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The Menace of Consilience Keeping the Disciplines Unreconciled Over the years, i have been given many opportunities to present my research to audiences across the waters in a number of different institutional settings. invariably , two responses have been forthcoming—in addition, that is, to whatever howls of disbelief greeted the arguments of the talks themselves. First, someone would express surprise at how much younger i was than they imagined, and second , someone else would profess bafflement at my being a historian. Of late, i have noticed, alas, for not very mysterious reasons, a palpable decline in the frequency of the first of these reactions; the second, however, remains stubbornly constant. in Europe, asia, Latin america, or australia, what i do, whatever that may be, is still not normally done by scholars housed in departments of history. as a result, i usually find myself classified as a social theorist or cultural critic or visual arts expert or even, dare i say it, a philosopher. i won’t deny that this kind of misidentification produces a certain frisson of pleasure, as if i have somehow broken free of my earthly ties and emerged as one of Mannheim’s free-floating intellectuals, able to soar over the walls of my disciplinary cage. But at the same time, i can’t quite shake a nagging anxiety that my impersonation of a nonhistorian will be revealed for what it is, a fraudulent misrepresentation by someone who has foolishly allowed himself to graze in someone else’s field. i impose these confessional remarks on you to make three initial points. First, any discussion of the construction and demolition of interdisciplinary boundaries and identities has to take into account the radically distinct contexts in which they take place. Even in the age of traveling theory, turboprofs, and internet globalization, local variations are still very meaningful. no general pronouncements about the state of the humanities tout court can hope to do justice 150 essays from the edge to the regional, national, and cultural anomalies that defeat homogenization. However powerful the americanization of the international culture may be, it is wrong to assume that our ways of mapping the intellectual and scholarly world are fully hegemonic. the expectations of audiences count as much as the selflabeling of those who stand in front of them. the second point i want to make is that the metamorphosis that is imposed on me when i stray into other contexts is not entirely successful. that is, no matter how i try to meet those audience expectations, i cannot entirely jettison the professional formation—or perhaps deformation—produced by my training and socialization as a historian and reinforced by more than three decades of squatting with members of the same tribe. although my subfield of intellectual history can often serve as an excuse for forays into interdisciplinary no-man’sland or even alien disciplinary territory, i always feel the obligation to keep my papers in order in case my cover is blown. if challenged, in other words, i can always fall back on the identity of a professional historian, whose role is merely to chronicle the intellectual triumphs and follies of others rather than commit some of his own. Don’t expect me, i can defensively protest, to solve your philosophical or political dilemmas, i only need tell you where they came from and what may explain their curious evolution. My third initial point is that contrary to the implication that might be drawn from this reticence, which may suggest to some an excessive modesty about the role intellectual historians can and should play in plunging into the discourses whose history they reconstruct, i think it is essentially a healthy reaction to the pressure to efface disciplinary boundaries that is coming at us from so many directions . in what follows, in fact, i want to mount a modest defense of the need to keep the walls up, or at least to dispel the idea that knocking them down is somehow a self-evidently good thing. Perhaps the most insistent current voice arguing for this outcome is that of Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard sociobiologist whose best-selling plea for what he calls “consilience” not only among the humanities but among the natural and social sciences as well has attracted considerable recent attention.1 Borrowed from the nineteenth-century philosopher William Whewell, the term denotes a “jumping together” of facts and theories from different levels to form a single grand theory uniting them all. although...

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