Hegel the pinnacle of modern romantic art, for it was the least material of the arts, in which the sensuous element was more than ever subordinate to the spirit. Yet in the actual encounter with Schadow’s creation in 1828, Hegel’s deeper conviction came to the fore, namely that even poetry could no longer function as the purest embodiment of the Absolute Idea either, which Hegel instead, as mentioned earlier, assigned to philosophy as the last and highest phase of the Absolute Spirit. Denying art a vital role in shaping contemporary politics, culture, and the public sphere, Hegel inevitably condemned Schadow’s insistence on art as an organon of higher knowledge and the ultimate point of connection with the infinite. Hegel’s historicist argument picked up Goethe’s strategy of eliminating the religious import of art through its investigation as an autonomous aesthetic object. At the beginning of Hegel’s section on painting, the intimate, unbroken connection to the cult emerges as the key characteristic of art in the first phase of the Absolute Spirit, when art incarnates the immediate knowledge of the Absolute realized in the form of sensuous intuition. In this phase, the quality of an artwork is solely determined by its devotional spiritual power. Yet with the demise of the Greek religion of art, this vital connection between cult and art ceases to exist, and thus, as Hegel asserts, we begin to look at the beauty of a religious artwork instead. This is, of course, the case for all modern art produced, as it were, for galleries, museums, and the emerging open art market. Even if commissioned for a specific religious context, modern religious art inevitably succumbs to the logic of connoisseurship, with its estimation of value in aesthetic terms. As a crucial symptom of this missing cultic necessity, Hegel identified the ungrounded subjectivism and radical interiority which he found exemplarily expressed in D¨usseldorf painting. In his criticism, Hegel resorted once more to Lessing’s semiotics. Accordingly, he criticized lyrical painting—or, in Lessing’s words, “painting as silent poetry”—for remaining without the “more definite situation” which Hegel postulated as the essential key to the objectivity of art, which had marked the religion of art. From this perspective, he inevitably opposed Schadow’s isolation of Mignon from any concrete situation, or plot, which he rightly saw as the attempt to establish longing—the subjective emotional perception of God— as a timeless universal state of cognition. Thus, what could for Carl Seidel be

67

Schaeffer, “The System of Art (Hegel),” 135–81.

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“a master drawing by the greatest painting poet, dashed off with a sure hand,”68 could for Hegel only be but an example of the hubris of Romantic aesthetics. This brings us back to the politics of medium specificity that I began with. The semiotic system of Lessing’s Laoco¨on served to help Hegel crack open the Romantic allegory, which sought to create, in Schelling’s words, an “inner bond uniting art and religion.” The recourse to Lessing implied Hegel’s preference for the linguistic sign as the privileged medium of philosophy, for the sign, because of its inherent arbitrariness, could shed the ambiguity of both symbol and allegory and become the transparent mediation of spirit’s self-determination. With his rejection of Schadow’s lyrical painting, Hegel rejected a philosophy of art that, as Schelling maintained, had the philosopher see “in art . . . the inner essence of his own discipline as if in a magic and symbolic mirror.”69 Simultaneously, Lessing’s semiotics also allowed Hegel to undermine the revalorization of religious revivalist art on grounds of its Christian content. Lessing himself had left no doubt that the limits of painting prohibited its subjection to alien interests, in particular the usurpation by the language of religion. “Among the antiques that have been buried,” Lessing remarked, we should discriminate and call only those works art which are the handiwork of the artist purely as artist. . . . All the rest, all that show an evident religious tendency, are unworthy to be called works of art. In them art was not working for her own sake, but was simply the tool of Religion, having symbolic representation forced upon her with more regard to her significance than their beauty.70

As W. J. T. Mitchell has pointed out, Lessing saw religion as fettering painting by removing it from its proper vocation. Instead of representing beautiful bodies in space, as painting should, religious painting is forced into a temporal mode in order to express “significance” through “symbolic representation.” Thus, Mitchell claims, religious painting is “a contradiction in terms for Lessing; it is a violation of the artist’s political liberty, and of the natural law of the medium, which confines the visual arts to corporeal, spatial beauty and reserves spiritual significance to the temporal medium of poetry.”71 In 1766, Lessing’s text signified a Protestant assault against Roman Catholic idolatry, and half a century later, Goethe and Hegel joined this “holy alliance” of Protestant thinkers. 68 69

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Seidel, “Ueber W. Schadow’s Mignon”, 279. F. W. J. von Schelling, “The Philosophy of Art,” in Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism. An Anthology, ed. Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 130; Warren Breckman, “Emancipation and the Bounds of Meaning: Reading, Representation and Politics in Young Hegelianism,” The European Legacy 8/4 (Aug. 2003), 425–39. Quoted from Mitchell, “Space and Time,” 106. Ibid.

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Schadow, on the other hand, condemned the turn to philosophy as a substitute for the moral and ethical guidance that religion provides. For him, the antireligious sentiment of the French Enlightenment was responsible for the decay, decadence, and evil of modern society; only belief in God, not in a World Spirit, could deliver mankind from its vanity, unrestrained passions, and sinful desires. In his posthumously published memoirs, Schadow casts this judgment as emerging from his experience of the personal and political confusion that reigned in the years around 1800, in which one philosophical system after another claimed the mantle of truth: Pestalozzi came, the artist of education, then Fichte, the philosopher, and finally Hegel, who swept all other doctrines from the table of memory. At that time I visited his lectures, already tired from work, and can say exactly as the pupil in Faust: “There is a mill-wheel going around in my head.” Naturally, these all preached us morals, too, wanted to build us up into noble people, although they pulled out from under our feet the ground from which the good grows.72

Schadow’s violation of Lessing’s semiotic system was an immediate consequence of his anti-Hegelian resistance. With his poetic painting, he emphatically insisted upon the religious nature of art. Consequently, in true Romantic fashion, he acknowledged allegory as the central device of painting, for only the gesture of allegory could approximate the transcendental. Although Schadow built upon traditional iconographic codes, he adhered to a high Romantic conception of the allegorical, marked by the forbidden, the unfinished, the unfulfilled form, and the overstepping of artistic boundaries. In this sense, Schadow’s treatment of the literary subject of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship took on paradigmatic features. His Mignon undermined Goethe’s concept of the symbol by absorbing it into an allegory of art under the auspices of the divine. Schadow’s Mignon exemplifies the multi-layered relation of late Romanticism to the aesthetic program of the Weimarer Klassik, which functioned simultaneously as model and adversary: its Romantic appropriation blended admiration and criticism, incorporation and resistance, absorption and subversion, verbatim repetition and fundamental reinterpretation. Goethe’s texts provided an ideal source for this complex and twisted process of appropriation, because of the actual ambiguity of his relationship to Romantic poetic experimentation. After all, Goethe more than once drew near to elements of Romantic thought and poetry, despite his fervent crusade against what he perceived as the Romantic disease.73 In this sense, Mignon’s popularity resulted,

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Wilhelm von Schadow, “Jugenderinnerungen,” K¨olnische Zeitung (Aug. 28 –Sept. 17, 1891), nos. 701–756, quote from no. 701, col. 2. Vosskamp, “Goethes Klassizismus,” 121.

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in large part, from nothing less than her composite nature. Her being is comprised of music, dance and speech, at times a performative fusion of all three, and thus she epitomizes a construct based on mixed media. Through the process of visualizing Mignon, Schadow infused Goethe’s basic conception with his own notions of poetic painting, and, in so doing, appropriated Romanticism’s father figure for an agenda Goethe fervently decried. Simultaneously, with his insistence on the Romantic conception of allegory, Schadow confronted and opposed Hegel’s philosophy and its legacy, which represented an anathema to his own beliefs. In contrast to Goethe, Hegel was not the desired father but the hated other. Against the philosopher’s dictum of the end of art, Mignon stood as the battle cry for art’s persistent potential to create an independent spiritual object that constructs a frame for devotion. For Schadow, in contrast to Hegel, the migration of the artwork beyond a stable cultic context did not diminish the sacred power of religious art. Rather, he saw the aesthetic object as a means to recreate the spiritual community from which it had once been born. From a modernist perspective, little might seem modern about Schadow’s concept of art, with its insistence on faith as the essence of all human creativity, and on religion as the ultimate basis of human life, be it personal, social, or political. Rather, his avowal of tradition and his rejection of the Revolution of 1848 affirm his distance from those claims for autonomy, freedom, self-determination and a social order based on scrutinized, negotiated structures, which we associate with the project of modernity. And yet, what is modern about Schadow’s religious concept is the way in which its strategies consciously function ex negativo: the ideal—here religious belief—is emphatically marked as historically mediated, and the pictorial strategies serve to work through this acute awareness. Thus, to an astonishing degree, the loss of immediacy forms the core of Nazarene production. The turn to religion is not simply represented as a return, but as an act of will in a world in which religion no longer functions as the unchallenged basis of society. In this sense, using a modern creation, Mignon, to articulate a complex religious art program was an emphatically innovative decision that foregrounded the question of historical mediation. Mignon stood for a period of German history associated with Enlightenment and the rejection of orthodox Christianity. Schadow’s appropriation of Goethe signaled the need to re-instill a new religiosity, which inevitably would carry the mark of an unbridgeable tension with the past with its promise of an immediate presence of belief, here symbolized in the contrast between subject matter and emulated model, Raphael. Schadow ultimately articulated an open dialectic, the reconciliation of which was indefinitely postponed. His often-used metaphor of an eternal dawn captures this insight into the impossibility of full presence and immediacy under the conditions of modernity.

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Schadow’s modernity thus exemplifies a crucial paradox at the heart of the modern world, that is, the modernity of strategies developed to defeat that very modernity. A similar paradox surfaces when we evaluate Schadow’s assertion of the allegorical nature of all representation, which again and again has been taken as proof of his outmodedness. And indeed, in ensuing years, Left Hegelian, Young German and bourgeois critics launched a powerful attack against the allegorical mode of painting as an outdated intellectualized representation of abstract concepts. What they called for instead was contemporary history, or at least those episodes from the past that spoke to the contemporary bourgeois self-consciousness. Inspired by the celebrated Belgian paintings of the 1840s, they envisioned this new form of history painting as true to life, namely vivid in its colorism and instantaneous in its naturalism, an illusionist staging of history that spoke to the viewer with fullest immediacy.74 Yet for his entire career as a teacher and a painter, Schadow would not give in to the harsh criticism of allegory, even if that meant that his work would be written off as “an arbitrary symbol of wavering ideas that always wants something other than what the presentation brings to our eye.”75 Even though he could appreciate the coloristic qualities of the Belgian style, he did not agree with its underlying notion of representation, that is, the belief in illusionist realism’s power to present things as they really are. The immediacy of its illusionism conflicted with his sense of history’s impenetrability. Beside political disagreement, Schadow’s resistance reflected his fundamental rejection of the promise held by the Goethean symbol: the promise of overcoming the dualism of the finite and the infinite. Paradoxically, this critique of the ideal of fusion and identity came to prefigure a modernist critique of the symbol’s claims for immediacy, presence, identity, and transcendence. Trying to grasp the essence of modernity, Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man both emphasized and endorsed allegory’s qualities of non-identity, rupture, disjunction, distance and fragmentation. Rather than designating a deficient mode of representation, the conventionality of the allegory thus regained critical favor exactly because it was seen as accentuating the gap between meaning and being.76 Of course, Schadow’s intense Christian–Catholic belief sets him apart from many twentieth-century critics of the symbolic logic. And yet his faith was the agent that allowed him to embrace an ambiguity that he sensed as essential for modern human existence. His example shows us that we have to complicate binary models of modernity

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Rainer Schooch, “Die ‘Belgischen’ Bilder: Zu einem Prinzipienstreit der Historienmalerei des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Streit um Bilder: Von Byzanz bis Duchamp, ed. Karl M¨oseneder (Berlin: Reimer, 1997), 161–79. “Berliner Briefe von T.L.S.,” Kunst-Blatt 29/45 (Sept. 14, 1848), 179. Gail Day, “Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics,” Oxford Art Journal 22/1 (1999), 103. See further Breckman, “Emancipation and the Bounds of Meaning,” 428.

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that pit regress and reaction against progress and innovation. Rather, it suggests that between these two extreme poles was a much more complicated terrain filled with complex interactions, fusions, and overlaps. In his concept of religious art, Schadow negotiated a position that sought to offer a solution to the threats of modern life without eliminating a critical view of the fundamentally fragmented nature of such a solution.77

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I want to thank Suzanne Marchand and the two other anonymous readers for their insightful comments, as well as Anthony La Vopa for his editorial guidance. I am also indebted to Warren Breckman, who commented upon this paper at several stages.

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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 2 (2004), pp. 219–248.
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000137 Printed in the United Kingdom

continental divide: ernst cassirer and martin heidegger at davos, 1929—an allegory of intellectual history peter eli gordon Department of History, Harvard University

The 1929 ‘Davos encounter’ between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer has long been viewed by intellectual historians as a paradigmatic event not only for its philosophical meaning but also for its apparently cultural-political ramifications. But such interpretations easily lend legitimacy to a broader and recently ascendant intellectual-historical trend that would reduce philosophy to an allegorical expression of ostensibly more ‘real’ or instrumentalist meanings. However, as this essay tries to show, the core of the dispute between Cassirer and Heidegger is irreducibly philosophical: the Davos debate brought into focus the emergent themes of the so-called “Kant-crisis” of the 1920s, and cast new light upon neo-Kantian doctrines as to the status of objectivity and the possibility for intersubjective consensus in both knowledge and ethics. The Davos encounter cannot be retroactively decided on political or cultural grounds, since it concerns just that unresolved tension between transcendentalism and hermeneutics that is itself constitutive of intellectual history as a discipline.

For to think without pursuing some practical purpose is surely an improper, furtive occupation; especially those thoughts that take huge strides on stilts, touching experience only with tiny soles, are automatically suspect of having disreputable origins. There was a time when people talked of their thoughts taking wing; in Schiller’s time such intellectual highfliers would have been widely esteemed, but in our own day such a person seems to have something the matter with him, unless it happens to be his profession and source of income. There has obviously been a shift in our priorities. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

introduction In the autumn of 1945, two emissaries of re-emergent French intellectual life, Maurice de Gandillac and Alfred de Towarnicki, made their way eastward from 219

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Paris to Freiburg to visit the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was then living with his wife Elfriede under allied occupation. His future was uncertain, and his past would soon become the object of official scrutiny: it was well known that Heidegger had served as rector at Freiburg during the first years of National Socialist rule, and while he would attempt to mitigate his guilt with a September 1945 report to the de-Nazification committee, rumors were beginning to swell concerning the true extent of his collaboration. For the time being, he was forbidden to teach and travel, and he was grateful for the coffee and other assorted gifts sent his way by post from old friends and students, such as Hannah Arendt, who were now living abroad. De Gandillac and de Towarnicki thus arrived at Heidegger’s home as unofficial agents of judgment and possible reconciliation between German and French culture, and, more specifically, as ambassadors sans papier from Jean-Paul Sartre, who seemed in those years the embodiment of the French intellectual resistance, and in whose fledgling journal, Les Temps Modernes, they would publish the record of their visit some months later, in January, 1946.1 In the published text of this visit, de Gandillac relates that he and de Towarnicki were shown into Heidegger’s barren study. He describes it as “nearly monastic.” Of the few books on Heidegger’s shelf he spies a set of Kant’s collected works in the edition by Ernst Cassirer. The conversation begins in a sober mood, and, to ease discussion, de Gandillac reminds the philosopher of their previous meeting: it was Easter, 1929, when de Gandillac, then a student, had made a pilgrimage to Davos, Switzerland, to witness in person an intellectual clash of the titans, between the two great philosophers of the age, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. “This memory,” writes de Gandillac, “restored him somewhat to his good humor.” “At that time then, said Heidegger, he had not hesitated, after long discussions concerning Kant, to shake publicly the hand of the Jew Cassirer. Compromising expressions, but which today have become, as it were, certificates of an upstanding life and morality.” “At this precise moment,” the visitor adds, “Heidegger opens a drawer and takes from it, without having to search, a paled photograph that recalls those innocent times.” Here de Gandillac cannot suppress a wry remark: “I doubt that, at that still-so-recent epoch, when everywhere there reigned a fear of the Gestapo, he could have found this small token of faith quite so easily.” By the end of World War II, the Davos disputation between Cassirer and Heidegger had already begun to assume in philosophical memory a nearallegorical significance for the history of European ideas, and, even today, 1

See Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger, A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 324; M. de Gandillac and A. de Towarnicki, “Deux Documents sur Heidegger,” Les Temps Modernes (1946), 713–24; quoted from de Gandillac, 714.

continental divide: ernst cassirer and martin heidegger at davos, 1929

the Davos encounter remains a touchstone of intellectual-historical narrative. Scholars from a variety of disciplines and ideological camps frequently claim it as a final moment of rupture—between humanism and anti-humanism, enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, or rationalism and irrationalism—as if this single event brought into focus the defining struggles of twentieth-century thought and politics. The accomplished Kant scholar Michael Friedman has read it as a “parting of the ways” between analytic and continental philosophy. Pierre Bourdieu, more dubiously, made it the centerpiece in his effort to decompose Heidegger’s thought in terms of its “political ontology.”2 J¨urgen Habermas has recently championed Cassirer’s modernist philosophy of symbolic form against “the intellectual celebration of archaic origins,” which, he notes (in oblique reference to Heidegger), is “as widespread today as in the 1930s.” More boldly, the German intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg once suggested it be read as a secular reprisal of the dispute over transubstantiation between Luther and Zwingli.3 There is nothing prima facie wrong about such interpretations. Even at the time, anecdotal accounts of Heidegger’s meeting with Cassirer were much burdened with symbolism: newspaper reports and academic journals referred to it in generational terms as a “representative encounter” between “the old and the new thinking.”4 Heidegger’s student Otto Friedrich Bollnow would later recall that “one had the sublime feeling, to have lived as witness to [in Goethe’s phrase] ‘a new epoch of world-history.’” Emmanuel Levinas, at that time Husserl’s pupil, recalls in a later interview feeling that Cassirer’s uninspired performance signaled “the end of a particular type of humanism.” A “young student,” he adds, “could have had the impression that he was witness to the creation and the end of the world.”5 2 3

4

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Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 48. J¨urgen Habermas, “The Liberating Power of Symbols: Ernst Cassirer’s Humanistic Legacy and the Warburg Library,” in Habermas, The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays, trans. Peter Dews (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 1–29, at 26; Hans Blumenberg, “Affinit¨aten und Dominanzen,” in Blumenberg, Ein m¨ogliches Selbstverst¨andnis: Aus dem Nachlaß (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1996), 161–8. See, e.g., the essays in Hermann Herrigel, Das neue Denken (Berlin: Lambert Schneider, 1928); “Die Davoser Hochschulkurse,” Frankfurter Zeitung (hereafter FZ), Morgenblatt, 73/206 (Monday, March 18, 1929), 2; “Denken dieser Zeit: Fakult¨aten und Nationen treffen sich in Davos, I”, FZ, Abendblatt, 73/297 (Monday, April 22, 1929), 4 (Hochschuleblatt: “F¨ur Hochschule und Jugend”). Claims about generational conflict are repeated in Franz Rosenzweig, “Vertauschte Fronten”, Der Morgen, 6/6 (April, 1930), 85–7; on this topic, see Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), esp. chap. 6. Francois Poiri´e, Emmanuel Levinas: Qui ˆetes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 78. See also Ludwig Englert, “Als Student bei den Zweiten Davoser Hochschulkursen, M¨arz,

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The Davos disputation between Heidegger and Cassirer is among the most frequently cited conversations in the history of modern European thought.6 It would be difficult to name another modern event of such pronounced symbolism, one attended by so many people of intellectual prestige, and one that seemed, even to the participants themselves, so closely bound to the fate of European culture. Yet just this endlessly annotated significance has made responsible interpretation of the Davos dispute all the more difficult. Its core meaning, both philosophical and historical, deserves careful scrutiny, not only because of its obvious importance, but also because that importance has been so frequently misunderstood. Of course, because the Davos debate is so rich in consequences, this essay can serve only as a prolegomena to a longer, more detailed study. In what follows, I would like to consider chiefly its significance for the practice of intellectual history. I will suggest that intellectual historians should take seriously the philosophical content of the Heidegger–Cassirer disputation, not only because it provides a powerful illustration of the ongoing struggle between transcendentalism and hermeneutics in recent European thought, but also because this very struggle, I would suggest, is constitutive of intellectual history as a discipline. This claim, however, deserves preliminary comment. Generally speaking, intellectual historians see it as their task to read ideas “in context.” Now one might say this is the key gesture of historicizing hermeneutics; it supposes that the meaning of an idea cannot be isolated from its historical setting. But the attempt to radicalize this gesture in the form of full-blown historicism raises the famous problem of self-defeating relativism: the claim that meaning depends upon historical context is itself presumably generalizable

6

1929),” in Die II. Davoser Hochschulkurse 17. M¨arz bis 6. April (Davos: Kommissionsverlag Heintz, Neu und Zahn, 1929); and O. F. Bollnow, “Gespr¨ache in Davos,” in Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger (Pfullinngen: Verlag G¨unther Neske, 1977), 25–9. For interpretation, see the excellent volume by Dominic Kaegi and Enno Rudolph, eds., Cassirer–Heidegger: 70 Jahre Davoser Debatte (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 2002). Also see Frank Schalow, “Thinking at Cross Purposes with Kant: Reason, Finitude, and Truth in the Cassirer–Heidegger Debate,” Kantstudien (hereafter KS) 87 (1996), 198–217; Calvin O. Schrag, “Heidegger and Cassirer on Kant,” KS 58 (1967), 87–100; Dennis A. Lynch, “Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger: The Davos Debate,” KS 81 (1990), 360–70; Wayne Cristaudo, “Heidegger and Cassirer: Being, Knowing and Politics,” KS 82 (1991), 469–83; John Michael Krois, “Aufkl¨arung und Metaphysik: Zur Philosophie Cassirers und der Davoser Debatte mit Heidegger,” Internationale Zeitschrift f¨ur Philosophie (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler), Heft 2 (1992), 273–89; Pierre Aubenque, “Le D´ebat de 1929 entre Cassirer et Heidegger,” in Ernst Cassirer: De Marbourg a` New York, L’itin´eraire philosophique, ed. Jean ´ Seidengart (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1990), 81–96; and Karlfried Gr¨under, “Cassirer und ¨ Heidegger in Davos, 1929,” in Uber Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, ed. Hans-J¨urg Braun, Helmut Holzhey and Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988).

continental divide: ernst cassirer and martin heidegger at davos, 1929

across historical contexts. Whatever their commitments in theory, intellectual historians often seek in practice to avoid this problem by historicizing only those ideas they do not endorse. In recent years, for example, some intellectual historians who profess scant admiration for Heidegger’s philosophy have moved to historicize his thought into the setting of Weimar conservative-revolutionary ideology, alongside such figures as Ernst J¨unger, Carl Schmitt, and so forth. Whatever the merits of such historical comparisons, the implicit bond between historicization and political commitment also raises a number of theoretical questions. First and most importantly, we might ask whether this is a contextualism without remainder, i.e., does this gesture of historicism spell the defeat of philosophical truth, or does it allow for a moment of transcendental validity that escapes full-blown historicity? If the latter, one might wonder why some intellectual historians seem frequently eager to historicize only those thoughts they do not admire. (A recent study of French intellectuals and Stalinism is a case in point, since the implicit charge of the book is that these intellectuals were “trapped” within historically localizable patterns of political thought from which we today are presumably exempt.) This may raise the suspicion that for some intellectual historians, the gesture of historicizing thought into past political contexts may serve as an unacknowledged means of political refutation.7 Of course, this was not always the case. Traditionalist intellectual historians in the not-too-distant past commonly devoted much of their energies to reconstructing ideas they seemed to admire and whose longevity they wished to secure. But the more recent turn from “high” narratives of thought to cultural histories of discourse has brought a marked shift of attention toward past political-ideological formations for which the narrators profess little sympathy (e.g. discourses of psychopathology, imperialist fantasy, sexual normativity, and so forth). While this methodological and topical shift has yielded a rich harvest, such gestures of “defeatist historicism” have become a preferred means by which intellectual historians now voice their disapproval, especially since by professional sanction they are forbidden from quarrelling with the past. But this raises the possibility that, notwithstanding the explicit gestures of historicizing thought, a crypto-transcendentalism remains intact in intellectual-historical practice. Habermas, for example, alludes to this tension when he faults Foucault’s seemingly historicist analysis of discourse with a

7

To be sure, intellectual historians also historicize to promote, e.g. Quentin Skinner’s celebratory statement on behalf of a neo-Roman idea of liberty in his recent work, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); but the promotional message of this work squares uneasily with Skinner’s self-denying ordinance as a contextualist against any strong evaluation of past ideas.

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non-historicizable, and therefore necessarily “cryptic,” normativity.8 Moreover, since even the new, post-Heideggerian historicism must lay claim to descriptive accuracy when exploring the power-political modalities of a given discourse, such claims presuppose an epistemic commitment to objectivity that should itself be irreducible to power. While not all historians can be troubled to lay out an explicitly philosophical justification for their method, their underlying commitments should, at least in principle, admit of philosophical defense. Indeed, it remains difficult to fathom how intellectual historians could resort to full-blown historicism without calling into question the transcendental presuppositions of their own intellectual practice.9 A second problem raised by the full-blown historical contextualization of philosophical ideas is that it remains uncertain just which context is believed to hold sway within intellectual-historical explanation: what counts as a context, and why is it often assumed that the inscription of philosophy into an extraphilosophical setting of power serves as the true ‘explanation’ for the ideas? With notable exceptions, European intellectual historians in the Anglo-American world have followed chiefly those models first laid down by Friedrich Meinecke, Isaiah Berlin, and the German e´ migr´e historians of North America, who regarded it as their primary charge to produce geneaological or developmentalist narratives of political thought (rather than, say, metaphysics, epistemology, or aesthetics). A similar belief in the primacy of political context remains operative even for that genre of new cultural history which, following Foucault’s post-dualist ontology of knowledge-as-power, tends to identify the historical significance of ideas with their power-discursive efficacy. While I hope to address these methodological questions elsewhere, my claim here is simply that intellectual historians’ expectation that all ideas are eventually to be construed in terms of politics may distort our understanding of the intellectual past: neither Ernst Cassirer nor Martin Heidegger was primarily concerned with matters political, and if one places undue emphasis upon their political disagreement one may miss what most mattered to them; and, just as seriously, one may fail to appreciate why their debate remains of such moment for European intellectual history even 8 9

J¨urgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). Such transcendental presuppositions would include the bid for trans-subjective descriptive accuracy (as against subjectivist expression or the fabrication of socially useful myths), and, more broadly, any of the transhistorical principles that condition or enable historicism without themselves being vulnerable to relativizing contextualism. For a classic statement of this problem, see Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism (New York: Liveright, 1938); for more recent contributions see Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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today. As Dominic Kaegi and others have demonstrated, the core dispute between Cassirer and Heidegger had its origins in the early 1920s in their rival readings of Kantian metaphysics and epistemology, and the later “politicization” of this dispute beginning at Davos in 1929 was neither inevitable, nor was it the most salient feature of the debate for the participants and the auditors.10 In sum, even a properly historicist sensitivity to context would compel us to realize that the primary context for understanding the Davos encounter was the broader context of European ideas stricto sensu, and not the political field as such. For intellectual historians, the enduring merit of the Davos disputation is that it thematizes without resolution just that methodological predicament that might be regarded as constitutive of intellectual history itself: the dispute between Heidegger and Cassirer represents the ongoing challenge of reconciling hermeneutic-historicist modes of situated understanding with the transcendentalist, non-historicist premises of philosophical rationality. Intellectual historians have frequently felt moved to “take sides” in this dispute; they have read the event as a kind of political allegory, as if the philosophical struggle were simply a struggle of politics by other means. But this grants the salience of political categories such as “victory” and “defeat” that may be ill suited to intellectual life. In what follows, then, I shall try to show why the Davos disputation is best understood as a paradigmatic moment in the ongoing debate between transcendentalism and hermeneutics as it emerged from the rival streams of post-Kantian epistemology. And this is the meaning of the debate, irreducible and perhaps irresolvable, that should remain of primary interest for those who hope to grasp its enduring fascination for intellectual history.

clash of the titans Ernst Cassirer is indisputably one of the greatest philosophers and practitioners of Geistesgeschichte to have emerged from the cultural ferment of the modern German-speaking world. Born in 1875 into a prosperous German–Jewish family, Cassirer combined the practical temperament of a scholar with the topical promiscuity of an artist; his brother was the art dealer Paul Cassirer, and he was later an associate of the art historian Aby Warburg as well as of Erwin Panofsky. To his admirers as well as his critics, Cassirer was the very embodiment of central European liberal culture: his many contributions to the history of science, culture, and epistemology bespoke a robust attachment to the rationalist spirit of the Aufkl¨arung, from Leibniz to Kant, and to the cultural legacy of 10

Dominic Kaegi, “Davos und davor—Zur Auseinandersetzung zwischen Heidegger und Cassirer,” in Kaegi and Rudolph, eds., Cassirer–Heidegger: 70 Jahre Davoser Debatte, 67–105.

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German classicism, from Goethe to Schiller and Humboldt. Cassirer was first introduced as a student in Berlin to the life philosophy of Georg Simmel, and then studied with Hermann Cohen at the University of Marburg from 1896 to 1899. He authored a great variety of seminal works: for example, three early studies of modern scientific explanation, chiefly addressing Leibniz and Einstein, a multivolume historical synthesis of epistemology, a biography of Kant, and the new scholarly edition of Kant’s collected works that became the standard apparatus for German philosophers, including Heidegger. This astonishing output culminated in the 1920s with Cassirer’s own independent contribution to modern philosophy and his definitive turn from science to culture in the three-volume masterpiece The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, published between 1923 and 1929.11 Although his Jewish origins seem to have inhibited the pace of his professional advancement under the Wilhelmine Empire, in 1919 Cassirer secured a post in philosophy at the newly founded University of Hamburg, and went on to serve as a leading editor at Kantstudien, one of Germany’s leading philosophy journals. When Cassirer appeared at Davos he was widely esteemed, not only in Germany but throughout Europe, as a philosopher of enormous consequence. However, just four years later, he and his wife would be forced to emigrate, first to Sweden and then to the United States, where he taught at Yale until his death in 1945.12 Heidegger, by contrast, was by origin and temperament an outsider to the academic world. Born in 1889 into a modest Swabian–Catholic family, he had demonstrated an early aptitude for scholastic philosophy, from Augustine to the medieval Aristotelians to Brentano, and, though he had briefly considered the Jesuit priesthood, eventually he turned to the academic study of philosophy, chiefly in the areas of phenomenology and logic. In the early 1920s, he attached himself as an apprentice at Freiburg to the great phenomenologist Edmund 11

12

The full titles are: Leibniz’ System (1902), Substance and Function (1910), and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1921), The Theory of Knowledge (1907), and Kants Leben und Lehre (1918). This paper cites Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume I: Language (originally 1923); Volume II: Mythical Thought (originally 1925);Volume III: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (originally 1929), all trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1957), hereafter cited as PSF, followed by vol. number and page; Die Philosophie der Aufkl¨arung (T¨ubingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1932), in English as The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), hereafter PE. A summary of Cassirer’s thought is John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). On Cassirer’s politics, see David R. Lipton, Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of the Liberal Intellectual in Germany, 1914–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). On Cassirer’s Judaism, see Thomas Meyer, “Ernst Cassirer—Judentum aus dem Geist der universalistischen Vernunft,” Aschkenas 10/2 (2000), 459–502; and Oswald Schwemmer, Ernst Cassirer: Ein Philosoph der europ¨aischen Moderne (Berlin, 1997).

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Husserl, and upon assuming a lectureship at the University of Marburg, he slowly earned a reputation among students as a phenomenologist of rival prestige. Hannah Arendt would later recall how news of Heidegger’s teaching spread like “the rumor of a hidden king.” In 1927, to merit consideration for the Freiburg chair in philosophy left vacant upon Husserl’s retirement, Heidegger came under institutional pressure to submit the still-unfinished manuscript of his original philosophy. Published that same year as Being and Time, it was soon hailed as a work of near-epochal significance, yet it also met with considerable controversy, in part for its exotic and frequently obdurate style. To his teacher Husserl, Heidegger’s creation of “existential ontology” seemed an act of almost personal betrayal, as it revivified those theological, historical, and psychological themes which transcendental phenomenology as a “rigorous science” had meant to expel. Nevertheless, by the time Heidegger crossed paths with Cassirer in 1929 he was widely seen as a bold contestant, if not the heir-apparent to the German philosophical tradition. To be sure, Heidegger’s early support for National Socialism considerably tarnished his reputation. But controversy notwithstanding, the influence of his ideas upon European philosophy, political theory, and literary criticism has only continued to grow since his death in 1976.13 The clash between these two titans of European thought was an event of memorable and unusually vivid symbolism, attended by more than 200 students and professors from across Europe.14 Among the younger members of the audience, the impression was almost unanimous that Heidegger had prevailed (an impression shared by Levinas, Leo Strauss, O. F. Bollnow, Joachim Ritter, and many others). In retrospect this may seem odd, since the encounter was not meant as a contest. But the various differences between the two were widely cast in terms of generational schism—the age gap between them was about fifteen years—and Cassirer was at that time institutionally far more established. Moreover, there was a notable difference in temperament, and some recollect Heidegger behaving with

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I cite the following by Heidegger: Sein und Zeit, 11th edn (T¨ubingen: Niemeyer, 1967), hereafter SZ; in English as Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), hereafter BT; Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 5th edn (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991), hereafter KPM. Present were over 200 students and professors, including Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice de Gandillac, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Joachim Ritter, Eugen Fink, Jean de Cavaill´es, and J. B. Soloveitchik. Some place Herbert Marcuse (at the time Heidegger’s student) at Davos, and also Kurt Riezler, perhaps with his friend Leo Strauss. But I have been unable to verify with any primary documentation the presence of either Marcuse or Strauss. See, however, Strauss’s comments on Riezler’s “preference” for Heidegger, in Strauss, “Kurt Riezler (1882–1955),” in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959), 233–60, at 245–6.

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a “sharpness” bordering on the impolite.15 Even the difference in their appearance seemed suggestive: Cassirer’s prematurely white hair only emphasized his age, he dressed in professorial suits, and he seemed always polite and conciliatory in speech, while his adversary was dark-haired and intense, and spoke in a voice that one participant later recalled as “gloomy” and “apprehensive,” as if he were giving vent to feelings “such as one has in anxious dreams.”16 Heidegger frequently appeared at lectures in his ski-clothes—not because he did not have the time to change into more formal attire, but because he seemed to enjoy the effect: he wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann upon his return from Davos that “my hope for the new powers among the youngest [students] has grown stronger . . . it was wonderful, when on intermittent days Riezler and I could get out for excursions,” and then, afterwards, “fatigued, full of the sunlight and freshness of mountains . . . we made our entrance every evening in our ski-suits amidst the elegance of evening attire.” “For most of the Docents and audience,” he adds, “this was something unheard of.”17 Some found Heidegger’s informality refreshing, but Toni Cassirer, Ernst’s wife, seems to have found it displeasing. In her later memoirs she speaks of Heidegger as a “remarkable nemesis” sporting an “unmodern” suit and speaking in a “southern” accent that marked him as “the child of peasants.”18 In recognition of this already dramatic contrast, some of the assembled students decided to amuse themselves and their teachers with a theatrical reenactment: Levinas recalled in a later interview how he joined this “little play” while the real Cassirer and Heidegger looked on: “I took on the role of Cassirer, whose positions Heidegger constantly attacked.” “At that time,” Levinas notes, “I had an abundance of very black hair, and lots of white powder was put on it so as to evoke the noble gray coiffure of the master . . . And, to represent the somewhat sorry Cassirer in the face of his combatant, I would continually repeat: ‘I am a pacifist . . . .’”19 The role of Heidegger was played by one of his own students, Otto

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Ernst Howald writes that “instead of seeing two worlds clash against one another,” “one enjoyed at most a theatrical performance, two spoken monologues, between a very nice man and a very violent man, who, however, made a terrible effort himself to be nice.” In “Betrachtungen zu den Davoser Hochschulkursen,” Neue Z¨urcher Zeitung (April 10, 1929). Hendrik J. Pos, “Recollections of Ernst Cassirer,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, vol. 6 (Evanston, IL: The Library of the Living Philosophers, 1949), 61–72. Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel, 1918–1969, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar, 1989), 30. Toni Cassirer, Aus meinem Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1981; originally published New York, 1950). Emmanuel Levinas, Les impr´evus de l’histoire (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994), “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” 203–10, originally published in Le Monde (Tuesday, June 2, 1992), 2.

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Bollnow (who would later help to transcribe the debate), whom Levinas provided with nonsense lines in mimicry of Heidegger’s etymological inventions, such as “to interpret is to turn the thing on its head.”20 Humorous as this may seem in retrospect, Levinas later regretted this play as a cruel mockery of Cassirer,21 and he confessed that he could never forgive himself for having preferred Heidegger to his Kantian rival.22 The town of Davos, renowned for its spas and its curative alpine air, played its own symbolic part in the encounter. By the time of Cassirer and Heidegger’s 1929 meeting, Davos had long served as a focal point for European travel and culture. It gained further renown as the setting for Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel of ideas, The Magic Mountain, which in retrospect seems to embody many aspects of the Cassirer–Heidegger debate, and which may have served as an inspiration to the creation of the yearly Davos conferences in 1928.23 Originally conceived as an “Alpine University,” the Hochschule was eventually reduced to a three-week retreat and promoted as a cultural summit for the resolution of national rivalries, especially between France and Germany. The yearly gatherings, which lasted only through 1932, boasted such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Paul Tillich, Eberhard Grisebach, Werner Sombart, and Alfred Weber. Journalists would dub it the “Locarno of the Intellectuals.”24 The second annual meeting of the International Davos Hochschule held its opening session on a Sunday in March, 1929. In the first week, in addition to a variety of other scholars’ presentations, Cassirer presented three morning lectures on philosophical anthropology, and Heidegger three afternoon lectures on Kant. In the second week, their independent lectures complete, Cassirer and Heidegger met for their public disputation, or Arbeitsgemeinschaft, in a special two-hour session held on Tuesday morning, March 26.25 Since their dispute hinged on rival interpretations of Kantian doctrine, a deeper assessment of its stakes calls for some preparatory remarks on Kant’s legacy at the time.

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Poiri´e, Emmanuel L´evinas: Qui ˆetes-vous?, 76–9. Alexandre Derczanski, personal conversation with the author, June, 2003. Poiri´e, Emmanuel L´evinas: Qui ˆetes-vous?, 78. On the comparison with Mann’s Zauberberg, see Hans Barth, “Davoser Hochschulkurse 1929,” Neue Z¨urcher Zeitung (Saturday, March 30, 1929), N. 609, Jg. 150, 1. Ernst Cassirer himself was also involved in the early stages of planning; see, e.g., Gr¨under, “Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos, 1929.” The transcript of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft was produced from notes taken by two of Heidegger’s students who were there at Davos, Joachim Ritter and O. F. Bollnow, now an appendix in KPM; in English as “Davos Disputation Between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger” in KPM, English, 171–85. I cite the English version of the debates, abbreviated as DVS, translated and amended as needed.

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the neo-kantian legacy Interest in Kant’s philosophy had gained renewed momentum in the last third of the nineteenth century thanks chiefly to the so-called “neo-Kantian” movement, a diverse group which took up Otto Liebmann’s call for an end to Hegelian and Schopenhauerian metaphysics—summarized in the slogan “back to Kant”—and went on to forge new perspectives on logic and philosophy of science (e.g. Cohen, Natorp), the philosophy of value (Windelband, Rickert), and eventually helped to inspire a newly rigorous method for sociology in both Germany and France (Weber, Durkheim).26 Of all these schools, however, neoKantianism as a term has come to be associated chiefly with the contributions of the so-called “Marburg” School and the works of Hermann Cohen. Cohen’s earliest work, Kant’s Theory of Experience, established a robustly antimetaphysical and science-oriented paradigm that was to remain dominant in Kant scholarship until well into the 1920s. Taking the riddle of the Kantian “thingin-itself ” as the point of departure, Cohen attempted to show that Kant’s chief task was to develop a theory of scientific discovery in which the thing-in-itself surrendered its metaphysical status to become instead a purely methodological idea, as the “task” (Aufgabe) or the as-yet-unexplained of expanding scientific knowledge. This interpretative innovation—from metaphysics to method— became the foundation stone for Cohen’s own original contribution to philosophy, the so-called “critical idealist” system, published in three successive volumes on logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Perhaps Cohen’s most definitive innovation was his claim, in the Logic, to have dispensed with Kant’s dualism: Kant had believed that knowledge requires not only spontaneity but also receptivity, that is, it requires the union of sensible “intuitions” and concepts. But on Cohen’s view, once the independent thing-in-itself has lost its metaphysical status and has been transformed into a merely regulative concept of scientific discovery, there is no further need to regard sensibility as a separate faculty. Kant’s dualism between concepts and intuitions was thereby abandoned in favor of a purely conceptual coherentism.27

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For a general portrait of neo-Kantianism, see Timothy Keck, Kant and Socialism: The Marburg School in Wilhelmian Germany (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1975); Klaus K¨ohnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universit¨atsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1991); and Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus: Die Geschichte einer philosophischen Schulgemeinschaft (W¨urzburg: Verlag K¨onigshausen & Neumann, 1994). For a lucid overview of Cohen’s interpretation of Kant, see Friedman, A Parting of the Ways, 25–37, and Walter Kinkel, Hermann Cohen: Eine Einf¨uhrung in sein Werk (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schr¨oder, 1924).

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The neo-Kantian school as a whole remained at the center of German philosophical controversy well into the 1920s, and its anti-metaphysical and scientific emphasis helped to set the direction for analytic epistemology well into the later twentieth century.28 Cassirer himself was Cohen’s student at Marburg, and Heidegger was a student of the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert. Indeed, while Heidegger’s philosophical originality is unquestionable, his growing success in the 1920s might also be understood as part of the wider atmospheric rebellion against the neo-Kantian tradition: the older ideal of philosophy as a transcendental grounding for science, typified by both Marburg neo-Kantianism and Husserl’s “transcendental” phenomenology, began to yield to new intellectual trends such as life philosophy, hermeneutic phenomenology, and existentialism, amounting to what some critics termed “the resurrection of metaphysics.”29

heidegger’s revision Heidegger’s early interventions in German philosophy are perhaps best explained as part of the emerging rebellion against neo-Kantianism and its antimetaphysical achievement. Already in 1927, in the opening pages of Being and Time, Heidegger complained that while the renewal of metaphysics was now a fashionable slogan, the deeper “question of Being” had been forgotten, chiefly because of persistent “prejudices” which governed the philosophical field.30 Chief amongst these was the Kantian prejudice that Being is not itself a concept, a claim Kant deployed in the First Critique to invalidate the so-called “ontological” proof for the existence of God, but which Heidegger regarded as symptomatic of an ontological error spanning two millennia. Even to pose the question of being in the proper fashion thus required a “destruction” of this ontological tradition, so as to locate and undo the knots of prejudice—moving backwards from the most recent to ancient, from Kant, through Descartes, to the Greeks—that had brought us to this modern impasse. As is well known, Heidegger’s call for such a destruction in the introductory portion of Being and Time remained a promissory note (the projected second part of the book was never written). But the first part alone contained a bold revision of phenomenology, which supplanted Husserl’s “transcendental” inquiry into the intentional structures of human meaning with a so-called “existential” inquiry into the structures of lived human experience. The object of this new investigation

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On the neo-Kantian background of the Davos encounter, see Friedman, A Parting of the Ways, which emphasizes Rudolf Carnap’s role as a “third voice” in the debate. Peter Wust, Die Auferstehung der Metaphysik (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920); Heinrich Kerler, Die auferstandene Metaphysik (Ulm: Verlag Heinrich Kerler, 1921). SZ, 2–4.

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was no longer transcendental consciousness, it was what Heidegger at first termed “life,” and later, “Dasein,” that is, the embodied and practical-historical existence of the human being: to be human, he claimed, is to find oneself in an inescapable predicament, that one cannot hope to understand one’s essential identity apart from the unfolding project of “existence,” or “being-in-the-world.” But since this project always involves some measure of self-understanding, it follows that being-in-the-world carries with it an implicit and unthematized understanding of Being itself. Heidegger’s renewed “ontological” inquiry—the investigation of the sense of Being—thus takes as its point of departure, not the analysis of human consciousness, but rather the analysis of “finite” and irretrievably mortal human existence. In sum, it is a philosophical inquiry into those structures of ontological understanding that belong to the very same existent being who performs the inquiry, the only being for whom its own sense of being is always “at issue.” Even before the publication of Being and Time, it was apparent that this was no longer phenomenology after Husserl’s ideal of a “rigorous science.” Heidegger’s so-called “existential analytic”—an anatomical sketch of being-in-the-world— was steeped in an unfamiliar pathos, earning him both the admiration and the opprobrium of his contemporaries. This project now required what Heidegger termed a “hermeneutic” method: for once Husserl’s search for transcendental grounds had been abandoned and philosophy was called back to an investigation of its own existential conditions, the difference between transcendental structure and empirical content lost all but a procedural meaning. Heidegger now claimed that philosophy takes place always and only from within an experiential horizon from which life contingencies can never be wholly expunged. Existential phenomenology was thus unavoidably a hermeneutic exercise, such that a host of social and historical themes, formerly condemned as mere “worldview” (and, in Husserl’s verdict, as “unscientific”), were granted new dignity as categories deserving phenomenological attention.31 Heidegger’s turn from transcendental to hermeneutic phenomenology had far-reaching implications, not least of which was a deepened opposition to the neo-Kantian legacy. As noted above, neo-Kantianism had placed a premium upon mental spontaneity, even to the point of erasing Kant’s own doctrine of time and space as pure forms of sensibility. Heidegger’s rejection of Husserl’s transcendentalism thus brought him into immediate conflict with neo-Kantianism as well. Both Husserlian phenomenology and Marburg neoKantianism had announced a revolt against psychologism, a revolt which implied a sharp break between the empirical subject and the subject as a merely formal 31

Whether the hermeneutic and phenomenological aspects of Heidegger’s discovery can truly be isolated, of course, remains a topic of ongoing dispute: I thank Jerrold Seigel for his searching comments on this point; a fuller defense must wait for another occasion.

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ground for “pure logic.”32 From the transcendentalist perspective, the formal concept of the subject was that of an essentially rational agency that stood over and against its constituted world. But with Heidegger’s introduction of a detranscendentalized human subject, as an invested and always temporal being-inthe-world, the metaphysical premises of transcendental subjectivity were thrown in doubt. By 1930, the Jesuit philosopher Erich Przywara (also a participant at Davos) could therefore plausibly speak of a “Kant-crisis.”33 A striking moment in Heidegger’s proposed “destruction” of the philosophical tradition was its attempt to read Kant’s critical doctrine against the neo-Kantian school. Anticipating the interpretation of Kant he presented first at Davos, and later that year in his book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger argued that Kant was “the first and only” philosopher in the tradition to have glimpsed the crucial role of temporality in the constitution of phenomena. He thus surmised there might be some “decisive connection” between “time” and the “I think” which Kant claimed must necessarily accompany all representation.34 But this possibility itself, Heidegger argued, seemed to jeopardize reason’s claim to transcendental preeminence in the constitution of phenomena: at the heart of transcendental idealism one found an idea with far-reaching ramifications Kant himself only dimly perceived. For it now seemed that reason was itself dependent upon a temporality born from the imagination, a mode of “original” temporality which escaped reason’s mastery. In his lectures on Kant at Davos, Heidegger returned to this idea to conclude that Kant’s philosophy was best understood as a “groundlaying for metaphysics”: “Negatively, and in opposition to the traditional interpretation of neo-Kantianism, that means: it [Kant’s First Critique] is no theory of mathematical, natural-scientific knowledge—it is not a theory of knowledge at all.” Implicit in this argument was the idea that transcendental idealism possessed a significance far greater than the neo-Kantians had cared to acknowledge: Kant’s true aim, Heidegger claimed, had been a “metaphysical” inquiry into the possibility of human understanding of Being. But the neo-Kantian view was mistaken not only as regards the character of Kant’s philosophy: it had also reinforced the customary prejudice that reason, i.e. categorial logic, was selfsufficient in its ontological status and unlimited in its scope: as noted above, Cohen’s Logic contained the bold suggestion that one might dispense with

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On Husserl’s “transcendental idealism” and his theory of mathematics in relation to Marburg neo-Kantianism, see Oskar Becker, “Die Philosophie Edmund Husserls,” KS 35 (1930), 119–50. Erich Przywara, SJ, in his book Kant heute: Eine Sichtung (M¨unchen/Berlin: Verlag von R. Oldenbourg, 1930), writes of the “Kant-Krise,” 28. SZ, 23; BT, 45. The original has an emphasis on “connection” (emphasis here deleted).

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Kantian intuition altogether, and thereby overcome the last remaining moment of receptivity in Kant’s philosophy as a mere dogma of empiricism. Receptivity was to be abandoned in favor of a more holistic theory of mental spontaneity. Heidegger, however, now attacked this anti-metaphysical theory for its apparent denial of what he termed “finitude” (that is, receptivity and dependency upon worldly intuition) as a basic, constitutive feature of human understanding: Kant’s supposed insight into “finite intuition”—and not spontaneity—was therefore the touchstone for his entire inquiry into human metaphysical knowledge: “The point of departure in reason has thus been broken asunder,” Heidegger concluded, and this implied nothing less than “the destruction of the former foundation of Western metaphysics, spirit, logos, reason.”35 The conflict with neo-Kantianism embedded in Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant was unmistakable: it took aim not only at Cohen’s dissolution of intuition into spontaneity, it also militated against the entire tradition of modern, scienceoriented epistemology that had once sought an end to metaphysics. Heidegger’s own interpretation of Kant would effect nothing less than “a radical, renewed unveiling of the grounds for the possibility of [a new] metaphysics,” as a “natural disposition of human beings.” Heidegger demanded that philosophers “pose the question concerning the essence of human beings in a way . . . prior to all philosophical anthropology and cultural philosophy.”36 He intended his lectures as a direct challenge to neo-Kantianism, not only to its orthodox-epistemological founders, but also to Cassirer’s expansion of their methods into previously uncharted cultural terrain.

cassirer’s philosophy of form That Cassirer was himself hardly the embodiment of neo-Kantian philosophical orthodoxy was clear. Already in the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923) he had taken the decisive step from “the critique of reason to the critique of culture.” Yet despite the obvious originality of his symbolic form theory, it would be a mistake to miss the enduring influence in Cassirer’s work of certain neo-Kantian premises, which he had absorbed while studying under Cohen at Marburg. The school’s creed was transcendentalism, that is, a view of the human mind as an essentially spontaneous and creative faculty which is capable of laying down transcendental conditions for its own surroundings and, therefore, of shaping the experienced world according to its own forms of intelligibility. To be sure, Cohen anchored this moment of transcendental 35 36

See on this point Peter A. Schmid, “Endlichkeit und Angst: Heidegger und Cassirer 1929 in Davos,” in Kaegi and Rudolph, eds., Cassirer–Heidegger: 70 Jahre Davoser Debatte, 130–55. KPM (mimeograph), as an appendix in KPM, English, 171.

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spontaneity in logic and had reserved its highest stage for scientific explanation, while Cassirer is credited with having relaxed the implicit scientism in Cohen’s thinking in favor of a more generous and pluralistic theory of cultural expression. Still, the core premise of transcendental formation proved highly flexible in its application, and Cassirer found it possible after the turn to culture in the 1920s to apply this transcendentalism to non-scientific phenomena such as language and myth. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms represented a bold effort to interpret all of human creativity after the transcendental model.37 Culture, Cassirer claimed, is an ever-expanding and pluralistic field of symbolic expression. Its apparent diversity nonetheless obeys certain formative laws, the expressive and a priori structuring principles of the human mind itself. Cassirer wished to show how an essentially Kantian theory regarding the formative powers of transcendental consciousness might guide his own inquiry into the nature of scientific symbolism as well as the “deeper” and historically prior modes of symbolic expression such as language and myth.38 Some would credit Cassirer’s theory of a self-created human symbolic order with a generous regard for “primitive” or even “irrational” modes of symbolism. Indeed, Cassirer’s inquiry into myth and magic drew inspiration from Aby Warburg’s library at Hamburg, where the unusual arrangement of books on the shelves juxtaposed a rich panoply of exotic rites and beliefs, folklore, astrology, magic, and esoteric wisdom, inspiring the visitor’s appreciation of the diversity of human culture. But in fact Cassirer’s attraction to cultural variety had little to do with multicultural promiscuity: the apparent pluralism of his approach was held firmly in check by a developmentalist theory that confined the diverse forms of symbolic expression to an unapologetically linear and developmentalist narrative. From myth to science, Cassirer claimed, human expressive capacities followed a single, world-historical path such that the history of symbolic expression became a quasi-Hegelian history of spiritual selfcultivation. The entire theory of symbolic form thus culminated in the third and final volume with an analysis of science that Cassirer, in homage to Hegel, termed a “phenomenology” of knowledge.39 On Cassirer’s view, it is impossible to

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¨ But cf. Wolfgang R¨od, “Transcendentalphilosophie oder Ontologie? Uberlegungen zu Grundfragen der Davoser Disputation,” in Kaegi and Rudolph, eds., Cassirer–Heidegger: 70 Jahre Davoser Debatte, 1–25. See Cassirer’s programmatic essay, “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften,” Bibliothek Warburg, Vortr¨age, 1921/22 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1923), 11–39, at 15. The term “phenomenology” was meant in its Hegelian sense, without mention of Husserl and Heidegger. On Cassirer and “phenomenology,” see Friedman, A Parting of the Ways,

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remain at the level of mythical thinking, because it is only by means of a “crisis”— a breakthrough from myth to modernity—that philosophical reflection as well as science can first arrive on the scene. Thus “the concept of philosophy attains its full power and purity only where the world view expressed in linguistic and mythical concepts is abandoned, where it is in principle overcome.” Given this developmentalist premise, Cassirer’s theory of form thus cannot be credited with a non-hierarchical pluralism. Indeed, the internal “logic of philosophy” required that humanity awaken from mythic devotion to acknowledge its own responsibility in creating its symbolic order.40 Cassirer was therefore unabashedly a modernist, and self-reflexively so, in that his theory of symbolic development seemed to underwrite his own theoretical labor. A true “philosophy” of symbolic form demanded insight into the inner constitution of symbolism, and was thus only possible given the breakthrough from myth to modernity. Philosophy, Cassirer observed, “first constitutes itself by this very act of transcendence.”41 Cassirer’s strong allegiance both to Kantian transcendental premises and to the primacy of science thus remained more or less unshaken even after his turn to culture in the 1920s. Indeed, in the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, completed just before the Davos encounter, Cassirer affirmed that science alone represents the culmination of human symbolic achievements. The hallmark of modern scientific thinking was that any remaining attachment to the explanation of things as “substance” had been dialectically supplanted by explanation in terms of pure “function” alone. Elaborating upon ideas set forth in Substance and Function and applied explicitly to modern physics in his 1921 study of relativity, Cassirer charted a gradual transformation in scientific explanation from the dogmatic metaphysics of “substance” to the “purely symbolic theory” of relations: whereas classical physics anchored its claims in material masses and so cleaved, if only surreptitiously, to a kind of metaphysical realism, modern science had reached a point of thoroughgoing intellectual abstraction where the coherence of purely internal relations dispensed with any and all appeals to the supposed nature of non-conceptual “reality.”42 The entire movement of science aims toward supplanting na¨ıve realism with a kind of conceptual

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101 n. 141; and Fritz Kaufmann, “Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology,” in Schlipp, ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 6:799–854. On myth and the “crisis” of separation from myth inaugurating both philosophy and natural science, see esp. PSF, 3:27. Ibid. See Felix Kaufmann, “Cassirer’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge,” in Schlipp, ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 6:183–213, esp. 203.

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coherentism, where human consciousness has replaced “the concept of being” with “the concept of order.”43 Given Cassirer’s robust attachment to a Kantian-transcendental model of mind and his modernist conviction that genuine philosophical insight emerges only in correlation to natural science, it is not surprising that he found much room for disagreement with Heidegger. Even before the Davos disputation, signs of the deepening intellectual gulf between them had surfaced in the guise of a seemingly methodological quarrel concerning the instruments proper to the study of myth. Cassirer and Heidegger had first met in December, 1923, in Hamburg, for a local meeting of the Kantgesellschaft, and Heidegger notes in Being and Time that “we had agreed in demanding an existential analytic” for the understanding of myth.44 Heidegger complained a year later in a review of Cassirer’s volume on myth that “the neo-Kantian orientation” to consciousness was “disadvantageous,” since Cassirer merely assumed the mythical subject’s “ontological constitution” as a transcendental spontaneity, but had neglected the prior task of laying out a “radical ontology” of “mythic Dasein.”45 But this, claimed Heidegger, meant Cassirer saw myth from the point of view of a specifically “modern” and enlightened consciousness, as if it were obvious that primitive thought exhibited the disengagement and “presence” characteristic of a Kantian subject.46

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Cassirer, “Mythischer, a¨ esthetischer, und theoretischer Raum,” an address to the Vierter ¨ Congress f¨ur Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Stuttgart: H. Noack, 1931). The shift from substance to function—or, more accurately, from metaphysical realism to coherentism—is a guiding thought in all of Cassirer’s works, including his 1932 work of historical synthesis, PE, and in “Kant und die moderne Mathematik,” KS 12 (1907), 1–40. The core statement is in PSF, 3:20–21. See also Felix Kaufmann, “Cassirer’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge,” 183–213, esp. 198. But cf. Swabey, “Cassirer and Metaphysics,” who attacks Cassirer’s “anti-realism” promoting “relativism” and “nihilism,” in Schlipp, ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 6:121–48. But Heidegger also doubts Cassirer’s approach, since “it remains an open question whether . . . the architectonics and . . . systematic content of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can provide a possible design for such a task, or whether a new . . . more primordial approach may not here be needed.” SZ, Div. I, Ch. 1, n. xi. Martin Heidegger, “Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. 2. Teil: Das mythische Denken (Berlin, 1925)” (review). Originally published in Deutsche Literaturzeitung, N.F. 5 (1928), Heft 21, Sp. 1000–1012, now appendix II in KPM, 5th edn (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), 255–70; in English as “Review of Mythic Thought” in The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger, trans. James Hart and John Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 32–45, hereafter MH, review of PSF2. The argument is reiterated in Heidegger’s summer 1928 lectures, Metaphysische Anfangsgr¨unde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, in his Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt:

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This seemingly localized disagreement had far-reaching implications. Philosophically, it signaled Heidegger’s rejection of any model of subjectivity as ontologically split from its representations: the sense of being “overwhelmed” was not, as Cassirer supposed, a mere illusion inflicted upon primitive consciousness only because it still lacked rational insight into its symbol-making capabilities. It was, rather, an experience of all human life in the modality of involvement and concern Heidegger called “everydayness.” Heidegger thus rejected Cassirer’s underlying Kantian model of the subject as sovereign and embraced a model of subjecthood as dependent; indeed, the primitive experience of mythic dependency was on Heidegger’s view only one illustration of the “thrownness” beneath all seeming “spontaneity.” Politically, this debate over hermeneutic thrownness as against transcendental spontaneity was later to inform Cassirer’s final and most public condemnation of Heidegger’s philosophy in The Myth of the State, where Cassirer charged that the theory of thrownness was a self-surrender of philosophical autonomy and a return to political “fatalism” and, therefore, to “myth.”47

the davos disputation The intellectual context sketched above provides a helpful background for understanding the various stakes of the 1929 encounter between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos. Indeed, this contextual preparation is crucial, since it shows how their meeting was only one stage within a long-germinating intellectual dispute that began as early as 1923 and continued, without overt hostility, throughout the 1920s, only reaching an explicitly political phase long after Davos in 1946 with Cassirer’s published critique of Heidegger’s return to myth. The Davos dispute was momentous, but less a rupture than a way station in an ongoing and continuously evolving philosophical conversation that lasted nearly a quarter of a century.48 The dialogue began with Cassirer’s remark that Heidegger, his protests notwithstanding, was himself a neo-Kantian. Since Heidegger in his independent lectures the previous week had just sketched the basic contours of his own

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Klostermann, 1978), 26; in English, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), esp. 138ff. See MH, review of PSF2, 43–5, and Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946), esp. 369. For a discussion, see Peter Eli Gordon, “Myth and Modernity: Cassirer’s Critique of Heidegger,” New German Critique, Special Issue on Secularizaton (forthcoming). Here I cite the Davos transcript in my retranslation; readers may consult the appendix to KPM, cited above, n. 25.

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interpretation of Kant as an explicit rejoinder to the neo-Kantians, Cassirer’s remark may seem counter-intuitive. Indeed, Cassirer seems to have recognized this: “Neo-Kantianism,” he claimed, “is the scapegoat of the newer philosophy.” But Heidegger’s seeming antipathy was misplaced, on Cassirer’s view, since “the term ‘neo-Kantianism’” was “not a matter of the kind of philosophy as dogmatic doctrinal system.” Rather, “it is a matter of a direction taken in question-posing,” and was best understood “functionally rather than substantially.” Heidegger was therefore quarreling with premises his own phenomenological method appeared to support. Provocative as this may seem, Cassirer’s suggestion was in many respects correct. Heidegger’s theory of receptive and existential understanding, though seemingly opposed to the neo-Kantian theory of mental spontaneity, was still “transcendental” in the broader sense, since it fulfilled Kant’s original assignment to examine the set of formal conditions that first permit the world to be disclosed as a world for human understanding. For Heidegger, of course, these formal conditions were “existential” rather than “transcendental,” and were thus themselves caught up in the world they disclosed. It was this circularity of form and content that lent Heidegger’s theory its distinctively hermeneutic character. Moreover, such existential conditions were on Heidegger’s view grounded not in reason, as Kant supposed, but instead in the faculty of human imagination and “primordial” temporality. But this difference could hardly vitiate the force of Cassirer’s remark. On Cassirer’s view, neo-Kantianism was best interpreted “functionally” and not “substantially,” since notwithstanding the possibly scientistic limitations of Cohen’s original theory, Cohen had supplied philosophy with the renewed energy to seek formal conditions of intelligibility, a method which Cassirer believed might be fruitfully generalized across the field of human experience. Cohen’s rationalist legacy was thus less a dogma than a directive: the enduring merit of Cohen’s theory was less the privileged position it assigned to science than its attempt to dissolve any remaining metaphysical-realist commitment to a “thing-in-itself” separable from the movement of understanding. Cassirer’s “coherentism”—the doctrine that a selfsufficient and internally consistent symbolic order dispenses with any reference to a metaphysical exterior—therefore represented an extension of Cohen’s anti-metaphysical revision. And because Heidegger’s “hermeneutic” theory of intelligibility was similarly coherentist and anti-realist, it was plausible in this respect to see Heidegger himself as an heir to the neo-Kantian tradition. Heidegger seems to have little welcomed this suggestion. The tone of the debate as gleaned from the transcript seems to have grown increasingly oppositional; and Heidegger spent much of the remaining session trying to differentiate between his own philosophical position and Cassirer’s. This may well reflect a contrast of discursive style. Cassirer was urbane and conciliatory, while Heidegger was almost

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rude: Cassirer’s wife, Toni, saw him as a “nemesis” who was determined “to reduce Cohen’s legacy to dust, and if possible to destroy Ernst as well.”49 Yet memoirs of the encounter seem to suggest that despite their various disagreements on matters philosophical, personal relations between the two men remained largely amicable, and it would be misleading to cast the Davos encounter as a bitter clash of political worldviews. Heidegger visited Cassirer when the latter fell ill during the conference, and their meeting later that same year seems to have been cordial. Even Toni Cassirer notes in her memoirs that when she told Heidegger of the chauvinism that had barred both Cohen and Ernst Cassirer in their careers, she had the pleasure of seeing how Heidegger softened “like hard bread dipped in warm milk.”50 Heidegger himself wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann shortly after his return from Davos that “in matters philosophical I gained nothing, although I did personally from my relations with [Riezler, Reinhardt, and] . . . Cassirer.” But Heidegger nevertheless complained that in the public dispute “Cassirer was almost too obliging. Thus I found too little opposition, which prevented me from giving the problems the requisite sharpness of formulation.”51 To the assembled audience, Heidegger had declared that he was “against leveling” their points of disagreement (Cassirer, seemingly unaware of the irony, readily agreed). And in his closing remarks at Davos, Heidegger emphasized to his audience that “the differentiation of standpoints is at the root of philosophical labor.” The chief difference concerned the status of objectivity. Cassirer remained committed to an ideal of intersubjective validity in ethics and descriptive objectivity in natural-scientific explanation that Heidegger seemed ready to abandon for the sake of his more “radical” theory of hermeneutic and “finite” understanding. Most of all, Cassirer believed Heidegger’s rejection of Kantian transcendentalism sacrificed any appeal to objective truth: Heidegger has emphasized that our power of knowledge is finite . . . relative and . . . fixed. But . . . the question arises: how does such a finite creature . . . come to have knowledge, to have reason, to have truth? [Heidegger claims] there can be no truths in themselves, nor . . . any external truths at all. Rather, . . . truths are relative to Dasein. [But for] Kant, the problem was precisely: Without prejudice to the finitude which Kant himself showed, how, nevertheless, can there be necessary and universal truths?

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Toni Cassirer, Aus meinem Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, 181–2. She further recalls: “We had been . . . prepared for Heidegger’s . . . hostility toward the neo-Kantians, especially toward Cohen.” And: “his tendency toward anti-Semitism was not unknown to us.” Pierre Bourdieu conflates these into a single ideology; see The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, passim. Toni Cassirer, Aus meinem Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, 182, and passim. Heidegger and Blochmann, Briefwechsel, 1918–1969, ed. Storck, 30.

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For Cassirer, Heidegger’s theory of finitude risked collapsing all knowledge claims into contingent and necessarily subjective claims lacking objective validity. Any such collapse, he warned, was clearly inconsistent with Kantian doctrine, since, notwithstanding the force of Heidegger’s interpretation, the inquiry into the possibility of synthetic apriori knowledge was intended to show how a “finite creature” can nonetheless “come to a determination of objects which are not bound to finitude.” On Cassirer’s view, only a transcendental theory of mind could justify our claims to objectivity in scientific description, since only a doctrine of a priori conceptual form could supply experience with rules bearing objective validity across all rational beings. Cassirer further claimed that his doctrine of symbolic form remained faithful to Kant precisely in its appeal to a transcendental theory of mind that guaranteed objectivity in culture and in language as well as in science: “This is the function of form,” Cassirer argued, that “even while man changes the form of his Dasein” he can “transpose everything in him which is lived experience into some objective shape,” so that although he does not achieve a “realistic” liberation from his finitude, he may still arrive at an “immanent infinitude,” and “can and must” effect a “metabasis which leads him from the immediacy of his existence into the region of pure form.” The fact that human understanding is the source of stable and intersubjectively valid principles of order, claimed Cassirer, is the best proof that, even while the existential human being “does not thereby become radically free from finitude as the point of departure,” it nonetheless arrives at this qualitatively new plateau of time-independent “infinity,” since form involves the transcendence of merely finite and existential bounds.52 In Cassirer’s boldest rejoinder to Heidegger, he argued that a de-transcendentalized theory of human understanding such as Heidegger proposed in Being and Time failed to sustain this requisite objectivity: “Does Heidegger want to renounce this entire objectivity, this form of absoluteness which Kant advocated in the ethical and the theoretical, as well as in the Critique of Judgment? Does he want to withdraw completely to the finite creature or, if not, where for him is the breakthrough to this sphere?” “I believe,” added Cassirer, “that Heidegger [himself] cannot be capable of abiding by [this finitude], nor can he want to.” This was perhaps Cassirer’s most decisive criticism of Heidegger, as it took aim not only at Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, but also at the deepest and most troublesome moment of conceptual tension in Heidegger’s own philosophy, between its claim to objective-phenomenological description (the “ontological” inquiry into Dasein’s apparently constitutive existential structure) and its concession to non-objective hermeneutics (the doctrine that

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DVS, 184.

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even phenomenological description occurs within local-subjective bounds). Heidegger had betrayed Kant’s transcendental doctrine, and his fateful retreat from objectivity also threw into doubt the authority of Heidegger’s own phenomenological project as a “description” of existential structure. Heidegger, however, would have readily granted that even the language of his own philosophical inquiry was subject to hermeneutic constraints. Although he failed to articulate this idea directly to Cassirer at Davos, it was already an explicit theme in Being and Time, where it was admitted that any and all phenomenological description, including this one, occurred not from a privileged and “transcendental” position but only from within a given culturalhistorical horizon. To be sure, Cassirer’s suggestion that language presupposes the possibility of a “truth” non-relative to the human historical condition was wholly foreign to Heidegger’s manner of thinking, and it failed to recognize what Heidegger saw as a decisive feature of truth itself—its indelibly hermeneutic character: Now to Cassirer’s question concerning universally valid eternal truths. If I say: truth is relative to Dasein, . . . this statement is a metaphysical one: in general, truth can only be as truth . . . if Dasein exists. If Dasein does not exist, there is no truth, and then there is nothing at all.

Despite the drama of this disagreement, it is worth noting here that the gap between Cassirer’s transcendentalism and Heidegger’s hermeneutics was not nearly so pronounced as later “political” interpretations have assumed. As noted above, Cassirer recognized that his own theory of “immanent” form shared many points in common with Heidegger’s theory of existential transcendental structure. It was really only in public dialogue with Heidegger that the contrast between them began to assume a somehow grander, more “allegorical,” significance, and this happened only when Cassirer and Heidegger turned aside from their core dispute over metaphysics and epistemology to address questions of ethics and freedom and henceforth began—even in the midst of their conversation—to annotate their disagreement with cultural and historical meaning. On Cassirer’s view, ethical thought best disclosed the realm “beyond the world of appearances,” and thus implied a “decisively metaphysical . . . breakthrough” to a “mundus intelligibus” that is “no longer relative to the finitude of the knowing creature.” While he agreed with Heidegger that the schematism held a pivotal role in Kant’s critical doctrine, he insisted that the schematism, pace Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, was confined in Kant’s philosophy to the role of demonstrating how the pure concepts individually find application in time. But since the concept of freedom, as formalized in the categorical imperative, is not itself an object of knowledge, it cannot be expected to show up as a “given” for sensible intuition. It therefore escapes all schematization and is instead a pure “thought” without a temporal—or “finite”—index.

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Heidegger quickly objected, however, that even in ethics human understanding cannot achieve such a metaphysical “breakthrough.” While ontological knowledge belonged essentially to human existence, such knowledge comprised on Heidegger’s view the sole and unique meaning of transcendence, which did not, however, burst the bounds of the human–temporal horizon. In fact, the concept of ethical duty as embodied in the categorical imperative was, Heidegger claimed, the best evidence that transcendence does not cancel submission, and that obedience to an imperative involves a “going beyond” that nonetheless remains within the realm of finitude. Here a further meaning of the conflict between Cassirer’s transcendentalism and Heidegger’s hermeneutic perspective at last became apparent: for Cassirer, the moment of spontaneity in human understanding served as a foundation not only for scientific-mathematical truth, but also for the guiding principles of human freedom. And because this spontaneity was prior to what Heidegger called “creatureliness,” it permitted an otherwise “finite” humanity a glimpse of ethical “eternity” irreducible to temporal experience. On Cassirer’s view, therefore, philosophy was not condemned to ruminating upon finitude and anxiety but instead “frees man . . . from anxiety as a mere disposition [Befindlichkeit].” To illustrate this point, Cassirer cited a line from a poem by Schiller: “‘Cast off your fear of the earthly.’ This is the stance of idealism, with which I have always identified.” If Heidegger rejected Cassirer’s transcendentalism, he also found it necessary to recast the idea of freedom in terms consonant with his own hermeneutic perspective. As against the Kantian doctrine of mental spontaneity, Heidegger now characterized the transcendental doctrine in unfamiliar terms as an “inner transcendence of Dasein.” But, he hastened to add, this did not involve “becoming free” in the sense of “forming images in consciousness” or achieving a breakthrough to an intersubjectively valid “realm of form.” Instead, this “inner transcendence” of Dasein in relation to its own hermeneutic bounds now meant simply “becoming free for the finitude of Dasein.” This remarkable new movement—to become free for rather than from finitude—is all that was left to Heidegger’s thought as a final remnant of Kantian autonomy now that an idealistic faith in transcendental reason had been abandoned.53 In the closing portion of the Davos encounter, Heidegger and Cassirer seemed now to agree that the differences between them were far deeper than either of them had originally supposed. They saw that they shared a single terminus a quo (point of departure), since they agreed that philosophical inquiry must always commence with the meaningful structure of human experience. But, 53

See also Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations, esp. the sections on “the problem of transcendence” and “the transcendence of Dasein,” 136–219.

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while Cassirer believed that this transcendental project reached its terminus ad quem (point of destination) with the realization of an objectivity in both science and ethics that was no longer relative to its factual beginning, Heidegger claimed that finitude remained for philosophy both its origin and its end.54 The contrast between these two positions was only further exacerbated by a question posed to Cassirer (by either Heidegger or a student from the audience) in quite stark and almost polemical terms: “To what extent does philosophy have as its task to be allowed to become free from anxiety? Or does it not have as its task to surrender man, even radically, to anxiety?” Cassirer’s answer, as noted above, was to quote Schiller’s dictum about casting aside one’s anxiety, a phrase which he would feel moved to cite once again in his lengthy 1931 review of Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics so as to emphasize the stylistic contrast between Kant’s Enlightenment heritage and Heidegger’s debts to “the world of Kierkegaard.”55 That Heidegger rejected Schiller’s dictum and the idealist culture it typified seems clear, which may help to explain why Heidegger’s remarks during the Davos disputation on Cassirer’s “cultural philosophy” seem mocking in tone: in Heidegger’s view, Cassirer’s inquiry into cultural form carried the risk that culture itself might become an instrument in Dasein’s attempt to “flee” from recognition of its own “nothingness.” A philosophical inquiry concerning the “essence of human being” could only be meaningful, Heidegger warned, “insofar as it derives its motivation from philosophy’s central problematic itself, which leads man back beyond himself and into the totality of beings, so as to make manifest to him there, with all his freedom, the nothingness of his Dasein.” But, Heidegger concluded, “this nothingness” was “not the occasion for pessimism and melancholy.” Rather, it was an occasion for deepening one’s sense that “authentic activity” takes place only where there is “opposition,” and that philosophy must therefore assume as its central task not that of “the shallow appearance of the man who merely makes use of the work of the spirit,” but rather that of “throwing man back, so to speak, into the hardness of his fate.”

conclusions As seen above, the Cassirer–Heidegger debate brings into vivid focus many of the themes that continue to be of overwhelming concern in the ongoing struggle in continental thought between transcendentalism and hermeneutics. From the cultural-political point of view, of course, historians have discerned a less rarefied meaning: already in 1929, Heidegger despaired of a “growing Jewish influence” and the need to counter it “through a renewed infusion of genuine, native teachers 54 55

DVS, in KPM. Cassirer, “Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik,” KS 36 (1931), 1–26.

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and educators” for the sake of “German intellectual life.” And in 1933 he further complained of “the neo-Kantian school” as a “philosophy . . . tailor-made for liberalism, [in which] the essence of man . . . is thinned down to a general, logical world-reason.” Thus, he added, “on an apparently rigorous scientific basis, [one] turns away from man in historical rootedness and his national . . . origins in earth and blood,” leading to a loss of “all metaphysical questioning.”56 The disputation between Cassirer and Heidegger has thus been understood—by Pierre Bourdieu, for example—as one of the last moments of struggle between a waning tradition of liberal rationalism (often seen by its detractors as narrowly scientific, antimetaphysical, and “Jewish”) and an ascendant ideology of conservative revolution (which advertised itself as restoring Europe to its national-historical roots and its genuinely “metaphysical” inheritance). The question remains whether such political and cultural values truly represent the “inner meaning” of the Davos encounter, or whether the intellectual disagreement between Cassirer and Heidegger must instead be assessed primarily on philosophical grounds. To postwar audiences, of course, the two became inseparable. Even the most precise facts of this pre-war exchange now seemed doubly portentous and richly laced with future meaning, and in the 1945 interview with the two envoys from France, Heidegger took care to mention that he had “not hesitated” to observe a remnant of academic custom, that he had shaken the hand of “the Jew Cassirer.” De Gandillac relates this as fact; but unsurprisingly, there is conflicting testimony on just this point: Hendrik de Pos, the Dutch professor of philology with strong leanings toward Cassirer, published an essay in 1949 in which, among other things, he would recall his own participation in the Davos encounter, and he was careful to record there that, at the end of the debate, Cassirer extended his hand, but Heidegger refused to take it.57 There is no decisive evidence as to which story is correct. Such discrepancies help to illustrate a more general problem as to how intellectual historians read philosophical disputes. Because the drama of personal and political confrontation is quickly legible, while the spectacle of philosophical disagreement is not nearly so visible to the eye, historians are frequently tempted to transform the conceptual combat between intellectuals into another, more legible type of combat possessing some greater, more allegorical significance. The interpretation of ideas thereby shifts problems of philosophy into problems of political affiliation, as if one could then simply “resolve” the originally philosophical problems on a political plane. This transformation is not always 56 57

Quoted by Ulrich Sieg, “Die Verjudung des deutschen Geist,” Die Zeit 52/22 (Dec. 1989), 19. Hendrik J. Pos, “Recollections of Ernst Cassirer,” in Schlipp, ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 6:61–72.

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something that happens only in retrospect: the “little spectacle” that Levinas helped to direct at Davos for a night-time gathering of teachers and students is a quaint but instructive example of how readily intellectuals themselves will effect the transition from concepts to caricature, not only for their own amusement, but also so as to lend their own activity a somehow more worldly ramification. Indeed, Heidegger and Cassirer themselves already indulged in this habit of allegorical interpretation, since even as they laid out their own ideas they worked to make those ideas more vivid by inscribing them into more ramified and seemingly more consequential cultural-political narratives. Cassirer’s brilliant use of Schiller’s poem to mark the idealist “culture” of his own thinking is one such example; Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is another. The latter is unacceptable where the former is not, but chiefly for political reasons, and not because historians object to cultural inscription as a matter of principle. One might argue that what I have called cultural inscription is inevitable and should be welcomed. Both Cassirer and Heidegger conceived of themselves as philosophers within history, and both developed philosophies of history that helped to describe how their own philosophical labor was born from and might be written into the political and cultural story they wished to tell about how the modern world was unfolding. For Cassirer this was the story of emergent self-consciousness in the deployment of the symbolic—a narrative that identifies philosophy with scientific and cultural modernity. For Heidegger it was the story of ontological oblivion—and this was also a narrative of scientific modernity, which was now seen not as the realization but as the negation of philosophy. Cassirer equipped his own philosophy with a self-credentializing narrative about its emergence from myth, while Heidegger wanted to cast his philosophy as a protest against this history, although this, too, was on a deeper level simply a different inscription of “genuine” philosophy into the history of its forgetting. The question remains whether such inscriptions always help us toward a fuller appreciation of the ideas, or whether sometimes even the original inscriptions are better seen as allegories—that is, strategies of historicization and cultural annotation—by which thinkers both mobilize and distort their ideas as they are drawn into controversy. The epigraph to this essay is a passage from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities which refers to the very same poem by Schiller, “The Ideal and Life,” that Cassirer used at Davos to announce his cultural-political identification with the Enlightenment. But Musil is less sanguine than his contemporary: “There was a time,” he writes, “when people talked of their thoughts taking wing.” “In Schiller’s time,” he laments, “such intellectual highfliers would have been widely esteemed,” while “in our own day such a person seems to have something the matter with him, unless it happens to be his profession and source of income.” He concludes: “There has obviously been a shift in our priorities . . . For to think without

continental divide: ernst cassirer and martin heidegger at davos, 1929

pursuing some practical purpose is surely an improper, furtive occupation.” And those who are not “practical” thereby leave themselves open to what Musil might have called (had he read Ricoeur) the hermeneutics of suspicion: “especially those thoughts that take huge strides on stilts, touching experience only with tiny soles, are automatically suspect of having disreputable origins.”58 For philosophers who are willing to think of themselves as participants in the historical condition, the separation between “concept” and “culture” is thus prone to collapse. To insist upon the possibility of daylight between them may well be a prerequisite for what Cassirer called “truth.” But belief that this separation is a metaphysical one seems now largely extinguished, no doubt partly thanks to Heidegger’s hermeneutic assault on the idol of transcendental consciousness. Politics notwithstanding, Heidegger’s philosophical “victory” over Cassirer’s transcendentalism stands at the origins of the twentieth century’s turn toward historicism, and thus serves as one of the indispensable foundations for intellectual-historical method today. For if a chief assignment for intellectual history is to make thought legible within a broader narrative plane, then one might argue that the temptation to collapse thought into history is simply constitutive of intellectual history as a discipline. Historicism is always a risk, but it is one from which intellectual historians have reaped great rewards. As I noted at the beginning of this essay, intellectual historians have frequently believed that the preeminent context of historical explanation is political. But with this belief comes the risk that a fixation upon “disreputable” origins will come to predominate to such a degree that at last only so-called “practical” motivations will seem real. But here intellectual history may turn anti-intellectual, as if the historical inscription of ideas meant nothing more than their unmasking as power.59 This was, of course, one of the fears regarding “materialist” causation that motivated the historicist rejection of Marxism more than a century ago. More recently, critics of Foucault’s genealogy who miss his historicist inheritance will often fault him for ostensibly “reducing” truth to power. Such criticism is of course dissolved once we see that it appeals surreptitiously to a transcendental model (of freedom as external to power). But the problem of self-reflexivity continues to afflict intellectual-historical practice, since, as Habermas has argued, 58 59

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1, ed. Burton Pike, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 399. I owe this idea and the notion of “anti-intellectual history” to ongoing conversation with my friend and colleague Samuel Moyn. For remarks on this essay and related chapters, I am grateful to the New York Area Consortium for Intellectual History, most especially Richard Wolin and Jerrold Seigel. Thanks also for the excellent comments and criticism from Martin Jay and Eugene Sheppard. My warmest thanks for their searching remarks and suggestions for improvement to Anthony La Vopa and the editors of Modern Intellectual History.

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the fulfillment of historicism also undoes the possibility of its truth. The ongoing and unresolved tension between transcendentalism and hermeneutics thus seems constitutive of intellectual history as a discipline. As noted above, this very same dilemma touched Heidegger himself, insofar as he remained split in loyalty between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Ironically, however, the best talisman against the wholesale dissolution of philosophy into history is still the transcendentalism Heidegger set out to destroy. For this very reason, the Davos disputation is perennial and cannot be brought to an end.

C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 2 (2004), pp. 249–265.
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000149 Printed in the United Kingdom

stephen greenblatt, new historicism, and cultural history, or, what we talk about when we talk about interdisciplinarity sarah maza Department of History, Northwestern University

Michael Warner, a literary critic with a keen sense of history, wrote in 1987 that “New Historicism is a label that historians don’t like very much because they understand something different by historicism. But nobody’s asking historians . . . .”1 This essay is an answer to questions nobody asked me, questions about interdisciplinarity and the differences between literary critical and historical practices. A return to historically informed literary criticism, which many critics still consider a dominant trend in the profession,2 emerged in the early 1980s following the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s acclaimed Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). Reacting as it did against the decontextualized abstractions of New Criticism and Deconstruction, the movement soon labeled New Historicism sought to breathe new life into canonical texts by relating them to non-literary texts and social practices of their day. This historicist inclination should have formed the basis for a coming together of the movement’s practitioners with historians interested in literary representations. But no such merger has occurred: New Historicists evince little interest in the systematic, archivally based study of history, and historians have at best shown indifference to the work of Greenblatt and his followers. This outcome is all the more surprising given that the New Historicism took shape in a high-profile interdisciplinary context created, starting in the early

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Quoted in Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 6–7. See Morris Dickstein, “Literary Theory and Historical Understanding”, Chronicle of Higher Education (May 23, 2003), section 2, 7–10.

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1980s, by the journal Representations.3 Along with Greenblatt, the editorial board of Representations included some of the best-known and most influential cultural historians of the late twentieth century: Natalie Zemon Davis, Lynn Hunt, and Thomas Laqueur.4 More broadly, the trend in the humanities embodied by Representations was similar to moves made in social-scientific disciplines in the later twentieth century away from grand systems and towards the individual, the particular, and the contingent.5 The commonalities between the New Historicism and the New Cultural History are striking. Both took shape largely in studies of the same time and place, early modern Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; both evinced a strong interest in similar subject matter, including marginality, popular and festive culture, gender, sexuality, and crime and violence; and they invoked the same roster of intellectual authorities, including Marx, Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault. While the initial group of scholars and their followers are generally respectful and appreciative of one another, their endeavors remain to this day quite separate, and have generated, for instance, almost no published collaborations across fields. For the purposes of this essay, I focus on the work of Stephen Greenblatt as the founder and quintessential representative of the movement known as New Historicism, though obviously in the quarter-century or so of its existence it has had countless adherents and generated some markedly different kinds of scholarship.6 My ultimate goal is, of course, not to give a full account of

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Thomas, The New Historicism, 117–18. See also the description of the journal and its founders in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–5. This new form of scholarship was given its name with the publication of Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), a volume which grew out of a high-profile conference at Berkeley in the mid-1980s. The volume, which includes contributions by Hunt, Laqueur and others, is dedicated to Natalie Davis. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), vii–viii. Muir points to such comparable developments as microlinguistics, microsociology, and the turn towards the case study in ethnology (Jane Goodall) and neurology (Oliver Sacks). Some recent works which illustrate both the diversity and the enduring influence of New Historicism include: Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Gail Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipline of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Garrett Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

stephen greenblatt, new historicism, and cultural history

New Historicism, but to use Greenblatt’s work as a means of offering some thoughts about why historians and literary critics think differently about the past and put “history” to very different uses. Historians often approach literary criticism with a hostility, or at least skepticism, that gets in the way of trying to understand what literary critics are really doing. In conversation, if rarely in print, historians routinely dismiss literary criticism as self-indulgent, trendy, arbitrary and jargon-ridden. There is nothing useful or intellectually engaging about such complaints, but neither is there much value in the opposite stance, that which mindlessly glorifies the ideal of interdisciplinarity without giving serious thought to the problems it raises. My point here is that there is a lot to be learnt from trying to grasp and describe precisely the differences between superficially similar disciplinary practices. Understanding these differences may not automatically advance the cause of interdisciplinary collaboration, but at the very least it makes for a more interesting conversation. Defining New Historicism is not easy, since its leading practitioners tend to resist definition, and Greenblatt himself soon came to prefer another label, Cultural Poetics. Greenblatt has repeatedly denied, in prefatory remarks to many of his works, that there is any theoretical program to his method. In Learning to Curse (1990), a description of his work and critical trajectory is quickly followed by disclaimers: “I am reluctant to confer upon any of these rubrics an air of doctrine or to claim that each marks out a well defined territory.”7 In another often-quoted phrase, Greenblatt asserted that “[T]here can be no single method, no overall picture, no exhaustive and definitive cultural poetics”.8 Commentators dutifully echo the premise that New Historicism rests on “no single theoretical stance”, that it is “a practice, not a theory”.9 Rarely has the founder of an influential academic movement devoted so much energy to denying that there is anything there, and the temptation is to take these statements at face value and speculate, along with some critics, that “New Historicism” merely amounts to Greenblatt and a few others showing off their individual cleverness.10 But the resistance to theory in these pronouncements must be taken seriously in that the New Historicism is defined by its practitioners mostly in negative 7 8 9

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Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 3. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 19. Hunter Cadzow, “New Historicism”, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 535; Frank Kermode, “Art Among the Ruins”, New York Review of Books 48 (July 5, 2001), 47. Lynn Hunt, “History as Gesture; or, the Scandal of History”, in Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, eds., Consequences of Theory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 97.

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terms: Greenblatt and company may seem evasive about what they are doing, but they are clear about what they are not doing.11 The movement’s historicism was a departure from twentieth-century critical traditions, most importantly from New Criticism and Poststructuralism, which treated literary texts as aesthetically autonomous units unrelated, for critical purposes, to the contexts in which they originated. To Greenblatt and others shaped by the politically engaged and socially aware academic culture of the 1960s and 1970s, the importance of connecting literary texts to history seemed sufficiently self-evident as not to warrant extensive discussion. Not so with the new in the movement’s label. Greenblatt and other New Historicists are explicit about rejecting all previous forms of historical criticism. Their complaint about traditional literary historicism is that it flattens and impoverishes texts by reducing them to “reflections” or instantiations of their contexts. The charge holds as true for liberal humanist critics like E. M. W. Tillyard as it does for those inspired by Marxism, from Ian Watt to Fredric Jameson. Such “old historicist” moves as proposing a sixteenth-century “Great Chain of Being” worldview as a key to understanding Shakespeare, or reading texts as expressions of the rise (Watt) or contradictions (Jameson) of capitalism, are rejected on the grounds, first, that they make texts monological by assigning them a single primary meaning, and second, that they assume for literature the passive role of ideological reflection. Furthermore, traditional uses of history are “totalizing” in their explicit or implicit view that, for instance, the sixteenth-century belief in “order and degree”, or the eighteenth-century premium placed on individual autonomy, were assumptions shared by a whole culture, or at least by a whole literate class within a culture. Finally, traditional historicism rests on the belief in a distinction between text and context and in the implicit subordination of the former to the latter. The challenge New Historicists faced was, therefore, the following. On the one hand, they were committed to rejecting a view of literary texts as timeless and/or self-contained objects of examination. On the other hand, the models available for historical criticism reduced literature to the role of passive conveyor of a single dominant meaning. The program of New Historicism became to devise an approach to literature which made it possible to hold two divergent views, on the one hand “literature is not timeless, transcendent and autonomous” (a traditionally materialist position) and on the other hand “literature is not a passive reflection but an active force in the historical world” (a stance usually connected to idealism). The challenge was to find a way of connecting literary 11

On the dual negative definition, see Cadzow, “New Historicism”, 535; Thomas, The New Historicism, 35–8; H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), ix–xvi.

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texts to history without subjecting them to historical determinism or negating their complexity and internal contradictions. These principles guide the practice of New Historicist critics, even as these practitioners resist any actual statement of theory. Adhering to two divergent principles at once seems to come easily to Greenblatt, whose characteristic intellectual stance is one of mediation and conciliation. In one of his most famous discourses on method, the essay “Towards a Poetics of Culture”, Greenblatt addresses the relationship between art and society by contrasting the views of a Marxist, Fredric Jameson, with those of a poststructuralist, Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard. Jameson, Greenblatt writes, argues that capitalism’s effect on culture is to erect barriers between such domains of experience as the public and the private, whereas Lyotard believes that capitalism typically collapses all aspects of experience into a single oppressively monological discourse. Characteristically, Greenblatt refuses to choose between the two: “It is, I think, a theoretical mistake and a practical blunder to collapse the distinction between representation and reality, but at the same time we cannot keep them isolated from one another.”12 As David Simpson puts it: “The rabbits that come out of the hat . . . both are and are not real rabbits, which is how new historicists like to have it.”13 Stuck midway between the perils of historical reductionism and the traps of text-happy poststructuralism, Greenblatt refuses to resolve the theoretical contradiction by assigning priority either to the social or to the textual. He and like-minded scholars hold that there is (or was) a real social world, though that world is (or was) constantly being shaped by the very texts it produces (or produced). Instead of staking out a theory, Greenblatt prefers to describe and illustrate the point that literature and the social are always simultaneously engaged in acts of mutual creation. Rhetorically, this stance has been equated with the figure of speech called chiasmus, which the dictionary defines as “an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases”, as in “the power of representation and the representation of power”. A fellow traveler, Louis Montrose, produced a classic and by now over-quoted chiasmus to sum up the New Historicist enterprise: “The historicity of texts and the textuality of history.”14 Organic historicism of the sort New Historicists reject can be expressed as the synecdoche, with a part standing for the whole, as when one uses “sail”

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Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7. From his review of Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, in “Touches of the Real”, London Review of Books (May 24, 2001), 25. Louis Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture”, in Veeser, ed., New Historicism, 20.

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for ship or “boards” for stage, in the same way as a work of literature is said to encapsulate a whole historical period. Recourse to chiasmatic constructions signals a rejection of the concept of historical totality which, for New Historicists, either does not exist or cannot be known.15 The conscious rejection of totality or wholeness shapes Greenblatt’s essays, which are characteristically built around the conjunction of two texts, or textual fragments, one literary and another nonliterary. This chiasmatic approach is telegraphed in the titles of his books and essays, many of which are conflations of the poetic and the prosaic, as in Marvelous Possessions, Shakespearean Negotiations, “Fiction and Friction” or “Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne”. A striking example of how Greenblatt creates understanding from unlikely juxtaposition is the essay “Marvelous Possessions”, the centerpiece of the book of the same name. The essay opens with an excerpt from Christopher Columbus’s account of his first voyage, a passage in which he describes taking possession of the first islands he discovered “by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me”.16 No (verbal: y no me fu´e contradicho) opposition was offered to Columbus, of course, since even if the islands’ inhabitants were present they had no idea what he was saying, and Greenblatt identifies the phrase as a speech-act, a legal ritual which conferred ownership on the Spanish crown. But Columbus’s speech-act must perforce recognize the possibility of contradiction even as it denies that any such thing took place, just as he describes seizing the lands and persons of natives while showering gratuitous gifts upon them. Greenblatt places these paradoxes in relation to the Christian rhetoric of one of John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’: “Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I / Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.” Where more predictable readings of Columbus’s narrative might underscore the hypocrisy or instrumentalism of Christian imperialism, Greenblatt uses Donne’s sonnet to draw a homology between two cultural paradoxes: just as the essence of erotic or religious desire is its own constant frustration, so the act of colonial possession can never be complete both because it must acknowledge another and because the very essence of the “marvelous” is to be always beyond grasp: “Something happens to the discourse of the marvelous when it is linked to the discourse of the law: the inadequacy of the legal ritual to confer title and the incapacity of the marvelous to confer possession cancel each other out, and both the claim and the emotion are intensified by the conjunction.”17 Greenblatt’s balancing act in this essay is a fine example of his method. By bringing together 15 16 17

Thomas, The New Historicism, 7–9; Simpson, “Touches of the Real”, 26. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 52. Ibid., 81.

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a historical narrative and a religious poem, he produces a jolt of insight into the cultural and emotional logic behind the symmetries of baroque language while carefully eschewing any broader historical or literary claim. While he provides a fair amount of information about sixteenth-century imperialism and Spanish legal practices, the essay’s payoff comes from textual juxtaposition rather than contextual information. This refusal to systematize, this self-conscious reliance on literary and historical “fragments”, constitutes New Historicism’s bid to set “history” free from “historicism”. The fragments appear to be chosen at random, but critics have pointed out that they are cunningly selected so as to create a resonance between the social and the literary.18 Sometimes the connections appear to be genuinely random, as in the Columbus and Donne example above, but in other instances it seems clear that a chip of historical information caught the critic’s eye because it resonated with elements of a literary work, as when accounts of sixteenth-century cross-dressing among French peasant women are brought to bear upon a reading of Twelfth Night.19 Although his essays are brilliantly varied, many of Greenblatt’s pieces follow a characteristic pattern, with close analysis of a non-fictional text, usually “exotic” or “marginal” in nature, followed by a parallel decoding of a canonical literary work. One of his most famous articles, “Invisible Bullets”, for instance, opens with a reading of passages of a 1588 description of Virginian Indians by Thomas Harriot. Atheism in the sixteenth century, Greenblatt argues, was “thinkable only as the thought of another”, so it is through the culture of the indigenous Americans that Harriot is able to pen cynical descriptions of the use of religion as political power. Typically, Greenblatt shows the simultaneous imposition and subversion of religious power in Harriot’s text, then uses the Harriot framework to read Shakespeare’s Henrician plays as similar manipulations of appearances, texts which empty out and undermine royal legitimacy even as they construct it.20 But what, then, is the status of the “history” that forms half of the New Historical chiasmus? In their recent coauthored work, Gallagher and Greenblatt advance a quasi-magical view of its function, something they label “the touch of the real” and which brings to mind Greenblatt’s occasional descriptions of literary critics as shamans or conjurers. In many self-descriptions, New Historicists do indeed appear as alchemists trying to make gold out of unlikely concoctions: as

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See for instance Walter Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare”, in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 34–8. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, chap. 6. See Kermode, “Art Among the Ruins”, 46–7. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, chap. 2, quote p. 22.

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Gallagher and Greenblatt explain, the very point of bringing together literary and historical texts is that they “make sharply different claims upon the actual”, that illumination will spring out of their very incommensurability. Both the literary and the non-literary acquire deeper resonance when they are made “to be each other’s thick description”.21 Sometimes the conjurer’s magic seems to work to the benefit of the non-literary: “The conjunction can produce almost surrealist wonder at the revelation of an unanticipated aesthetic dimension in objects without pretensions to the aesthetic.”22 But lurking around the edges of Gallagher and Greenblatt’s manifesto is the suggestion that the literary text is, in the end, the great beneficiary, with “the real” as the medium of enchantment: “We wanted the touch of the real in the way that in an earlier period people wanted the touch of the transcendent.”23 In other words, a beautiful high-canonical princess lies sleeping, exhausted by every possible internalist reading. Enter her savior who is not a prince, but someone more like the bulbous and flatulent Shrek, and who will shake the beauty awake while conferring on her the kiss of unmistakably democratic “reality”. Like the canon-busting and computer-animated Shrek, this is a tale for postmodern times. Greenblatt’s approach to “the real” has evolved over time, and it is mostly in his more recent work that he has invoked the powers of wonder and the magic touch of reality. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, his inclinations were more materialistic, if not in most of the conventional senses of academic “materialism”. In 1988, in the essay which opens Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt explained a strategy for connecting society and literature which he tagged “the circulation of social energy”. “Social energy” is an entity graspable only in its effects, “in the capacity of certain verbal, aural, and visual traces to produce, shape and organize collective physical and mental experiences. Hence it is associated with repeatable forms of pleasure and interest, with the capacity to arouse disquiet, pain, fear, the beating of the heart, pity, laughter. . .”, and so on.24 Although Greenblatt would surely dispute it, this sounds suspiciously like a newfangled version of what used to be called “the enduring power of a work of art.” Of course the point is that “social energy” can originate from the realms of both art and non-art, and that the aim of New Historicism or Cultural Poetics is to trace the circulation, the exchanges which flow in both directions between those realms. Two examples of “the circulation of social energy” can be found in Greenblatt’s early essays. One is the cardinal’s hat displayed in the library of Christ Church, Oxford, identified as having belonged to Wolsey, the founder of the college. 21 22 23 24

Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 31. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 31. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 6.

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Wolsey did not donate the hat to the college; instead it was bequeathed to a succession of descendants and eventually sold in the nineteenth century to the daughter of the actor Charles Kean, who wore the hat while playing Wolsey on stage, before the headgear made its way back to Christ Church.25 This miniature account of the hat’s adventures suggests that “social energy” can be imagined as a spiraling slide through which an “object”, not always as tangible as the hat, progresses, bouncing off “art” and “the social” on either side and sometimes looping back to the beginning—in this case with the cardinal’s hat reconnected to the college. The idea of “Wolsey”, fetishized in the hat, provoked powerful enough associations for the educated British elite to keep the object moving between realms for three centuries. The circulation of social energy can occur in a wide variety of forms and media. Greenblatt’s Shakespearean training and interests orient him especially towards the stage, and when he outlines the most common types of cultural exchange and circulation, he finds his examples most readily in the playhouse: appropriation, especially of language; purchase, as of props, costumes, or story rights; symbolic acquisition of social energy, as when social practices are represented on stage.26 All of these are being simultaneously acquired back by the public either in direct ways, like paying to watch plays, or in less tangible ways, as when a person models her behavior after a stage character. But Greenblatt’s other examples range widely in time and place, to include such instances as the writings by, about and between Norman Mailer and the convicts Gary Gilmore and Jack Abbot in the 1970s and 1980s; villagers in Bali recording and then watching, thanks to a VCR, their own religious ceremonies; and a Coca-Cola stand in Mexico transformed by its owner into a replica of Mayan architecture.27 Notions of circulation, appropriation and exchange seem to place Greenblatt in the tradition of Marxian critics of “bourgeois aesthetics” like Walter Benjamin and Walter Benn Michaels, who highlighted the exchange value— direct or through reproduction—of works of art.28 But Greenblatt repudiates the “totalizing” perils of Marxism, and his orientation is definitely postmodern rather than Marxian—he is not interested in systems of production and exploitation, but in what for a traditional Marxist are the secondary matters of commerce, mediation, and consumption. In this respect, Greenblatt’s departure from materialist literary criticism is similar in origin to what is known as the study of “material culture” in historical writing today. Reacting in part against what became known as the “linguistic turn” in the 1970s and 1980s (an interesting if not 25 26 27 28

Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 161. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 9–11. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 156–7, 176; Marvelous Possessions, 4–6. Thomas, The New Historicism, 131.

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exact parallel to New Criticism in literature), a group of historians have begun adopting approaches to social history that are firmly grounded in the nitty-gritty of daily life yet escape the strictures of classical Marxism. Historians of material culture have explored the history of furniture, housewares, clothing, guns, meals, medicine, and much else that shaped daily life in past centuries.29 Starting with the object itself, they eschew the examination of vast and abstract systems of production and ask: Who made it, and under what conditions? Who bought it, and how did they use it? How were the producer’s and the consumer’s lives shaped and possibly changed by the transaction? This new approach to social history is symptomatic, as is New Historicism, of a suspicion of grand interpretive schemes and of an urge to remain as close as possible to the realm of particulars, a desire to acknowledge the centrality of material and symbolic transactions in the past while keeping grand concepts like “capitalism” at bay. For historians, however, the exercise always leads to some form of generalization, while for their literary counterparts it usually does not. An historian examining the history of clothing in the eighteenth century, for instance, might start with very concrete and specific records such as images, descriptions, commercial records, wills, comments by chroniclers and travelers, and after poring over enough of this, argue that sometime between 1720 and 1780 clothing became less markedly a matter of rank and status, more socially ambiguous within a certain range, more driven by the commercial imperatives of “fashion”, and more a preoccupation for women than for men.30 She would present her journey through the sources as one leading through a mass of particulars from Big Picture A to Big Picture B. This contrasts sharply with a New Historicist understanding of circulation, negotiation or exchange, in which the point is not a process of change and its outcome, but the energy spent and received in the transaction between realms of human existence. Greenblatt’s “circulation of social energy” is by the usual standards of historians an ahistorical concept, since it seems to apply in exactly the same way to Elizabethan England and to twentieth-century America—the expense of spirit in a historical vacuum. Change 29

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See for instance John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien R´egime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lawrence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). As argued in Roche, The Culture of Clothing, and Jennifer Jones, “Repackaging Rousseau: Femininity and Fashion in Old Regime France”, French Historical Studies 18 (1994), 939–68.

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is certainly not alien to the model that Greenblatt adopts; but the outcome, in this approach to culture, is punctual rather than systemic. The distance between New Historicism and the usual practice of history is to a large extent deliberately staked out, since the aim of New Historicists is precisely to get away from traditional “historicism”—by which, as my opening quote suggested, they may or may not mean the practices of mainstream historians. The criticisms of conventional history that Greenblatt advances most frequently are all closely related: that history over-tames the past by cramming it onto the Procrustean bed of some grand scheme or other; that it leaves little room for contingency or agency; and that it has no place for the bizarre, the marginal, or the inconceivable. Greenblatt’s rejection of traditional historicism follows from the same logic that led poststructuralists like Paul de Man to turn away from history: the reasoning that historicism was an artifact of modernity which led to the privileging of a single dominant narrative, that history as normally practiced generated stable visions and predictable stories with no room for contingency. Standard “contextual” explanations of works of art proposed a single interpretation based on a consensus about dominant historical patterns, thereby closing off other readings and robbing both the text and the social of their self-contradictory complexity.31 Thus in his 1990 Learning to Curse, Greenblatt writes: The historical evidence . . . conventionally invoked in literary criticism to assist in the explication of a text seemed to me dead precisely because it was the enemy of wonder: it was brought in to lay contingency and disturbance to rest. I do not want history to enable me to escape the effect of the literary but to deepen it by making it touch the effect of the real, a touch that would reciprocally deepen and complicate history.32

At the heart of the New Historicist approach to the past lies a fundamental tension, in full view in Greenblatt and Gallagher’s recent Practicing New Historicism. On the one hand the volume opens with ringing challenges to something called “history”, a scowling censor which exercises a “stabilizing and silencing function . . . in analyses that [seek] to declare the limits of the thinkable and the sayable”, and decrees “that certain things in a given period were beyond conception and articulation”. New Historicism, the authors write, “remains committed to the value of the single voice, the isolated scandal, the idiosyncratic vision, the transient sketch.”33 The theoretical difficulties posed by this approach to the past could be summed up by pointing out that the expression “isolated scandal” is an oxymoron, since a scandal is an inherently social event—it

31 32 33

Thomas, The New Historicism, 35–9. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 5–6. Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 16.

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can’t happen if nobody is around to be scandalized. More generally, it is difficult to apprehend truly isolated and idiosyncratic voices in the past since most of the heresy and marginality that we know of was preserved for posterity because it came into contact with dominant religious or secular institutions. It exists as deviance in the past only in relation to norms in the past—or, as Michel Foucault would put it, it was constructed by those very same repressive norms. On the other hand, Greenblatt’s description of his approach to cultures as texts includes, in the recent volume, admiring exegeses of the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the mid-twentieth-century literary critic Erich Auerbach.34 At first, it is easy to see why Greenblatt would be drawn to these two scholars, since both Geertz and Auerbach are famous for their close readings of minute cultural fragments, incidents in Morocco or Java in the first case, carefully chosen paragraphs from Homer or Flaubert in the second. But Greenblatt himself acknowledges that the power of these scholars’ writings lies in their ability to connect a shred of culture to a whole social world in the same way that a fragment of DNA provides the map of a whole human body. He cites Geertz writing in The Interpretation of Cultures that from a single incident “one can widen out into enormous complexities of social experience”.35 Auerbach, he notes, “is brilliant at locating moments of representational plenitude: moments in which a culture’s apprehension of reality, its experience of reality, and its representation of reality converge.”36 Ultimately, of course, Greenblatt would like to have it both ways: he wants to demonstrate, like Geertz, that texts are cultures and cultures are texts, but he also wants to showcase utterances that confound the expectations of their cultures, which he calls counterhistories. He and Gallagher cultivate a “double vision of the art of the past—at once immersed in its time and place and yet somehow pulling out and away”.37 This ambition is truly interdisciplinary in its simultaneous pursuit of cultural patterns, the usual business of historians, and of the exceptional voice, the traditional quarry of literary critics. Whether New Historicists have succeeded is a matter very much in the eye of the beholder, but in the process of trying they offer some revealing insights into the profound differences between neighboring disciplines. The most telling issue from this point of view is the matter of the historical anecdote, a major item in New Historicists’ descriptions of their own

34 35 36 37

Ibid., chap. 1. Ibid., 26. The quote is from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 19. Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 40–41. Ibid., 17.

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historical practice.38 As we have seen, Greenblatt’s method frequently involves the juxtaposition of a historical fragment with a literary one. The historical fragment is not contextualized beyond a few words identifying the author and explaining the circumstances in which the text was written—no larger meaning is invoked at the outset. Neither are these the kinds of anecdote about famous people in which Samuel Johnson said this or Queen Victoria said that. They are more offbeat tales involving exorcists, transgendered peasants, and especially encounters between Europeans and the strange peoples of distant lands. New Historicists wield the anecdote, which in French is known as petite histoire, “little history”, as a weapon against the “totalizing” dangers of the grand narrative or grand r´ecit.39 Anecdotes are useful to New Historicists for making certain claims about history. First, the anecdote is self-contained and therefore evokes no vaster scheme—it is autonomously intelligible; second, it is itself a miniature conflation of history and literature, since its subject matter claims a connection to “the real” but its form is obviously crafted for the purpose of satisfying narration. As Joel Fineman wrote in an essay much cited by New Historicists, “the anecdote is the literary form or genre that uniquely refers to the real”.40 The anecdote is therefore, like New Historicism itself, a hybrid of “art” and “the real”. Catherine Gallagher notes that “mainstream historians” despise anecdotes, or tolerate them only as “moments of relief from analytical generalization”. They are wary of intriguing and amusing stories, because these, she writes, might interfere with the distance from the past that historians cultivate in the service of a “protocol of objectivity”.41 It is indeed the case that professional historians are suspicious of la petite histoire, though not, I would argue, quite for the reasons Gallagher proposes. For most of the twentieth century the idea of anecdotal history was a threat because it evoked the old-fashioned, gossipy history of Great Men and Women that historians were striving to get away from through such innovations as Annales history or the New Social History of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition—and this is not unrelated to the previous point— the anecdote has traditionally carried ahistorical connotations since its purpose, similar to that of the aphorism, is often to offer a “timeless” nugget of wit or wisdom.

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For two other stimulating recent accounts of the anecdote and its function, see David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 2, and Lionel Gossman, “Anecdote and History”, History and Theory 42 (May, 2003), 143–68. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 2. Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction”, in Veeser, ed., The New Historicism, 56. Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 49.

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If for literary critics like Greenblatt the anecdote seems like a step forward, a liberation from the weight of “totalizing grand narratives”, for most historians petite histoire feels like a step backward. Just as literary critics understandably reject middlebrow gushing over Great Literature as “bourgeois aesthetics”, so historians are legitimately wary of a form, the anecdote, that threatens to reduce history to a People magazine of the past. Gallagher and Greenblatt seem oblivious of the longer range of disciplinary development in history; they reject grand narratives as extensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist, socialist or whiggish programs, obfuscating the fact that such mid-twentiethcentury innovations as histoire totale and quantified social history, large in scale as they were, originated from a desire to make history more democratic and more inclusive. Greenblatt and others are certainly aware of the anecdote’s resurgence in the writings of New Cultural Historians, since some of the most prominent historians of this stripe—Davis, Hunt, Laqueur—were their colleagues and co-editors in the heyday of Representations. But under the pen of New Cultural (or New Social) Historians the anecdote serves a function quite different from its use in either traditional history or literary criticism. They use it very much as does Geertz, as a point of entry into a broader cultural system. Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, for instance, a book whose themes and approach are superficially much akin to New Historicism, opens with a quintessentially “Greenblattian” anecdote. It is the story, reported in 1752, of a beautiful innkeeper’s daughter who dies and is the object of a young monk’s necrophilic lust—she then revives from apparent death and is discovered to be pregnant. When the story was retold fifty years later, commentators assumed without question that a passive, corpse-like woman could have conceived— no orgasm was necessary.42 The juxtaposition of two versions of the anecdote serves to dramatize the book’s thesis that understandings of women’s sexual nature shifted in the later eighteenth century from a “one-sex” model (women as identical in kind but lesser forms of men) to a “two-sex” model (women as qualitatively different). Where a Greenblattian critic would use this anecdote to puncture the cultural fabric, Laqueur’s approach is very much that of a cultural historian. He derives meaning from the distance between two versions of the same story and, like a cultural anthropologist, uses each instance of the tale as a point of entry into a different worldview. The “New Cultural History” which took shape in the 1980s literally alongside New Historicism also relies centrally, in many cases, on anecdotes. But the anecdotes that have become classics in the historical profession—of apprentices in 42

Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1–3.

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Paris torturing cats, of a miller arrested in sixteenth-century Friuli for spewing a bizarre heretical cosmology, of a man taking over another man’s wife and identity in a southern French village—are all pressed by their authors into the service of larger questions, about workers and bosses in prerevolutionary Paris, about elite and popular culture at the time of the Reformation, about selfhood and marriage in Renaissance France. Cultural historians of this stripe begin with an anecdote that seems outlandish and incomprehensible, but proceed to reconstruct around it a cultural universe that makes it comprehensible—when the polyvalence of cats as symbols intersects with working conditions for apprentices, for instance, or when sophisticated travel tales are read by a semi-literate man influenced by rural lore and religious heresy.43 Cultural historians, in short, take the aberrant and award it its own normality, which is exactly what New Historicist critics do not want to do. The anecdote in cultural history is always an opening to a wider cultural pattern, not, as Greenblatt would have it, an object of “wonder” or the means to an “effect” or “touch” of the real. In the process, the anecdote can, as Joel Fineman points out, serve to produce new narratives by opening a hole in the existing narrative “wholes”, thereby generating a new story which may itself eventually be punctured by a new anecdote.44 But the value of the anecdote, for Fineman as for cultural historians, lies not in its idiosyncrasy but in its relationship to a new overall narrative, a new understanding of “normality” in the past—for instance, in the Laqueur example, a new story about understandings of sex. The point here is not that historians are more productive or more responsible than New Historicists in their use of anecdotes, but that different forms of training and different goals lead us in different directions: for them the cultivation of surprise and complexity, for us the piecing together of broadly coherent cultural patterns. Literary New Historicists engage with the past using methods very much their own, and very different from those of even the historians closest to them in training, outlook, and field. They are determined to connect the aesthetic and “the real”, thus marking a distance from Deconstruction, New Criticism, and “bourgeois aesthetics”, while at the same time they resist the materialist “flattening” of works of literature into ideology. The outcome as represented by the work of Stephen Greenblatt is, as he himself admits, not a theoretical

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Robert Darnton, The Great Cat-Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1984), chap. 2; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Anne and John Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote”, 61.

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breakthrough but a series of brilliant strategies—“wondrous” juxtaposition, applying to literature “the touch of the real”, tracking the “circulation of social energy”, and in some cases even resorting to good old-fashioned homologies between literary and non-literary texts.45 The outcomes are, in Greenblatt’s case at least, illuminating, but his elegant pragmatism dodges the most difficult questions currently bedeviling the encounter between history and literature: how to reconcile the affective and ideological functions of a text, and what ontological status to grant “history-as-text”.46 Historians fail to recognize their idea of history in Greenblatt’s approach to the past because he is interested neither in causality (a lesser problem) nor in coherence (a major problem). His use of the past is almost talismanic in its recourse to “the real” as a device for opening up new readings of a literary text, and he sometimes succeeds brilliantly in using literature to introduce complexity into a historical text, as in the Donne/Columbus example. But there’s the rub: historians are generally not interested in bringing complexity to the texts they use as sources, and for very good reasons. As Gabrielle Spiegel points out, the fundamental difference between literary and historical scholarship as done today is that literary scholars are trained to work with an existing object (say, the novels of Jane Austen), whereas historians are taught to construct an object of study (for instance, social structure in nineteenth-century Hamburg). As Spiegel points out: “The task facing the [historian] is broadly constructive, that facing [the literary critic] broadly deconstructive.”47 Hence, while nearly all historians believe in the ultimate reality of the past, they approach that reality much more gingerly than do their literary colleagues. Fully aware of the many choices and extensive labor that go into the task of historical reconstruction, they are both less likely to invoke the past’s “reality” but also wary of acknowledging double and triple meanings or the self-subversion of a source: a document can only mean one thing if it is to serve as one element of a large pattern. Literary critics, by contrast, write as if there was an agreed-upon historical “reality” which can enhance or enchant works of art (“the touch of the real”), but also must serve as a target for deconstruction.48

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For instance, Greenblatt’s essay “Fiction and Friction” reads Twelfth Night in the context of a view of sex according to which women are lesser, or “inside out”, versions of men, and where gender difference is a lot more slippery than in a post-Enlightenment world. Shakespearean Negotiations, chap. 3. For an excellent discussion of these issues and an interesting attempt to resolve them, see Gabrielle Spiegel, “History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages”, Speculum 69 (1990), 59–86. Ibid., 75. I thank Ed Muir for pointing out to me the disciplinary implications of Spiegel’s point.

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The rise of textual analysis in history, especially in cultural history, serves ironically to highlight the difference in the approaches dominant in each discipline. Either because the canon of literary “objects” is genuinely limited or because of deep training when she or he steps outside of that canon, literary critics are trained to produce complex and often self-contradictory readings of texts—as for instance when Greenblatt writes that the image of kingship in 1 Henry IV “involves as its positive condition the constant production of its own radical subversion and the powerful containment of that subversion”.49 A historian, by contrast, usually constructs out of a large number of sources an object that is not a given; under those circumstances, to have one’s sources, or even a small part of one’s sources, say two different things at once would amount to selfdestructive insanity. For these reasons, literary scholars set their texts a-wobbling while historians nail theirs to the ground. The task of mutual complication that Greenblatt sets himself must in consequence serve a literary constituency much better than a historical one. Of course, many literary critics work in ways that are perfectly congruent with historians’ practices. Literary Americanists, for instance, trained in the genuinely interdisciplinary tradition of American Culture programs—scholars like Cathy Davidson, Jane Tompkins, or Eric Lott—produce works that historians can easily recognize and use, as do others in practically every literary field. Conversely, many intellectual historians and some cultural historians—Joan Scott or Judith Walkowitz, for instance—employ methods very similar to those of literary critics. That said, scholarly gestures towards interdisciplinarity in the humanities are often governed by the logic of preschool: I want to play with your toys, but not by your rules; we tend to borrow each others’ objects while ignoring each others’ methods. In pointing this out I certainly do not mean to denigrate interdisciplinarity—quite to the contrary. I am suggesting here that instead of repeating unexamined bromides about the benefits of cross-disciplinary work, we need to approach other disciplines with an educated and open-minded appreciation of differences. Navigating between disciplines demands a deep immersion in the practices of another field, and a clear understanding of the points at which “translation” between disciplines is most difficult. But, as with immersion in another language and culture, those are also the points at which the real challenge, and the real excitement, begin.50

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Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 41. For extremely helpful readings of an earlier draft of this essay I thank Sam Kinser, Ed Muir, Sean Shesgreen, David Simpson and Wendy Wall.

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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 2 (2004), pp. 267–282
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000150 Printed in the United Kingdom

capitalism and intellectual history richard f. teichgraeber iii Murphy Institute and Department of History, Tulane University

Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003) Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) Allan Megill, Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market) (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002)

i For many reasons, this seems the right time and place to take stock of the current standing of capitalism as a subject in intellectual history and to ask how enlightening intellectual history may be when applied to the study of capitalism. Since the late 1970s, when the field was pronounced dead at the hands of social history, intellectual historians have devoted a remarkable amount of energy to constructing accounts of meanings and perceptions that have been invested in capitalism over time. By the mid-1990s, the tide of social history had run out, and fine books like Thomas Haskell’s The Emergence of Professional Social Science (1977), Donald Winch’s Adam Smith’s Politics (1978), Joyce Appleby’s Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (1978), Drew McCoy’s The Elusive Republic (1980), J. G. A. Pocock’s Virtue, Commerce, and History (1985), Jean-Christophe Agnew’s Worlds Apart (1986), Colin Campbell’s The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987), Boyd Hilton’s Age of Atonement (1988), R. Jackson Wilson’s Figures of Speech (1989), Jonathan Freedman’s Professions of Taste (1990), Dorothy Ross’s The Origins of American Social Science (1991), James Livingston’s Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution (1994), and many others had helped intellectual history regain a respected position within the profession. Not 267

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exactly an avalanche of new work, but more than enough to suggest that one of the more important achievements of intellectual historians working during the last quarter of the twentieth century was to deepen (and complicate) our understanding of capitalism. Much of this work, it is worth noting, was done by people who also gave life to an increased methodological self-consciousness and sophistication among intellectual historians across the board.1 Ask for an explanation of intellectual history’s resurgence since the late 1970s, and sooner or later the conversation should get around to capitalism. But the conversation is likely to get fuzzy if one begins by asking what intellectual historians have in mind when they write about capitalism. Are they actually engaged in writing the history of capitalism? Or are they simply showing that intellectual history has an important place in understanding capitalism? Certainly the history of capitalism is “too important and complex a subject to be left to economists,” as Jerry Muller observes, so developing “a critical comprehension of it requires perspectives beyond those of modern economics” (p. ix). But modern academic intellectual history has complexities of its own, and they have precluded widespread agreement about what historians aim to accomplish when they apply themselves to the study of capitalism. If the characteristic task of intellectual history is, as David Hollinger puts it, “study of actual argumentation and reasoning, at least as carried out by historical actors who were good at it, or made a production out of it (i.e. ‘intellectuals’),” clearly this task is one that has been understood and accomplished in a variety of ways.2 There has been no shortage of intellectual history that treats the ideas and activities of intellectuals—and increasingly those of academic intellectuals—as its main object of study. But some of the most acclaimed and innovative work done in recent decades has been deeply informed by cultural and economic history, resulting in a new kind of intellectual history that moves back and forth between close readings of texts and authors and careful reconstruction of cultural and economic contexts. To further complicate things, while narrative has functioned as an important tool of analysis in the intellectual history of capitalism, it too has been put to 1

2

The Intellectual History Group Newsletter (later the Intellectual History Newsletter, deceased forerunner of Modern Intellectual History) published some of the liveliest early examples of this work. See, e.g., Joyce Appleby, “Ideology and the History of Political Thought,” Intellectual History Group Newsletter 2 (1980), 10–18; J. G. A. Pocock, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs?,” Intellectual History Group Newsletter 3 (1981), 47–50; Joyce Appleby, “Response to J. G. A. Pocock,” Intellectual History Group Newsletter 4 (1982), 20–22. See also Intellectual History Group Newsletter 3 (1981), 14–32, for a heated exchange between John P. Diggins and Thomas L. Haskell on the contextualist movement in American historiography. David A. Hollinger, “The Labelling Game,” Intellectual History Newsletter 18 (1996), 65.

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use in different ways. Many intellectual historians who write about capitalism seem content to see their work, in its broadest outlines, as a matter of telling the story of what intellectuals have had to say about capitalism over time. Neither “intellectuals” nor “capitalism,” however, were employed as conscious mental constructs prior to the last decades of the nineteenth century. So it may be no surprise to discover that we have no widespread agreement about how to identify individuals we call “intellectuals,” or about where in time to begin the story of their relationship to capitalism. At first glance, it may seem obvious that the intellectual history of capitalism should begin with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). It is by no means obvious, however, that Adam Smith was an intellectual in the modern sense of the term. The Wealth of Nations was, in part, the fruit of ten years of concentrated effort made possible by the patronage of Charles Townshend, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1764, Townshend lured Smith away from his position as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow to serve as traveling companion to his stepson, the third Duke of Buccleuch. When Smith completed the Grand Tour in 1766, he was rewarded with a pension for life of £300. The ‘Dr Adam Smith’ praised so often in late eighteenth-century writing was not simply an established academic or a freefloating citizen of the world, but a figure who moved comfortably in the upper levels of British society, as well as one who seems to have been almost predestined to make an enduring mark in the elite world of polite letters. Intellectual historians have also taken different approaches to explaining the specific role that figures more easily identifiable as intellectuals have played in the history of capitalism. Twenty-five years ago, when historians commonly construed capitalism as a system of class relations, and identified the commodification of labor in the wage system as its central innovation, intellectuals were viewed primarily as spokesmen for the attitudes and interests of a few distinct and easily identifiable classes. What might be called socialrelations-of-production narratives invited plenty of internal theorizing about how intellectuals played their roles as class spokesmen, but left little room for the bread-and-butter work of closely examining formal arguments and the filiation of ideas. More recently, a number of intellectual historians have taken what might be called a neo-Weberian turn. This move has involved developing new ways of viewing capitalism as Weber did: not merely as an economic mechanism, but also as an agency of individual character formation and of fundamental cultural upheaval. It also has involved a conspicuous shift in definition, with capitalism and “the market” now being treated as interchangeable terms. While that definition remains open to question, new market-driven narratives have allowed intellectual historians to see that “the market” is a formal idea that has been open to comment and systematic investigation over time. They also have

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tended to blur the line between intellectual history and cultural history. With capitalism understood primarily in terms of the spread of the market into a variety of spheres previously untouched by its values and practices, intellectual and cultural historians alike are now in the business of making sense of the subjective meanings that an increasingly complicated array of individuals and groups have attached to their experience of the market. It is with these broad historiographical concerns in mind that I have attempted to organize my reactions to the four books under review here. Because each takes a different approach to intellectual history, I will consider each in turn and on its own terms. But some broader historiographical questions frame my comments. What makes for good scholarship on the intellectual history of capitalism these days? And, perhaps more importantly, what guidance do these books provide for future efforts in the field? Whatever the intellectual history of capitalism is, it arguably is not coterminous with the history of capitalism as such, any more than, say, the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain is coterminous with the history of nineteenth-century Britain. But this is not the same as saying that intellectual historians are free to approach capitalism in whatever way they want, or for whatever purpose they want. What, then, ought intellectual historians to be doing when they write about capitalism?

ii “Sorting out their discontent” might be one plausible answer. It is quite plain, for example, that both Jeffrey Sklansky’s The Soul’s Economy and Jackson Lears’s Something for Nothing have their origins in deep dissatisfaction with contemporary America’s economic direction. But Sklansky and Lears are unhappy for different reasons, so the stories they tell about American capitalism turn out to be rather different. Sklansky’s is the more straightforward of the two. He wants to know why, at a time when the rule of the market grows ever more universal, “both the system of private accumulation and the working class it created” (p. 2) have become outmoded as topics for American political debate. He locates part of the answer in what he calls “a seismic shift” in conventional understanding of market society prompted by the rise of industrial capitalism. For a century after Independence, Sklansky argues, Americans were able to talk openly and plainly about money and power, thanks to a native tradition of “political economy” which identified republican rule with the independence of self-employed farmers and artisans and a broad distribution of the means of subsistence. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, the demise of the household economy rendered propertied independence an unmanageably contentious ideal. Large landowners and industrialists claimed the right to rule as a privilege of their growing monopoly over productive resources. But so too did

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dispossessed farmers and factory workers who complained that a now effectively property-less populace was incompatible with true liberty and democracy. The basic contention of The Soul’s Economy is that, in the face of a widening class divide, a significant number of America’s most influential nineteenthcentury social theorists—seventeen in all, including several of the most influential figures in our first generation of academic social scientists—chose not to take sides, but instead set out to fashion a new and more reassuring way of understanding market society. Although by no means simple apologists for industrial capitalism, they did, on Sklansky’s account, recoil from the contemporary preoccupation with economic and political power, at the same time as they maintained that the trend of the times was “toward the erosion of class boundaries and separate interests by the rising tide of material and mental commerce” (p. 230). The upshot was that, by the turn of the century, plain but increasingly contentious talk about questions of property and class had given way to elaborate but comforting theorizing about the “social self ” and the increasing “material interdependence” of individuals collectively searching for their identities and souls in an all-embracing market society. The intellectual transformation The Soul’s Economy charts has its origins in the writings of the New England transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller and the conservative Romantic Congregational minister Horace Bushell, whose varied protests were not aimed so much at market society itself, as at what they saw as the increasingly disruptive tradition of political economy, and which in their view had now come to bolster popular resistance to the emerging industrial order as well as conventional rationales for it. The most significant part of Sklansky’s story, however, focuses on the twin birth of modern academic psychology and sociology during the last decades of the nineteenth century. For as political economy then began to break down into the technical disciplines of economics and political science, Sklansky contends, it was a hybrid of these two disciplines—“social psychology”—that formed the central pillars of a new master science of market society. The pioneers here were William James, John Dewey, and G. Stanley Hall, all of whom recognized that the practical challenge to individual autonomy posed by the rise of industrial capitalism entailed a philosophical problem as well. But the main protagonists of The Soul’s Economy are two less well-known figures: the Michigan Supreme Court judge and constitutional scholar Thomas H. Cooley and his son Charles H. Cooley, who spent most of his career as a professor of political economy and sociology at the University of Michigan. It is the combined work of the Cooleys, Sklansky argues, that illustrates most clearly the close relationship between the “social self ” and corporate property in American thought. On the one hand, the father maintained an “antebellum allegiance to individual property rights and the neutral state” that led him to defend new forms of corporate property against

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public appropriation. On the other, not only did the son pursue path-breaking studies on “imaginative sociability” that entitle him to primary credit for the master creation of modern American social science, the “social self ” (p. 205), but he also went on to identify the new corporate order “less as an autocracy of power than as a dawning democracy of the psyche, in which increasing economic as well as psychological interaction made possible a collective transcendence of competition and social strife” (p. 222). The Soul’s Economy is a first book of high interpretive purpose and sophistication, and its appearance marks the arrival of an important new voice in the field. But there are some problems with the story the book tells. Decline and fall is one of our most common historical perceptions, and Sklansky plainly wants us to see the demise of a distinctively American tradition of late eighteenthcentury political economy as a development that sheds light on the limits of a new tradition of American academic social science that arose in the late nineteenth century. The most important of these, he argues, was a disavowal of the eighteenth-century ideals of propertied independence and social contract that in turn caused the nation’s first generation of social scientists to discredit “the class analysis essential to any fundamental transformation of the social order, then and since” (p. 232). Maybe so. But in arriving at this conclusion, Sklansky also puts two distinguishable senses of the term “tradition” to work in The Soul’s Economy, without either noting or accounting for the significant difference between them. Sklansky tells us that the more clear-eyed tradition of late eighteenth-century American political economy derived from eighteenth-century British and French thinkers, and also identifies the intellectual common ground of such founding texts as the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and scores of lesser-known works (p. 5). What Sklansky does not tell us, however, is that this tradition is, at the same time, one which he has brought to life after the fact, essentially the product of his own retrospective efforts to understand and assign coherence to political and economic views of the revolutionary era. He also does not tell us that the other tradition that figures in The Soul’s Economy—late nineteenth-century American academic social science—is one of a rather different kind. By no means an invented tradition, it was instead consciously constructed by an actual community of historical actors and interpreters who helped to lay the foundations of modern American academic culture. There are two problems here. The first is that if “American political economy” is a tradition of Sklansky’s recent invention, by definition it cannot once have exerted the powerful historical force he attributes to it. Nor can its supposed fall from grace carry the considerable historical significance he wants to assign it. The second problem is Sklansky’s failure to engage directly with the views of

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several other scholars before him who, for different reasons, have also construed the rise of academic social science as a watershed in American intellectual history. Sklansky’s range of reference in his sixty-eight pages of notes is quite impressive. But in reading the text of the book itself, one would never come to understand why, unlike Sklansky, some of the most respected intellectual historians of recent decades have seen the novel modes of perception associated with the rise of academic social sciences not as a new set of ideological blinkers that served to accommodate industrial capitalism so much as elements in a new way of thinking designed to curb capitalism’s tendency to commodify all aspects of American life.3 To move from Jeffrey Sklansky to Jackson Lears is to move from a freshly minted intellectual historian to one of our most accomplished cultural historians. Lears is deservedly celebrated for two earlier books—No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981) and Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994)—which explored philosophical outlooks and cultural practices that sought to fashion ways out of what Lears (taking his cue from Weber) sees as the regrettably disenchanted condition that capitalism’s dominant culture of rationalization and control has left us in. Something for Nothing casts the net more widely, and the result is a sweeping reinterpretation of the broad outlines of American history. Lears’s new book offers us another look at the “graceless” culture of American capitalism. But where his two earlier works focused on failed or ineffective alternatives—intellectual anti-modernism and the expressive milieux of advertising respectively—now he seizes on the gambling mania of recent decades to suggest that capitalism in fact has never managed to effect a complete disenchantment with American life. On Lears’s reading, the nation’s dominant “culture of control” has had a long-standing, if not always visible, rival that he labels the “culture of chance.” Otherwise how do we explain the America that has poured billions of dollars into casinos and lotteries, that in the past has romanticized the riverboat gambler, and more recently celebrated Wall Street day-traders who suddenly strike it rich? A deep, but only occasionally acknowledged, reverence for luck runs through our whole history, Lears insists, and it is this strand of our culture that he explores in Something for Nothing, carefully reconstructing how conflicting attitudes towards luck, chance, and gambling have defined and shaped our national character.

3

See, e.g., Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in the Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1998) for a recent and very forceful restatement of the view that the paramount task of the first generation of American social scientists was social reform. While Sklansky refers to Rodgers in his notes, he makes no effort to identify or explain the substantial differences in their approaches to the history of American academic social science. See The Soul’s Economy, n. 13, pp. 283–4.

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It is difficult to do Something for Nothing justice in a brief review, because while Lears’s subject is easy enough to describe, it makes for a complicated story. The narrative splits into several overlapping phases, beginning with the first European settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts and ending with the New Economy balloon of the 1990s. In general, the culture of chance has thrived at times when the market has operated largely without restraints and has offered spectacular rewards for risk-taking. America’s first “Golden Age of Gambling,” Lears tells us, came during the decades immediately after the Civil War, when “the tactics of a Daniel Drew or a Jay Gould differed little from those of a professional gambler such as Richard Canfield, who owned popular casinos in Saratoga and Manhattan” (p. 152). Within each phase he explores, Lears is also concerned to examine both religious and secular expressions of the two rival cultures. The “culture of control” has become dominant in American life, he argues, partly because it represents a powerful hybrid of “Enlightenment ideals of rationality and liberal ideals of individual autonomy” and “an increasingly evangelical rhetoric of Providence” (p. 61). Finally, Lears also cross-cuts individual discussions of some of the leading figures in the history of American thought— the list includes Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, Mark Twain, William James, and Ralph Ellison—with a running account of the attitudes and practices of various native and immigrant groups, carefully documenting how the American culture of chance over time “became more concentrated on the poorer, darker margins of the social order” (p. 53). Something for Nothing is much the most ambitious of Lears’s three books to date, and it displays all the virtues we have come to associate with his work: it fashions a historical narrative in which art and literature are major components; it is written with a powerful sense that historical scholarship can be a form of moral reflection and cultural criticism; and it is driven by a desire to make America speak its common, however ambivalent and divided, mind. Lears is something of a throwback in speaking confidently about the “American character” and the “American creed,” although he does so not simply by recounting what artists, writers, and intellectuals have said and done, but also by telling stories about ordinary men and women looking for meaning in their lives. In tracing the history of conflicting attitudes towards luck, Something for Nothing is, in its way, also a history of ideas, although—as with his earlier books—not of an idea that has been given sympathetic attention by progressive-minded academics and intellectuals. But Something for Nothing is not beyond criticism. The word “culture” works overtime in this book. In most cases, Lears uses it in the anthropological sense, to map out both (i) a distinct world view or ideology that defines basic social institutions, the persons eligible to participate in them, and the rights or roles to which they are entitled, and (ii) specific practices and institutions

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that embody and reproduce such a world view. Yet in places he also speaks of culture metaphorically: as a “stew” of beliefs and rituals that somehow keeps its “savor,” and more often as a “landscape” or “battlefield,” with “fault lines” and “fissures,” as if it were actual changing and physically contested geographical territory. Throughout the book there are also discussions of various regional American sub-cultures—the urbanizing North, the post-Civil War South, the Frontier West, for example—as well as of differing “high” and “vernacular” expressions of the two overarching cultures of “control” and “chance.” The problem here is that, in reading Something for Nothing, one gets to the point where one is tempted to say that, in taking so many shapes, “culture” is asked to carry more weight than it can bear. It requires practiced judgment for a historian to distinguish what is genuinely cultural from mere collocations, and Lears certainly is one of the best in the business. But part of what makes reading Something for Nothing so challenging and pleasurable—one can never be sure what will come next as Lears goes about reconstructing American culture—also invites the judgment that, even in his skillful hands, “American culture” is an amorphous subject.4 It should be said, too, that while Something for Nothing usually presents the “culture of control” and the “culture of chance” as rivals, in places Lears concedes that America’s dominant “culture of control” has been (and remains) concrete, continuous, and plainly visible to a much greater extent than the “culture of chance.” But if this is the case, one has to ask if it makes sense to think of them as genuine rivals, and if the tensions between them are, or have ever been, as central to the American experience of the market as Lears would have us believe. The “culture of chance” seems less a full-blown alternative to the dominant American ethos of control than an intermittently powerful undercurrent.

iii Jerry Muller’s The Mind and the Market is perhaps the most ambitious of the four books under review here. It also shows that not all intellectual historians need write about capitalism to sort out their discontent. Indeed, at first glance, Muller’s wide-ranging book has what appear to be two altogether unbiased organizing premises. The first is that capitalism (which he equates with “the market”) has 4

See, e.g., Chapter 4 (“The Waning of Providence”), which chronicles the fate of the culture of chance during the decades immediately following the Civil War. Lears’s discussion here includes comments on the tactics of Jay Gould, a review of the contents of Grit & Steel (the era’s leading magazine for cockfighters), summaries of condemnations of gambling offered by the likes of Anthony Comstock and O. B. Frothingham, and a closing sympathetic account of the aging Mark Twain’s darkening vision of a universe ruled by accident and chance. Strands in a single cultural fabric or simply disparate cultural items?

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been on the mind of Europe’s greatest intellectuals for a long time—“at least since the early eighteenth century,” he claims. The other is that anyone interested in understanding capitalism’s present dynamics and future implications would benefit from knowing “the best that has been thought and said on the subject in the past” (pp. ix–x). The Mind and the Market explores the views of sixteen British and continental European intellectuals, including in the mix those who have despised capitalism as well as those who have praised it. The list includes familiar faces such as Adam Smith, Burke, Hegel, Marx, Schumpeter, Keynes, and Hayek, as well as a few surprises such as Voltaire and Matthew Arnold. Muller records their views on a variety of straightforward questions about the character and consequences of a market economy. Does the market make people richer or poorer? If it does tend to make people richer, is that necessarily a good thing? Does the market create a society more oriented to this-worldly or other-worldly concerns? Is there a characteristic mentality associated with the market? How does the market economy affect the family? And so on. Intellectual historians who approach their work with issues such as textuality, semiotics, social control, and ideology in mind may want to pass over The Mind and the Market. The book is unashamedly intellectual history of an old-fashioned kind, a narrative of great thinkers who wrote great books filled with great ideas. But Muller writes with conviction and clarity, and his notes make it plain that he brings wide learning to bear throughout much of the book. Any single book that takes on a huge subject will have limitations. The Mind and the Market has several. To begin with, there is something disingenuous in Muller’s suggestion that the book was not written to make a case for or against capitalism. He is too savvy an intellectual historian to adopt a pleading posture or not to make serious efforts to give critics of capitalism their due. (Only Marx, as we shall see, gets very rough handling.) But the dominant mood of The Mind and the Market is plainly pro-capitalist. For instance, at the end of his chapter on Hayek—the only thinker in the entire group who, on Muller’s own account, comes close to being an altogether uncritical booster of capitalism—Muller heralds him as the place to start in developing a “more disinterested and informed perspective” (p. 387) on the workings of the market. In his conclusion, he also speaks with apparent satisfaction of “the growing awareness that capitalism is now the only game in town” (p. 405), and confidently proclaims that one myth his book “should put to rest is that intellectuals are all anticapitalist” (p. 389). Little effort is required, however, to see that The Mind of the Market plays with a stacked deck. Among the sixteen figures Muller considers, there are only two anticapitalist intellectuals on the right (Sombart and Freyer) and three on the left (Marx, Luk´acs, and Marcuse). The rest, he tells us, either enthusiastically embraced the market or found a variety of acceptable ways of mitigating its faults. Well, yes, this would be one way of stacking the deck. But what if we discard Voltaire for Rousseau,

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say, then Burke for Tocqueville, Hegel for Fichte, Arnold for Ruskin, and Schumpeter for Durkheim? Still a stacked deck—but also one that immediately suggests that the myth of anticapitalist intellectuals may have some life left in it. Exactly how much life is another question. Once given wide currency by Joseph Schumpeter, the myth that all intellectuals are anticapitalist flattered intellectuals with special status in determining the future of capitalism. At the moment, however, the received version of historiographical wisdom tells a different story. There can be no question that countless American and European intellectuals have expressed deep-felt revulsion against certain libertarian excesses thought to be inherent in the culture of capitalism. But their criticisms by and large have been ambivalent and uncertain, directed against the harshest cultural and social consequences of the rule of the market, not against capitalism per se. Against whom or what, then, does Muller think he is arguing? Rather than challenging a prevailing interpretive model in the field, The Mind and the Market is set up to join a struggle that seems to have no other serious participants. In the end, though, the chief limitation of The Mind and the Market simply may be the complete assurance with which Muller goes about his work. The possibility that telling the story of “capitalism in modern European thought” might be much too ambitious a project for a single book, or maybe just too ambitious altogether, apparently never occurred to him. Nor does he seem bothered by the fact that the literature on almost every one of his subjects is vast, or that the stakes in reconsidering several of them are so high that the possibilities for even the most resourceful intellectual historian might be restricted to scratching the surface or recycling familiar accounts. He also gives no sign of knowing that we are no longer entirely certain what the criteria of greatness may be. No surprise, then, that The Mind and the Market in places is prone to sweeping, unsupported generalizations, and that some of its portraits come perilously close to being caricatures. Muller’s curiously dismissive account of Marx provides a case in point. Marx’s writings are staggering in both their size and their complexity, and one might expect that any serious student of his work would at least acknowledge in passing that their rigorous examination requires years of close study and invites commentary of inordinate length. But Muller is undaunted by Marx and by the voluminous history of commentary and scholarship on his career and writing. He snaps off his account in forty-one pages, making it clear from the start that he has an explanatory key that unlocks all doors. To “a degree rarely appreciated,” he writes, Marx simply “recast the traditional Christian stigmatization of moneymaking into a new vocabulary and reiterated the ancient suspicion against those who used money to make money” (p. 167). Beginning with “On the Question of the Jews” (1844), the first of his writings to address the issue of market relations, Marx’s life-long strategy in criticizing market activity, we are told, was to embrace

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all the negative moral evaluations that traditional Christianity applied to the Jews and insist that they had come to apply to modern capitalist society as a whole. Or, as Muller puts it more bluntly, “For Marx, Jew-bashing becomes a tool for bashing the bourgeoisie” (p. 186). As a formal economic thinker, Marx operated with an equally archaic premise, insisting on the centrality of the labor theory of value in analyzing the inadequacies of capitalism, spending the latter part of his career in what Muller characterizes as a hopeless effort to respond to critics who found that theory unconvincing, as well as to sympathetic allies who found it incomprehensible. Marx’s masterwork, Capital, remained unfinished, Muller concludes, not because he ran out of time, but because he could find no way to salvage a dated theory.5 Muller obviously feels he has the right to put Marx on the rack (these days, who doesn’t?). But as his assault plays itself out one begins to wonder. Muller concedes in passing that the attractiveness of Marx’s writings as “a source of analysis and as a critique of the market is unlikely to wither away entirely” (p. 166). Yet if this is the case, it is fair to ask what in his severely diminished, almost derisive, picture of Marx—bourgeois-basher who used the tools of Jew-bashers—could possibly help us understand why he might continue to deserve our attention, let alone our respect? And why, for that matter, is Muller unwilling to put his unflattering interpretation of Marx into play with countless other more respectful readings of his work? Indeed, as the chapter comes to a close one has to wonder how Marx, all of whose guiding assumptions are characterized as either archaic or derivative, ever managed to earn a place on the book’s roster of the best and the brightest. Muller can think of little to do with Marx but to hunt for his flaws, and the net effect is simply to encourage us to turn away from him. Those looking for some stimulus towards a more even-handed rethinking of Marx’s views of capitalism would do better to read Allan Megill’s awkwardly titled but brilliant Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market). Because Megill begins by situating Marx within a set of distinctively nineteenth-century European traditions, his book is partly an exercise in contextualist intellectual history. But it is more than that, for he also wants to avoid what he calls the “contextualist error” of viewing Marx primarily as a reflection of his historical circumstance. Megill explains that

5

It is also worth noting that this line of argument leads Muller to overlook the fact that during the same years Marx labored on Capital, he produced volumes of writing on nineteenth-century nationalist movements in a parallel effort to see if those movements either corroborated his theory of historical change or called its deepest premises into question. Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels (Oxford, 1995) stands as the best recent analysis of the Marxian understanding of nationalism.

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with Marx we are not dealing with a figure who continues to attract attention “because he was an exemplar of a past mode of thought that deserves historical reconstruction.” His overall portrait is of a complicated, contradictory, and brilliantly flawed philosopher who stands on his own precisely because he “burst out beyond the constraints of nineteenth century thinking” (p. xvii), and did so by intensifying certain of its characteristic features, especially its widespread belief in the fundamentally rational character of the world. The book’s organizing argument is that Marx stood alone in rigorously adhering to a notion Megill labels “embedded rationality,” a philosophical claim that there actually is a logic or reason in the workings of the world which can be distinguished from any norm or standard outside the world (p. 8). It is well known that Marx’s commitment to the notion that history manifests an embedded progress came directly out of Hegel. But Megill argues convincingly that Marx’s rationalism was a great deal more than a new version of Hegel’s. His thinking was more deeply informed by the natural sciences of his day, for example, and where Hegel’s general orientation (at least in his later years) was primarily backwardlooking, Marx’s was overwhelmingly forward-looking—“promethean” in the sense that he was “a radical, inclined to change the existing order” (p. 14). Or, put another way, Marx’s rationality criteria included necessity and predictability, as well as universality. Unlike Hegel, he believed he could understand the world as nineteenth-century natural scientists understood it—namely, as “a perfect machine functioning according to universal mechanical laws” (p. 13). He also believed that we do not have a rational understanding of the world if we are unable to make good predictions in all its domains. All this describes a “hyper-Enlightenment thinker,” as Megill aptly puts it, since no eighteenth-century philosophe, let alone Hegel, was ever as confident about progress and science as Marx was.6 More significantly, it also explains why Marx was not simply a harsh moral critic of the market, but why he “hated” it on “intellectual grounds” as well (p. 179). Marx viewed the market as “a realm of irrationality,” Megill observes, because (like Ricardo before him) he recognized and recoiled from the high level of unpredictability of market prices,

6

While the view of Marx as a mechanist or “hyper-Enlightenment” thinker has been sketched by earlier scholars, it is arguable that no one has developed it as systematically as Megill. He also makes extensive use of MEGA2—the “new” Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz, 1972–)—which is the first complete edition of Marx’s and Engels’s writings to be edited according to adequate modern standards of textual scholarship. MEGA2, as Megill notes, began to appear after an earlier great interest in Marx’s manuscripts, and Marx generally, had dissipated, and many people in the wider world had come to view Marxism less as the bearer of hope for the future, and more as “a sclerotic apologetics for the (as we now know) dying Soviet system” (p. xix).

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and then recoiled even more from a position that would allow for nothing but that unpredictability. But Megill argues convincingly that Marx also viewed the market as “irrational” in a much broader sense of the word. Because the market by its very nature is a realm of flux and uncertainty, it was for Marx a phenomenon that could not be subsumed under laws that are predictable, and hence resisted scientific explanation as he understood it. Megill’s account of Marx’s criticism of capitalism is more satisfying than Muller’s, partly because it emerges from a more sustained effort to probe what is essential and distinctive about his way of thinking. Like Muller, Megill is primarily interested in Marx’s early writings, and proceeds in a largely negative fashion (“It would have been better,” he writes, “had Marx either loosened his rationality criteria or not deployed them at all”, p. 177). Unlike Muller, however, Megill approaches Marx as considerably more than just an analyst and critic of capitalism. His Marx is “a kind of thinking machine,” a philosopher who was “trying to see the human world as a unified whole,” and whose thinking both explored and generated a complex array of tensions: “tensions, for example, between necessity and freedom, between labor as burden, labor as gratification, and labor as self-development . . . between science and activism, between rationality and freedom” (pp. 159–60). That there are fundamental tensions in Marx’s thinking, Megill observes, is “less a defect than an indication of the seriousness of his thinking” (p. 160). More importantly, their existence also sheds light on the intellectual origins of the disastrous end that befell fully planned economies, which Marx and his twentieth-century followers embraced as an alternative to the irrationality of the market. The most fateful of these tensions was that between the rationality criteria and the humanistic criteria the early Marx deployed in judging the market. Megill reminds us that there were in fact aspects of Marx’s thinking that did not militate against the market, especially his recognition that human needs cannot be readily calculated in advance. If one accepts, as the young Marx did, that we can only know human needs a posteriori—that is, by testing and experiment—it follows that wholesale engineering makes no sense. But Marx eventually came to reject the a posteriori mode—his rationalism in effect trumped his humanism and his empiricism—and this rejection would prove fateful in two related respects. For not only did it mean there was no real possibility of Marx’s model ever succeeding, it also meant that the admirable end he originally had in mind in constructing that model—namely, “the maximization of human freedom”—was fatally undermined as well. In his conclusion, Megill observes that Marx is not a closed chapter in our intellectual life. But his portrait—essentially a respectful debunking of Marx’s “embedded rationalism”—does create an irony. For it seems to leave us with a Marx stripped of what Marx himself took to be his deepest and most characteristic

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critical insights. “One has to reject Marx’s method,” Megill concludes, “one has to reject his rejection of the market and of politics; and one has to reject his too-optimistic, too-uncomplicated view of human life” (p. 265). Well, yes and no. In his conclusion, Megill goes on to say that Marx offers us other “insights” that ought not to be rejected—namely, that economic forces form an important basis of all social structure and all history, and that economic modernity is dynamic and costly. But these insights, I suspect, will strike most students of early twenty-first-century capitalism as little more than truisms.

iv The question I come around to, finally, has more to do with intellectual history than with Marx or capitalism. If we want general conclusions about how to write the intellectual history of capitalism—other than the plain and simple one that says that there are various ways of doing it—how do we know when it has been correctly written? Or to put it more negatively, if we accept that no one distinct or dominant method should guide scholarly study of the intellectual history of capitalism, what professional principles would justify a bad review of a serious contribution to the field? Intellectual historians writing about capitalism fail us, I would suggest, when they ignore certain a priori constraints we associate with sound professional scholarship in the broadest sense: conscious fair-mindedness, honesty, faithfulness to evidence, and respect for logical coherence. From my own experience in reading these books, I would add two other complaints. The first is against the absence of careful explanations of why new attempts to provide guidance to past wisdom about capitalism are needed, and of exactly how they differ from earlier efforts in the field. The other is failing to recognize that one of the chief responsibilities of intellectual history is to serve as a prophylaxis against the easy acceptance or naturalization of certain dominant ideas.7 Any intellectual historian worth her salt knows that in drawing attention to the fact that capitalism has history, she wants to remind her readers that capitalism is not rooted in human nature, but rather in continuous social conflict, upheaval, and cultural meltdown, as well as in changing forms of thought and expression that capitalism both invites and eludes. There is little point, however, in taking serious scholarship apart if the effort does not leave us with a better understanding of the appeals and challenges of writing the intellectual history of capitalism in the first place. The more capitalism draws the attention of professional intellectual historians the better, I say. But not at the expense of maintaining the increased methodological 7

I borrow this understanding of the mission of our field from Wilfred McClay.

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self-consciousness and sophistication that have since come to characterize the field. And on this count, I would conclude by suggesting there are at least two things we might hope for if intellectual history is to remain one of our primary ways of understanding capitalism. First, less work on the slippery slope of “culture,” and more attention to what might be called the “ways and means” of thinking about capitalism—i.e., more work focused on specific historical circumstances that prompt some to embrace market institutions and values, others to oppose them, and still others to believe they somehow might go beyond them. Where do the changing arguments and attitudes that inform these positions come from, and why? Second, narratives that inform our interpretations of capitalism should guard against what Megill aptly characterizes as “the danger of a retrospective illusion” (p. xvii). If one of intellectual history’s primary functions is to strip away whatever makes capitalism familiar, we should not look back on its history and seek to uncover a past that followed a particular path. We should instead construct narratives that turn on chance and unpredictability, stories that highlight and try to make sense of developments that might never have taken place or never have been imagined. Less predictable narratives also might have the added benefit of assuring that writing and reading about the intellectual history of capitalism remain worthwhile activities in the decades ahead. For wherever capitalism may be taking us at the moment, its future is sure to remain as unpredictable as its past, proceeding not as one game but as many shifting and changing games, not all of which will be played on the square.8

8

My thanks to Thomas Bender, Charles Capper, Thomas Haskell, and Wilfred McClay for numerous invaluable suggestions.

C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 2 (2004), pp. 283–292.
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000162 Printed in the United Kingdom

french letters bruce kuklick Department of History, University of Pennsylvania

George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) Ann Fulton, Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945–1963 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999) Jean-Philippe Mathy, Extrˆeme-Occident: French Intellectuals and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) Jean-Philippe Mathy, French Resistance: The French–American Culture Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) In the 1790s French thinkers fascinated Americans, but for almost 150 years after the Founding, French cultural and intellectual life had a minor impact on the United States. British thought had an entr´ee because of the language, although Americans often poutingly rejected the English. German ideas more slowly made inroads because most American thinkers were not fluent in German, although as the nineteenth century wore on, the fame of German scholarship prompted the reading of Germany’s philosophers, especially if they had large reputations in their homeland and were almost unintelligible in translation. But France’s influence was negligible. Americans have regularly embraced European thought for their own culture wars. Attitudes toward the French Revolution and the Terror were often a Rorshach Test about domestic politics. The erudite in the early republic adopted the Scottish Realists, partially to escape the more skeptical empiricism of the English, and then clung to the Scotch to fend off the influence of what was seen as the irreligiosity of the Germans. Emerson and many around him then looked to Kant and some post-Kantians to liberate them from a stultifying American rationalist Unitarianism. The pragmatists appreciated that Kant and Hegel might salvage a spiritual life from some English interpreters of Darwin. Young Turks in the twentieth century studied Bertrand Russell and Rudolph Carnap to fortify their secular vision against the faux Protestantism of speculative thought at home. Overall, American thinkers have often suspected the importation of alien ideas but have often found them useful in one or another battle that has involved the 283

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definition of an appropriate orientation to the universe. Over the last 200 years, as philosophy has increasingly become an esoteric inquiry pursued formally in the university, these battles have had less social significance. Not much hung on the fact that as a young man in the 1920s Willard Quine mastered Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. After World War II, however, not only did French philosophy make its first entrance on the modern American stage, but it also did so in a way that had ramifications far beyond the American university. It is ironic that France should have achieved its force in American intellectual life only after its time as a great power had decisively passed. The defeat of France in World War II initiated a complicated process that in the second half of the twentieth century would gain French thought more notice in the United States than it previously had had. All the books under review take up this issue, and they do so in a rarified area, the history of ideas. In addition to presenting a coherent account of the FrancoAmerican connection in the second half of the twentieth century, the volumes collectively raise the issue of how to study the interaction of intellectual, cultural, and social history. Fulton’s Apostles of Sartre and Cotkin’s Existential America do not dismiss the history of philosophy in the United States but are more committed to investigating how the wider educated culture of postwar America appropriated continental European ideas. Although the books sometimes slight the American profession of philosophy, the links the authors make between French philosophy and American culture are most worthwhile. Jean-Paul Sartre emerged as a luminary in the French intellectual world writing on the decadence of the fascist ideology that had engulfed Europe in the 1930s and on the struggle for legitimate political authority that had arisen in the ruins of the continent after the expensive victory over the Germans. By the time the war ended, Sartre was a caf´e intellectual in France, and his “existentialism” became known in the United States. No essential characteristic of human beings guided their lives—“existence preceded essence”—and so people could not take comfort in social pressure or conventions to explain their behavior. This was for Sartre mauvaise foi, bad faith, which allowed them to avoid accountability for their decisions. Instead individuals had to recognize that nothing was guaranteed to them, nothing settled or determined. Human nature did not exist, and people had to make themselves into what they were to become. In such circumstances, faced with the inevitable terror of death, authentic individuals accepted responsibility for moral preferences and political commitments. They had a radical freedom of choice that could not be sloughed off. How did this bleak product of the destructive political extremism of Europe from 1914 to 1945 make its way to America? What space was there in the relatively

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untouched United States, home of the friendly optimism of John Dewey, for this nightmare? Answering questions like these is the burden of Apostles of Sartre and Existential America. While they emphasize Sartre in the period after World War II—and one translated essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism”—the story in the first instance includes other existentialists such as Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, and extends to a canon of earlier “continental” philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. But Fulton’s and Cotkin’s books should appeal to intellectual historians not just because they have a bearing on the transmission of (mainly) French philosophy to the United States, but because the authors also deal with a significant but overlooked topic, the way in which the philosophy penetrated the general culture. Existentialism is, moreover, distinctive in twentieth-century America because it permeated educated society in the face of disdain from many professional philosophers and eventually helped to destroy established paradigms in professional philosophy itself. The narrower study, Apostles of Sartre, meticulously and straightforwardly lays out how Sartre’s views were introduced to the literary scene in New York; how they achieved a beachhead in the academy in a spot as improbable as Yale University; how they appealed to and provided jobs for marginal scholars, for example women philosophers; and finally how they were made alluring to thousands of undergraduates. Perhaps most convincing in this story (and in Cotkin’s) is the tale of the popularity of such texts as Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism: From Doestoevsky to Sartre (1956) and William Barrett’s Irrational Man (1958). The scope of Existential America is broader, and carries on Fulton’s narrative past the introduction of Sartre into philosophy departments and into the lives of educated Americans. Cotkin also ranges beyond the postwar period. He contends that existentially inspired themes shaped cultured life from the 1950s onward and, indeed, have affected a long tradition of American thinkers worried about the state of our souls in a meaningless universe. There is some truth to this contention. Cotkin points to Jonathan Edwards, Herman Melville, and William James, for example, as “American existentialists before the fact,” and a strain of thought in these thinkers does intimate the fear and trembling associated with the European philosophers of Existenz. Only a purist studying the history of ideas would argue that one cannot have “existentialists before the fact.” Cotkin, I believe, does not get these matters wrong so much as he misplaces his emphases and overlooks a way to make his exploration even more engaging. It would surely be a mistake to argue that the tormented dimension of Edwards, Melville, and James represents a major thread in American intellectual history. In the twentieth century, if any thinker signifies the United States it is the aforementioned and benign John Dewey, who lacked a dark side. If commentators doubt the role of national cultural style in understanding high philosophy, all

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they need do is compare Dewey to Heidegger; or if James is an American thinker considered to be in torment, measure him against Nietzsche. National differences count in philosophy, and those facets in Edwards et al. that Cotkin focuses on are not central to the American story. After existentialism entered the United States, Edwards, Melville, and James had their existentialist aspect heightened. In the era after World War II, scholarship reinterpreted these men to intensify the troubled side of their lives. Here, I believe, the core book is Perry Miller’s Jonathan Edwards (1949). Cotkin uses Miller’s work on Edwards to intimate the existential edge of American thought long before Sartre wrote. Cotkin overlooks the fact that Miller wrote in an already existentialized intellectual life. The 1950s gave us a more agonized Edwards, Melville, and James; Miller’s Edwards is an artifact of Sartre’s authority in the United States. Most effective and imaginative is Existential America’s exploration of existentialism’s wider sway. The treatment of Norman Mailer is most original, although other novelists are also covered. In addition, the book examines cultural creations such as the photography of Robert Frank, and philosophical dread in the American film noir. Cotkin even talks about the films of Woody Allen, but not enough in my opinion. The book closes with an obligatory look at how existentialism shows up in the more literate of the radicals of the 1960s. The Port Huron Statement of 1962, which launched SDS, is redolent with an existentialist idiom, and Cotkin finally tells us how these subjects (in the work of Simone de Beauvoir) define the writing of Betty Friedan. Both Fulton and Cotkin elucidate the absorption of existentialist ideas into the general culture by citing latent fears of the Cold War and nuclear weapons, by the pressures for conformity in a mass society, and (later) by the revolts of the Vietnam era. These explanations are predictable and unadventurous but nonetheless persuasive, and exhibit the unexamined historical conventions in the United States to which Fulton and Cotkin appeal in their explanation: the social and political world is somehow salient to the intellectual and cultural but not determinative of it. The authors devote less time to what was going on in the academy itself, or the complexity of the response in the scholarly world. Fulton presumes that Anglophone philosophy is not worth much and is dreadful stuff. And Existential America ignores how the learned study of existentialism became entrenched in philosophy departments in the United States and how the whole sub-discipline of “Continental Philosophy” became part of the academic scene. We find out about the followers of Betty Friedan but not about the industry of Heidegger monographs. And both Cotkin’s and Fulton’s works silently accept the dismissal by existential Americans of the dominant Anglo-American analytic philosophy. This bothers me, in part because of my lingering attachment to what goes on in

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philosophy departments at places like Harvard, Pittsburgh, and Michigan. But it bothers me more because the authors neglect an opportunity to examine the role of ressentiment in intellectual life in the United States; the anti-intellectualism of all stripes of philosophers and their followers; and the social function of the philosophical disciplines in the second half of the twentieth century. While Fulton and Cotkin cover the period from World War II to Vietnam, Jean-Philippe Mathy’s two books concentrate on the period from Vietnam to the present. But Mathy reveals a different sensibility in pursuing the same subject matter. Fulton and Cotkin approach even the history of ideas with little theoretical baggage. Mathy, who tells us that he is “a Frenchman living in the United States” (Extrˆeme-Occident, p. 14), would say that the American authors exemplify the empirical bent of Anglo-American thinking. By contrast, Mathy has picked up the theory of the French intellectuals whose writing he studies. Concentrating on the period after the one Fulton and Cotkin cover, and taking the story to the end of the twentieth century, Mathy focuses on how French intellectuals have understood the Idea of America and what this tells us about them. But this description simplifies a complicated set of concerns that range over both books and that mix Mathy’s own views as a theoretically minded commentator and the views of the philosophers he is examining. The major concern and the ostensible topic of Extrˆeme-Occident is how some French writers have grasped the origins, growth, and meaning of democracy in America. After a running (and competent) start in the nineteenth century, the book surveys the twentieth century more carefully and then closes in on the era following World War II, emphasizing the 1970s and 1980s. Although it covers other issues, French Resistance elaborates on the same subject among French writers in the 1990s, carrying forward the analyses of Extrˆeme-Occident to the end of the twentieth century. Mathy shows that both the French left and the French right have been antiAmerican, although attitudes have changed over the years and although the left has tended to honor Americans who have denounced their native land (as in the 1960s). Mathy also depicts a group from Tocqueville to French Atlanticists thinking about NATO who have criticized the United States more moderately than the diatribes characteristic in the majority perspective shared by left and right. The consistent violent distaste for the United States is the most noteworthy trait of the French at whom Mathy looks. Many pages are spent analyzing Sartre’s detestation of the United States, and the suggestion that the United States might become the home for a post-Nazi form of fascism. But Sartre is only one example. Over the years French critics of the United States have denigrated its democratic decadence, which they have linked to the mass production and industrial collectivization brought about by a love affair with technology. An essential American modernity has marginalized high culture and produced a conformist intellectual life. As the

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United States has become a world power, it has imposed its hegemonic capitalist way of life wherever it can, by economic coercion if possible, by violence if necessary. In other cultures the imprint of America has vulgarized the locals, and further diminished the sensitivity of the conqueror. Mathy wrote both of his books before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (2001) and the Second Iraq War (2003), and thus for observers of FrancoAmerican relations after this period he valuably demonstrates how rich was the soil in France for germinating poisonous beliefs about the United States. A second concern in his books acquaints us with the theories of these same thinkers who, in addition to denouncing America, try to understand the world. That is, Mathy has applied the theories of Foucault, Derrida, and their more recent followers to explain an important dimension of their writing—the perceptions of these French thinkers of the United States. French theories are used to explain substantive French beliefs. Mathy treats French intellectuals talking about America as engaging in a form of what Edward Said has called “Orientalism.” “The French narrative construction of America” has mixed idealization and demonization, and has comprised a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections (Extrˆeme-Occident, pp. 254–6). These writings, says Mathy, tell us more about their authors’ position in French life than about the United States. The “textual references” he has collected constitute “what is called today an intertext.” Repeated complementary descriptions, cannibalizing one another and exhibiting similar structures in the depiction of American life, result in “a complex signifier, a contested textual construct that bears the name ‘America’” (ibid., p. 3). The set of shared categories, political commitments, and collective musings give life to “a discursive formation,” and the scholar who finds the key to such a formation, while cogitating over many of its instances, is thus freed “from the erudite, scholarly obsession” with exhausting the corpus of the material (ibid., p. 11). In part the notion of discursive formation that derives from the French intellectuals under study and that Mathy exploits to understand them is like the notions of “myth and symbol” popular in American Studies in the United States in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The American practitioners were more literary critics than historians, and believed that in examining great works of American art, or in unpacking the code at work in popular fictions, the scholar might get at the core (and often tormented) values that shaped American life. In both the American and the French cases the insight of the scholar and a focus on textual method replaced empirical research. In contrast to Mathy (and oldfashioned students of American Studies) Fulton and Cotkin are common-sense historians, eschewing theory of any kind and trusting to the accumulation of data to illuminate the topics they have undertaken to explore.

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Moreover, while Mathy explores a discursive formation that saves us from research, he also wants its application to provide more than a series of verbal formulas that exemplify belief about the United States. “The representations” of America are “rooted in the specific social and political history of the French learned classes” but also intend “the object of the representations” (Extrˆeme-Occident, p. 38)—the American nation. The intertext or formation or representations are a generalization from the writing of thinkers, but also depend on a (French) social reality, and try to uncover such a reality in the United States. We have a set of ideas that reflect both the underside of the mental world of French philosophers and the connection of this mental world to a material substrate in France. Simultaneously, this set of ideas is about—that is, it aims at—reality in the United States; the intertext tries to get at the truth, the “object.” Mathy next tells us that intertext and object are not separate: “in a sense” America “is” its representations; the collaborative French odium is an integral part of America, even though French social history produced the collaboration. Most important, more than any other nation, America “partakes of this dubious ontological status” (Extrˆeme-Occident, pp. 50–51). I infer from this statement that beliefs about France are more clearly manufactured by the “real” France. But America is more a blend of French fantasies (among others) and real life in the United States. Mathy’s theorizing lacks clarity, but I am unsure whether the fault is his or the thinkers he both criticizes and studies. More important, he falters in his attempt to show how the intertext is a product of French social life, and thus whether the ideas have any justification—he does not tell us what the social base is in France that “causes” French beliefs about the United States. One often cannot tell if some view about America emanates from Mathy or some other French thinker, or if it is to be taken as true or as an example of some kind of French projection. Mathy cannot decide whether he is deconstructing French ideas about the United States or validating them. Obviously he wants to say: a little of both. Yet we don’t learn which is which. In two books that are appropriately enough filled with amplifying comment, the author’s habit of stating the most febrile notions associated with America without appropriate explication makes for trouble. Some pertinent examples: r Mathy discusses, as if it were not silly, Julia Kristeva’s assertion that “America embodies principles of womanhood: its prehistoric landscapes escape the linearity attributed to masculine (historical) time” (Extrˆeme-Occident, p. 195); r Referring to Alexander Koj`eve on Hegel, Mathy says, as if it is intelligible, “an extreme aesthetic formalization of self, pure (gratuitous) opposition to the ‘given,’ is, in the Kojevian perception of postmodernity, the only cultural

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practice now available to human beings, since history, as transformation of the world and moral activity, is totally finished” (ibid., p. 13); r Similarly, Mathy writes about Baudrillard, who “submits both the Hegelian and Nietzschean readings of America to a double twist. He agrees with the Neo-Hegelians that postmodern America is the consummation of historical time through the resolution of the contradictions between nature and man (technology) as well as between man and man (the disappearance of all meaningful conflicts, the end of ideologies)” (ibid., p. 231). In French Resistance, Mathy is more concerned to get at the truth value of French visions of the United States, and additionally outlines how French views of America really imitate American views of France. There is a “structural homology” between disputes in the United States and France on issues that in both countries are shared passions of intellectuals and the public. But these similarities are not only structural: they mimic close connections between the two cultures, in which an American involvement with France balances the French involvement with America (French Resistance, pp. 12, 17). A series of connected faults, I believe, weakens this line of reasoning. The book operates on the assumption that some intertexts can be trusted—one can read off the ideas of the masses in the United States from the ideas of a tiny elite in France or the United States, that we can easily move from intellectual history to cultural history. In this case, Mathy generalizes from his concentration on two elements of postwar Franco-American history: the previously cited fury of Sartre with the United States, and French–American theoretical affairs of the past twenty years. These are indeed important phenomena. But Mathy is far more oriented to the mental world of French thinkers than to the United States. Contrast his treatment of Sartre in America to that of Fulton and Cotkin: Apostles of Sartre and Existential America barely mention Sartre’s rage, which is trivial in their calculation of Sartre’s import. American intellectuals and then, ultimately, moviegoers didn’t care much about what Sartre thought of them; his thoughts about the world and our anxiety-ridden place were intriguing. By contrast, Mathy does not mention “Existentialism as a Humanism”; nor does he expound on how the United States took up existentialist belief. He does presume that Sartre’s distaste is based on the insight of genius into wide empirical truth. In talking about French theorists after Sartre, French Resistance first appraises these ideas and those of their admirers in the United States, exploring the French intellectual migration to the United States; that is, he considers in a later period the question that Fulton and Cotkin have addressed in an earlier period. Indeed, Mathy’s first chapter, recycled from an earlier essay, contributes to the scholarly debate over the value of this thinking. The author highlights opposition to structuralism, deconstruction, and their variants in the United States, but also

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attends to how American pragmatist intellectuals such as Richard Rorty gravitated to the French philosophy. Overall Mathy comments fair-mindedly and parses the notions correctly. More important, however, Mathy is committed to the view that the reputation of theory is relevant to a thick cultural relation, that it signals some kind of popular link between the United States and France: cultural history can be derived from a correct appreciation of intellectual history. Theory, of course, was pertinent in the limited realm of higher academics in the humanities and softer social sciences. But it had far less currency than Sartre’s existentialism. Mathy is so engaged with his French ideas and their elevated world that he does not see that, at least in the United States, the obsession with some French thinkers in part of the university system does not tell us much about the impact of France on America. Mathy wants to discriminate and to distinguish an abstract history of ideas from a cultural tie that richly connects both societies (French Resistance, pp. 31, 34), but he inevitably extrapolates a Franco-American bond from something like an examination of “how some of the most recent historiography of France in the English language has popularized a view of the French mind as utterly unable to conceive of a tolerant pluralistic post-imperial society” (French Resistance, p. 25). Not to mention “a special issue of PMLA devoted to the emerging field of colonial discourse analysis” (ibid., p. 44), or “many French and AngloAmerican conceptions of gender relations as well as brands of feminist theory” (ibid., p. 49), or the “fundamental opposition between the voluntaristic moral and philosophical idealism of the French Enlightenment and the immanentist historicism that is at the core of Anglo-American liberalism” (ibid., p. 91). Much more compelling is that Mathy repeatedly states that fewer and fewer students bother to take French at all as a language, and are decidedly indifferent to French cultural studies (ibid., pp. 11, 120–22). As I see it, there is little connection. It is not more than a clich´e to note that Americans don’t think much about the outside world. France does not mean much to them now, one way or another. We know that there is Paris and the Eiffel Tower; the French have fancy cooking; teenagers know particularly about their kisses. What else? When the American government calls attention to French hostility, or when the French rub the American nose in their anger, there is a bellow of irritation in the United States, of the sort that occurred in the period of the Second Iraq War. But for the most part Americans have not been concerned with the French for the last thirty years in the realms Mathy depicts. At the end of 1993 Major League Baseball sent Lenny Dykstra, the star center fielder of the Philadelphia Phillies, on a goodwill tour of Europe. The Phillies had appeared in the World Series that year, and Sports Illustrated wrote up the tour. On the trip from Paris to Amsterdam, Dykstra reflected on Europe:

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“Now Paris is France. But London, that’s just London, right? It’s just London.” Theories may help us if we want to learn how French and American culture, in the anthropological sense, connect. But there is no easy way to go from what the chattering classes think to what Dykstra and his French equivalents think. A necessary condition of doing cultural history is sustained empirical research about what non-intellectuals make of cultures not their own.

C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 2 (2004), pp. 293–304
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244304000174 Printed in the United Kingdom

talking about truth kenneth cmiel Department of History, University of Iowa

Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper – The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) John Kadvany, Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001) Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) Science and science studies were on the front lines during the culture wars of the 1990s. On one side were those defending the purity of science, hostile to the contextualizations and deconstructions of scientific practice, strongly supporting the idea that science propels us forward. On the other were the skeptics who sometimes openly disparaged science and at other times more cautiously expressed reservations about the scientific enterprise. Through much of the decade, each side manned the trenches, fired salvos, and, like the Western front in 1917, looked for the decisive opening that didn’t come. Like so much else in the culture wars, the tendency to lock the discussion into two sides left little room for nuance. The subtlety that was genuinely there was largely ignored. Newspapers and news magazines didn’t want to hear it. And why should they, when there were plenty of academics and scientists content to blast away at each other merrily? Wars—at least for the partisans—leave little room for complexity. The science wars also underscored something else—rumination on science takes place in the context of larger events. Nervousness about national mores in the long wake of the 1960s brought on the culture wars of the last decade, and battles about science were drawn into the roil. And it is not only the recent past that makes this clear. New work on the history of the philosophy of science underscores the same point. In the past few years, three important books have appeared which try to assess three mid-century philosophers of science—Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Thomas Kuhn. Each biography discusses scientific epistemology in relation to dramatic world events. Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn each spun out a defense of science that was free of empiricist cant. Hovering behind their efforts were 293

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the great political dramas of the times—the Great Depression, the Nazi menace, Stalinism, and the Cold War. Yet it is no surprise that these biographies are appearing now. They are a fitting punctuation to the culture wars. And they remind us of the range of ways in which the practice of science can be imagined. We should be grateful for these books. After the recent simplifications and polemics, it is reassuring to see historians trying to do justice to the subject’s complexity. Malachi Haim Hacohen’s biography of Karl Popper is first-rate intellectual history. Popper, of course, is famous for his doctrine of falsifiability, the idea that science does not progress by positively proving its hypotheses but by allowing them to be rigorously tested and falsified. The ability to rigorously test theory, for Popper, marked the line between science and non-science. Since you can’t really disprove that Jesus was the son of God, the idea isn’t a scientific one. On the other hand, the Michelson–Morley experiment did undermine the idea that the universe is filled with ether. Consequently, the theory of ether, even though false, was still science. Popper’s great originality was to suggest that empirical confirmation is not the core of the scientific enterprise. Hacohen’s book follows Popper from his birth in 1902 to the end of World War II. The thirty-page epilogue is an excellent place to get a bead on Popper’s later career. Hacohen is careful with Popper’s thought and adds hugely to our knowledge of the philosopher’s personal life. The archival digging clears up much that was murky about the Austrian intellectual. There are shrewd observations about the Popper family fortunes which do a far better job of explaining Popper’s outsider status in Viennese social circles than the breezier account recently published in David Edmonds and John Eidenow’s Wittgenstein’s Poker. Popper did come from a haute bourgeoisie family, but one that apparently suffered deep financial reversals during the inflation of the 1920s. By 1930, he had to scramble for a living. Hacohen also does an excellent job of parsing out Popper’s politics. By the end of his life, Popper was often seen as a conservative. How far this extended back, how the Cold War mattered to Popper, and what exactly his relationship was with the Austrian libertarian Friedrich von Hayek—these were just some of the questions lacking serious research. Popper’s 1974 autobiography was a start but, of course, such books need to be taken with a grain of salt. Popper, we now know thanks to Hacohen, briefly flirted with communism in 1918, but by the end of the 1920s he thought even the German Social Democratic Party incompetent. Social Democrats, he concluded by the middle of the 1930s, had done much that inadvertently helped bring Hitler to power. Yet despite such criticism, Popper remained committed to a soft, middle-class form of socialism. Into the 1940s, he continued to support liberal social reform, the basic point of view in The Open Society and its Enemies. The libertarian Hayek helped Popper find work and a

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publisher, and appreciated Popper’s ideas about science, but the two men did not share the same politics. Hacohen also has very competent renderings of Popper’s major books and essays. Most important, though, Hacohen has the best account to date of Popper’s relations with the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. Like Popper, early twentiethcentury Viennese philosophers like Otto Neurath and Moritz Schlick devoted themselves to developing a logic of science. Unlike earlier positivists, these central Europeans placed just as much emphasis on the power of formal logic and linguistic analysis as they did on the gathering of empirical evidence. The relations between Popper and the group have never been clear, and some scholarship at least implicitly puts Popper uneasily close to them.1 Hacohen shows that while key logical positivists—notably Rudolph Carnap and Moritz Schlick—supported Popper’s work, and saw it as highly original, Popper was, intellectually and personally, firmly outside the circle. Personally, Popper was too much of a pain in the neck to belong, yet too important to ignore. Popper participated in some key Vienna Circle events of the mid-1930s, which gave the impression that he was closer to the group than he actually was. Hacohen argues forcefully that Popper was intellectually distant from the logical positivists. Popper’s philosophy of science, with its famous defense of falsifiability as the cornerstone of science, was meant to reform metaphysics, not overthrow it as the Vienna positivists hoped. Moreover, the Viennese positivists understood logical analysis and empirical experience to be the bases of knowledge. Popper shared their passion for logical analysis but rejected the idea that empirical testing could firmly establish “truth.” Popper saw himself “as a heterodox Kantian, and the positivists as precritical philosophers”(p. 209). John Kadvany has done his own biographical digging, putting together an absolutely riveting story of Imre Lakatos’s life and work. As for his life, Lakatos was long known to have been a Hungarian communist who lost the faith in the mid-1950s, made his way to England, studied with Popper, and took up a post at the London School of Economics. Lakatos was a strong anti-communist and a vocal opponent of the student rebellions of the 1960s. As for his work, Lakatos is conventionally understood as having expanded on Popper’s notions of scientific research. Lakatos came to believe that Popper’s ideas about falsification were not so much wrong as simplistic. Contrary to what Popper had claimed, one refutation, according to Lakatos, did not undermine a whole scientific theory. It took multiple failures for a theory to be jettisoned. A scientific research program, according to Lakatos, had an outer and an inner shell—the former being the 1

See, for example, Victor Kraft, “Popper and the Vienna Circle,” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Paul Schilpp (Chicago: Open Court, 1974), 185–204; Friedrich Stadler, Studien zum Wiener Kreis (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997).

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protective realm that could be criticized and tested for falsifiability, the latter the core beliefs that could not be touched without the whole enterprise collapsing. The outer shell, among other things, protected the central core from attack. Only when the outer shell (the “protective belt” was Lakatos’s term) stopped doing its job did the inner essence become vulnerable (“degenerate” was Lakatos’s term). A research program could be judged progressive if it kept answering new questions, kept generating new facts. Kadvany reexamines Lakatos’s life in two crucial ways. He provocatively argues that Lakatos never gave up his Hegelian roots, that his key insights into science reflect his continued faith in the philosophy of history he learned in a Budapest intellectual climate where George Luk´acs’s Hegelianized Marxism marked advanced thinking. Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, his 1961 dissertation and his major contribution to the philosophical history of science, was certainly not Marxist, but it was covertly historicist. So, too, were his key essays on the philosophy of science—contributions like “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes” or “History of Science and its Rational Reconstruction.” The Marxist political economy so important to Luk´acs was gone, but in these essays Lakatos continued to emphasize the omnipresence of error and how science advanced by incorporating error into new theory—Hegel’s Aufhebung, in other words. By the time he emerged in Anglo-American philosophical circles in the early 1960s, Lakatos was writing in an Anglo-American analytic style that masked his covert central European historicism. He sounded like Popper but thought— secretly—like Luk´acs. This historicism, according to Kadvany, reached right to the heart of Lakatos’s criticism of Popper. Popper had argued that once it was shown that a theory contradicted the facts, the theory would be jettisoned. This ignored, in Lakatos’s estimation, the fact that contradiction was a part of all scientific theory. Some debunking experiment was not, in itself, grounds to get rid of anything. Falsifiability was far more complex than Popper imagined. It took a much more complicated rotting of a research program for a theory to fail. Only in retrospect do we think that some key experiment destroyed a weak scientific theory. The owl of Minerva appears at dusk. Kadvany’s second point is biographical—and stunning. Delving into Lakatos’s Budapest background, Kadvany found that Lakatos was a far more committed Stalinist in the 1940s than is usually thought.2 In the most shocking revelation of

2

Contrast this paragraph, for example, with the biography included in Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, For and Against Method: Including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos–Feyerabend Correspondence, ed. Matteo Motterlini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 401–5.

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the book, it appears that during World War II Lakatos, a resistance cell leader, engineered the suicide of a woman who potentially compromised the group’s secrecy. He convinced her to kill herself, in other words, for the good of the cause. People who knew Lakatos at the time described him as “diabolically clever” and “a fanatical Communist who believed the end justified the means” (p. 288). As a student and working in the Ministry of Education after the war, Lakatos helped undermine the independent university system and pull it into the communist orbit. In 1947, the Party sent him to work on Budapest’s E¨otv¨os College. He was an aggressive, confrontational activist, “disrupting college activities” (p. 289), helping organize communist students, attacking the record and probity of noncommunist college administrators, and ultimately, in 1950, helping force those administrators to resign. He was, Kadvany argues, ruthless and committed to creating a fully fledged Stalinist state. Despite this, he was arrested in the early 1950s as ideologically unreliable, spent a couple of years in a prison camp, and then made his way to England in 1956. Kadvany does not integrate this biographical material into the flow of the book, unfortunately. The author says that he wants to use these events to show one more way that truth unfolds through history, but readers get no discussion of how Lakatos behaved in England, his values, his treatment of colleagues, his politics. The personal biography of Lakatos, as opposed to the history of ideas, simply stops in 1956. It is well known that Lakatos vehemently opposed the student disruption of university activities in the late 1960s, a reversal of his own role in 1947–8.3 But it would have helped this truly original and fascinating book to include some discussion of Lakatos’s later life. Steve Fuller, in his Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for our Times, has his own take on the relationship between his protagonist’s life and work. And none of it is good. For Fuller, Kuhn’s famous 1962 book should be understood as an expression of Cold War ideology. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reeks of the questions it does not ask—questions of power, domination, and the role of science in the national security state. Kuhn’s take on revolutions is similarly bad for Fuller. There is, Fuller posits, an analogy between scientific and political revolutions. Kuhn, according to Fuller, leaned far too heavily on normal science and far too little on revolutionary science, an emphasis that supposedly reflects his political conservatism. Kuhn’s emphasis on normal science and the laboratory also pushed later science studies scholars like Bruno Latour to do phenomenologies of lab practice, leaving unexplored the more political,

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See “A Letter to the Director of the London School of Economics” (March 1968), in Imre Lakatos, Mathematics, Science, and Epistemology: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 247–53.

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external social backdrop to science. Kuhn’s understanding of scientific practice as autonomous, disconnected from social forces, was disastrous, according to Fuller. In some major ways, Fuller is certainly correct. Kuhn’s uncritical assumption in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that autonomous, self-regulating professionalism is the way science works becomes even more striking when contrasted with the more radical work of J. D. Bernal, the radical physicist and sociologist of science from the 1930s and 1940s. For Kuhn, truth was what the scientific community said it was. His epistemology was a version of philosophical conventionalism. Fuller is sympathetic to Bernal, who brought to center stage the question of what science actually does or does not do to benefit citizens at large, a question completely absent from Kuhn’s work. Nor is Fuller wrong to compare Kuhn to Chance, the strange, disconnected observer-protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Being There. (I myself have long compared Kuhn to Andy Warhol, another blank observer whose breakthrough year was 1962.) There was what seems to be a determined effort by Kuhn—throughout his career—to avoid thinking about the critical consequences of his insights, to be calmly looking on from the sidelines without there being anything at stake in the outcome. And Kuhn’s equation of autonomous professional communities with the nature of the scientific enterprise becomes more pronounced in his later work.4 Even as resolute a defender of the social order as Imre Lakatos would deride Kuhn as an “elitist.”5 Yet despite these insights, this is a frustrating book. There is Fuller’s tone. He is a sort of know-it-all, always looking for the least generous interpretation. Kuhn is never just wrong or lacking insight: he is always the “Cold Warrior,” a phrase hauled out time and time again by Fuller without a really clear sense of what it means, save that it’s clearly bad. This book paints a one-dimensional Kuhn, whose work on the history of science is on a par with some of the worst excesses of the Cold War. Sometimes Fuller engages in gratuitous political slandering, claiming, for example, that for Kuhn “unrestricted” criticism “verges on treason” (p. 177) but presenting no evidence to support this extravagant claim, no evidence that Kuhn thought his statements on science reflected beliefs about the political world, and no discussion of what that key word “unrestricted” actually means in this passage. It does hint, though, at some sort of relationship between Kuhn and

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See Thomas Kuhn, The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Imre Lakatos, “The Problem of Appraising Scientific Theories,” in Mathematics, Science, and Epistemology, 114–16.

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McCarthyism.6 The book, moreover, is sloppy. Fuller sees himself as a polymath, talking about a huge range of intellectual and political trends of the twentieth century. Yet he does not handle all of them with the same level of reliability (the contrast with the scrupulous scholarship of Hacohen and Kadvany is striking). Fuller is utterly romantic about the New Deal. I can’t see how he can have actually read Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and still describe Bell as calling for “a harmonious social order supported by a benevolent technocracy” (p. 240). Fuller argues that Kuhn borrowed from the political science realism of the 1950s but only provides very weak analogical evidence. He often relies on leaps to make a point. He darkly introduces the “Pareto Circle” at Harvard, a set of moderate and conservative social scientists developing alternatives to Marxist social theory in the 1930s and 1940s, the most famous of whom was Talcott Parsons. Fuller wants to connect Kuhn to them, but he has too many sentences like “To be sure, Kuhn never cited Pareto”(p. 168). He tries to make up for this by citing the “intellectual environment” at Harvard. Given the prominence of Pareto, “it is only natural to conclude” that Kuhn’s concept of revolution “owed more to Pareto than, say, Marx.” Put like this, it’s a no-brainer. Who has ever claimed that Kuhn owed anything to Marx? But it also shows Fuller’s sleight-of-hand. Why does it have to be posed as Pareto versus Marx? So consumed is Fuller with placing Kuhn in his proper Cold War context that he pushes some of his interpretations into boxes they don’t easily fit in. This is a shame, because, as I noted above, his initial impulse to place Kuhn in his own time was a wise one and Fuller makes some useful points. It is too bad that this isn’t a more careful book. All three philosophers painted alternatives to twentieth-century versions of positivism. Popper’s neo-Kantianism, Lakatos’s neo-Hegelianism, and Kuhn’s neo-conventionalism all rejected empirical philosophies of science. At the same time, however, all remained very supportive of scientific endeavor. All three liked science and wanted to put it on a solid footing. From the perspective of the philosophy of science and its history, these three books can be seen as revealing counter-traditions to mainline scientism. Figures like Ernst Mach and the Vienna Circle in central Europe, or A. J. Ayer in Britain, formed the positivist core about which alternatives were spun. And certainly, the backdrop to each of the three philosophers is their desire for an alternative to positivism of any sort. Yet the collective stories of Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn can also be seen as challenging the idea that some core positivism defined 6

Here Fuller’s innuendo replaces scholarship. There are other archival papers available that will possibly shed light on these matters, but Fuller, given his penchant for “philosophical” history, did not sully himself with the dust of the archives.

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twentieth-century philosophy of science. There was too much outside of that box. Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos were just part of it. Henri Poincar´e, Pierre Duhem, George Canguilhem, and Michael Polanyi were conventionalists of one sort or another, that is, believing that what counted as “truth” depended on what the community of scientists accepted at a given time. None had much faith in the idea that truth was defined by the correlation of propositional statements to some external reality or facts. Thomas Kuhn might be seen, not as articulating something so shockingly new, nor, as Fuller wants, as fundamentally a Cold War apologist, but as a thinker working in a deeper twentieth-century tradition.7 Recent work on the early years of the Vienna Circle has suggested that neoKantianism was far more important than earlier thought, that Poincar´e was a source as much as Ernst Mach.8 Hacohen observes, correctly I believe, that Popper saw himself as the valiant neo-Kantian fighting off the pre-critical philosophers of the Vienna Circle, but Popper might have been wrong. Popper might be seen as arguing for a second neo-Kantian front rather than a sharp pre-critical alternative to positivism. In all sorts of ways, any straightforward history of twentieth-century philosophy of science seems up for grabs. One message of these three biographies is that far more needs to be done to sort out the intellectual history of reflection on science in the twentieth century. Still, it does remain striking that all three searched out non-positivist understandings of science. However complicated the paths taken by twentiethcentury philosophy of science might have been, each of these three philosophers suggested midway points between positivism in all its varieties and recent postmodernism. All three, in other words, filled some space between Ernst Mach and Franc¸ois Lyotard. Popper filled it with the doctrine of falsifiability, arguing that science gets better not by confirming truths but by debunking unsupportable claims. Lakatos extended that but, if Kadvany is to be believed, the Hungarian also snuck in the historicist faith-in-the-long-run. Truth emerges as history unfolds. Kuhn voiced a version of conventionalism, suggesting that science cannot support itself as the empiricist bromides claimed, but that scientists do their jobs pretty well nonetheless. Moreover, as these books make abundantly clear, the musings of Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn all developed in the midst of huge, cataclysmic political

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For two essays which place Kuhn in broader traditions of twentieth-century philosophers of science, see Gary Gutting, “Thomas Kuhn and French Philosophy of Science,” and John Worrall, “Normal Science and Dogmatism, Paradigms and Progress: Kuhn ‘versus’ Popper and Lakatos,” both in Thomas Nickles, ed., Thomas Kuhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45–100. See, for example, Michael Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism,” in Nickles, ed., Thomas Kuhn, 19–44.

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events—the failure of liberal politics in central Europe and the expansion of communist and American global power after World War II. For Popper, the breakdown of liberal Vienna (his father worked in the administration of the last liberal mayor of Vienna) hovered in the background. Popper made his dramatic epistemological breakthroughs as the Great Depression settled in and Hitler came to power in Germany. Lakatos struggled with issues of intellectual responsibility and science in the face of Nazism, Stalinism, the Cold War, and, finally, the student protests in the West of the 1960s. Fuller grounds his whole understanding of Kuhn in the politics of the Cold War. Just as I would see the long residues of the 1960s as the appropriate backdrop to fights over science in the 1990s, so too does it seem just common sense to place Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn in relation to the dramatic events that shaped, not the particulars of their thought, but the issues that pressed in on them. Science may or may not be a product of its times—but rumination on science certainly is. As the history of ideas about truth gets written, it cannot, at least in the mid- and late twentieth century, be severed from the politics that mattered so much. Peter Galison, in Einstein’s Clocks, Poincar´e’s Maps: Empires of Time, connects Poincar´e’s musings about science to new attitudes to time emerging at the turn of the twentieth century.9 While Galison does not ignore politics, it is industrialization, time management, and the more general excitement and nervousness about the “modern age” that is the heart of his contextualization. Can it be that the most important contexts for discussions of science shift—culture at one point, politics at another, new technology or science at still a third? The recent literature certainly suggests that questions like this deserve more attention from students of science. If these books upset the picture of positivism as the core philosophy of science in the twentieth century, they do confirm another basic idea of twentieth-century intellectual history: the 1960s and 1970s were a great divide. For while the story of positivism triumphant needs to be rethought, critical sentiment did take a significant turn a few decades back. Even this needs to be stated carefully. We should not confuse this shift with less science being done. We should not forget that there were always intellectuals nervous about science—romantic, religious and traditionalist objections to science are easy enough to come by in the past three centuries. Nor is it difficult to find past scientists complaining that the larger cultural commitment to their work was faltering. None of this is new. In the 1970s, though, the critique happened in new places and seemed to be more threatening. And this has been sustained. Here’s what I think was new:

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Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincar´e’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003).

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people who professionally thought about science—science reporters, sociologists of science, and philosophers of science—now joined the skeptics. This new turn reflected, my current guess is, not an outright hostility in the culture at large but certainly a more general ambivalence about science, technology, and medicine.10 By the 1970s, it was no longer the hoary humanist complaining about soulless scientism; it was now Paul Feyerabend, the extravagantly anarchistic philosopher of science. It was not some Protestant minister fighting the truth claims of Charles Darwin, it was Bruno Latour questioning the truth claims of Louis Pasteur. It was not Lionel Trilling pining for literary values in the Partisan Review, it was the expos´e of Jean Heller of the Associated Press denouncing the now infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.11 Once people who wrote professionally about science added their voices to the critique, it made the criticism sustained rather than ephemeral and episodic. It gave the critique institutional homes, instead of being encased in a fleeting book of the season. These new homes for criticism certainly helped to propel, for better or worse, the last generation’s complaints about science, medicine, and technology. It is this writing that led to the flare-up of the “science wars” of the 1990s. It is not surprising, then, that two of the books under review also stake out positions on current notions of science (Kadvany does not say much about the present). Hacohen and Fuller, despite their very sharp differences, share some broad similarities. Each suggests a variant of one of the most common contemporary way stations between positivism and postmodernism—the call to deliberation and debate. For Hacohen, Popper is still the answer. Hacohen is quite upfront about Popper’s problems as a human being. Popper was rude, reclusive, high-handed, domineering, unable to bear criticism, and more and more hidebound in his views as he got older. But Hacohen makes all this so apparent in order to reclaim Popper’s thought. Yes, Popper was no great shakes as a human being, Hacohen seems to be saying, but that does not undermine his philosophy. In the closing pages of his book, as Hacohen discusses the present, he highlights Popper’s defense of critical discussion. The commitment to rational debate is still the best alternative out there, Hacohen reasons, and we would do well to pursue it. It is through giving reasons—and testing their validity—that we get closer to the truth. Hacohen defends liberal universalism against the charge of racism and sexism. “Only in a deliberative democracy (or the Open Society),” he writes, “are

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In 1970, for example, the New York Times reported that the sharp increase in interest in the history of science was “closely linked to a growing tension, even revulsion, among students and public over the consequences of science and technology . . . .” See “Rise of History of Science is a Reply to Technology,” New York Times (Feb 18, 1970), 49. James Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, rev. edn (New York: Free Press, 1993), 203–19.

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intersubjective criticism and politics proximate” (p. 545). As Hacohen presents his defense of deliberative science and politics, his Popper starts to sound suspiciously like J¨urgen Habermas. To be sure, despite their differences, there are elements in both that do sound close. Popper’s 1965 essay “The Myth of the Framework” is a spirited and impressive defense of discussion.12 And as early as The Open Society and its Enemies in 1945, Popper was claiming that “argument, which includes criticism, and the art of listening to criticism, is the basis of reasonableness.”13 Some of the seminal moments that created the image of Popper as a conservative and positivist were his highly publicized debates with Habermas and Adorno in the 1960s. Hacohen, in contrast, now emphasizes Popper’s liberalism, his distance from positivism, and his closeness to Habermasian discourse ethics. There really was not as much difference between them as was thought in the heat of the 1960s.14 Fuller offers a different defense of debate. Contemporary discussion of science, he argues, is trapped in two different ruts—the phenomenological description of practice (Kuhn’s legacy to science studies) and the layperson’s assumption “that airplanes are kept up in the air by ‘the laws of physics’”(p. 315). Fuller wants science questioned, current practice always put up for debate. Although Fuller is committed to debate and reason-giving, his notion of argument is considerably different from Popper’s. Fuller draws largely from the philosopher Stephen Toulmin. All discussion is rhetorical, according to Toulmin, even discussion of science. This does not mean that reason is irrelevant, just that the relevant reason is based on practical life instead of formal logic, mathematics, or any sort of formal method. Toulmin, unlike Popper, believed that questions of fact and emotion overlap in argument. Nor is there any sharp line between science and society. The rhetoric Fuller privileges is civic, providing “training in public speaking for democratic citizens of all walks of life” (p. 314). Fuller’s reliance upon Toulmin is intriguing. Toulmin’s first important book, The Uses of Argument, was published in 1958, four years before Kuhn’s more famous work. In other words, Kuhn and Toulmin were contemporaries. Their interests overlapped. Both wanted an alternative to logical positivism. Both were indebted to Wittgenstein. Lakatos lumped them together as philosophical

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Karl Popper, “The Myth of the Framework,” in Popper, The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality (London: Routledge, 1994), 33–64. Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (London: Routledge, 1945), 214. Popper wrote later in life that it was Habermas who first labeled him a “positivist.” See Popper, “Reason or Revolution?”, in Myth of the Framework, 66–7. For the exchanges of the 1960s, see Theodor Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

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conventionalists and therefore “elitists.” Yet Fuller sees it differently. Fuller, via Toulmin, wants rhetoric to reaffirm “its democratic roots and public service orientation” (p. 314). He wants a “citizen science” instead of a “professional science” (pp. 418–19). Fuller’s deliberation is civic and populist; Hacohen’s is—at least as presented in the closing pages of his book—civic but more restrained. Fuller’s debate seems to take place in the public assembly amid the swirl of crowds, Hacohen’s in scientific journals, Op-Ed pages, congressional hearing rooms, or university seminars. Fuller’s accent is on “rhetoric”, Hacohen’s on “rationality.” One of Fuller’s antagonists is Bruno Latour, whom Fuller associates with the unfortunate turn of science studies in a phenomenological direction. It is ironic, then, that Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern, comes as close to Fuller’s model of science and society as anyone writing, arguing for a republican science where scientists, policy makers, politicians, and citizens all get a say in the process.15 It is a sign of the power of discursive interchange as a contemporary intellectual model that it will appear in various guises: rhetoric, discourse ethics, deliberative democracy, republicanism, participatory democracy. Discursive ethics of various sorts have emerged as one of the most potent alternatives to recent postmodernism. Both Hacohen and Fuller polemicize against postmodernism as they defend debate. Fuller is far more radical than Hacohen. Despite the differences, however, both represent the current fascination with deliberation as a key intellectual resource.16 Moreover, this faith in rational deliberation has become, in our time, a contemporary way of maneuvering between positivism and irrationalism. In other words, it represents the most recent variation of the same basic concern that gnawed at Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

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Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 142–5. For a brilliant intellectual history that suggests alternative ways of thinking about communication, see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).