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SoSe 22: US Intellectual History

Andrew M. Johnston, visiting professor

Comments

This is a reading and discussion course that examines the main currents of intellectual and cultural thought in the United States from the 18th century to the present (although we focus primarily on the post-Civil War period). It will not only seek to define whether there are distinctive tendencies in the evolution of American ideas (about politics, society, science, religion, economics, culture, art, and so forth), but will attempt to locate these tendencies in the specific historical conditions that gave rise to them. We will critically examine the oft-held assumption that there is an American “mind” to be discovered through key intellectual texts, and instead place American ideas in the context of ongoing debates over national identity and meaning, and against a backdrop of a nation that was and is continuously changing economically and socially. While the term “intellectual” will be broadened to include social critics, artists, polemicists, novelists, and other voices in the public sphere, the course entails discussions of what might be called the classic streams of American intellectual life: liberalism, Darwinism, Pragmatism, cultural pluralism, feminism, conservatism, and postmodernism. Amidst this diversity, of course, we will look at what appear to be persistent dichotomies in American life, debates that reflect not a single trajectory but a continuously argued uncertainty about what it means to be American in an increasingly interdependent and porous world: individualism versus community, freedom versus order, solidarity versus pluralism, religion versus secular modernity, noble republic versus glorious empire, to name only the most obvious. close