In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

290 Notes emphasizing mystical univocity, Emerson was most faithful to the synechdochal form of the Naturphilosophie of German romantics like Schelling and Schlegel. Arguing that all Being was an organic unity, German romantics drew upon Kant’s description of a living organism in the Critique of Judgement (§ 65) as conforming to two general characteristics, which Frederick Beiser summarizes as “the idea of the whole precedes its parts; and the parts are mutually the cause and effect of one another.” German romantics were thus able to claim for their philosophy an exhaustive account of nature that was neither materialistic nor mechanistic by transforming “the paradigm of explanation: to understand an event is not to explain it as the result of prior events in time but to see it as a necessary part of a whole.” This romantic paradigm of explanation, as I will show, foreshadows Eisenhower’s with respect to deterrence through nuclear stockpiling. Frederick Beiser, “The Enlightenment and Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33, 35. 83. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 57. 84. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 57. 85. Emerson, “Abraham Lincoln,” 833. 86. Harold Bloom, “Emerson and Whitman: The American Sublime,” in Sticky Sublime , ed. Bill Beckley (New York: Allworth Press, 2001), 17. 87. A similar thesis to mine can be found in Stephen John Hartnett, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). American democracy emerged in tandem with modernity, and thus, as Hartnett has written, has had to address “two driving questions,” namely: “how does modernity affect the status of and relationships among selves and society, and how does modern capitalism affect the promises of democracy?” (135). Hartnett argues that Whitman’s poetry is a paradoxical attempt at answering these two questions, as it “claims repeatedly to embody the spirit of presence, immediacy, and physicality while simultaneously claiming an oceanic and all-knowing position that illustrates absence, mediation, and totality” (161). In the language of my essay, Whitman tried simultaneously to metonymically embody the American sublime and synecdochally mediate it. 88. John Foster Dulles, “Toward World Order,” March 5, 1942, Dulles Papers, Box 290. 89. Osgood, Total Cold War, 4. 90. Osgood, Total Cold War, 5. 91. See Greenstein, Hidden-Hand Presidency. The connection between the notion of a “hidden-hand” presidency and Adam Smith’s “hidden-hand” economics is not Notes 291 incidental or insignificant. Eisenhower’s ideological commitment to free-market economics, as I will suggest, meant a resistance to FDR-type “statist” leadership. 92. Very helpful cased studies of Eisenhower’s rhetorical approach to each of these crises can be found in Medhurst, Eisenhower’s War of Words. 93. Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 152. 94. Eisenhower, The Eisenhower Diaries, 78. 95. C. D. Jackson, in “Eisenhower, Dwight D.—Correspondence, 1954,” CDJ Papers, Box 50. 96. Stephen E. Ambrose, Ike: Abilene to Berlin (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), xii–xiii. 97. Eisenhower, The Eisenhower Diaries, 84. 98. Chernus, General Eisenhower, 293. 99. Eisenhower, “Address before the American Alumni Council on Presentation of the Council’s Award of Merit, Amherst, Massachusetts, July 11, 1946,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 120. 100. Eisenhower, “Address at Veterans’ Day, Nebraska State Fair, Lincoln, Nebraska, September 1, 1946,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 121. 101. Eisenhower, “Address before Convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars, Boston, Massachusetts, September 3, 1946,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 130–131. 102. Eisenhower, Eisenhower Diaries, 168. 103. Eisenhower, Eisenhower Diaries, 374. 104. Hughes, The Ordeal of Power, 346–347. See also chapter 2 of William E. Leuchtenburg , In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 105. Ira Chernus, Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 27. 106. Robert J. Art, “The Four Functions of Force,” in International Politics: Enduring Concepts and Contemporary Issues, ed. Robert J. Art and Robert Jervis, 7th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 142. I should note that because deterrence is designed to prevent actions of an adversary, it does not necessarily do so. For example, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein have suggested, “Strategic buildups are more likely to provoke than to restrain adversaries because of their impact on the domestic balance of political power in the target state.” See Lebow and Stein, “Deterrence and the Cold War,” Political Science Quarterly...

Share