Early American Intellectual History After Perry Miller

Early American Intellectual History After Perry Miller Bruce Tucker It is one of the pecular ironies of current American historiography that intellectualhistorians have turned increasingly from writing the history of ideasto writing about the history of ideas. 1 During the 1940sand 1950sintellectualhistorians such as Merle Curti, Ralph Gabriel, Richard Hofstadter and PerryMiller led the profession away from the economic determinism of the Progressivehistorians toward a new synthesis which emphasized political consensusand the unity and uniqueness of the American past. 2 The preeminenceof the history of ideas, however, was short lived. A near revolution in methodologyduring the 1960s elevated social history to the cutting edge of theprofession and precipitated the demise of intellectual history as a coherent field.Intellectual historians have now begun to join their colleagues in turning to the social sciences-psychology, sociology and anthropology-to rejuvenatethe field, and they are writing more frequently about the history ofideas in order to evaluate the work which has relied on methodologies fromother disciplines. 3 Whereas earlier intellectual historians aspired to a literarymastery of their sources, their successors have become obsessed with methodand technique. Thedifference ishighlighted by the following two quotations which attempt toexplainthe transformation of New England culture and society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In 1953Perry Miller concluded hissecond volume of The New England Mind with this paragraph: Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 1982 146 Bruce Tucker It was a parched land, crying for deliverance from the hold of ideas that had servedtheir purpose and died.... By the end of 1730it was evident that everybody had spoken fromwhom ideas or words were apt to come, had indicated what he might or might not contribute10 the solution. Or rather, all except one. The next spring it was known that Jonathan Edwards would come to the Harvard Commencement, and he was pressed to give the Thursday lecture. Solomon Stoddard's successor announced that he would speak on God Glorified in theWork of'Redemption, by the Greatness of Mans Dependence upon him, in the Whole o/ 1t. That man must depend upon God in the work of the covenant was always a basic axiom ofNe\\ England .... Yet somehow, in a century of American experience, the greatness of man's dependency had unaccountably become a euphemism for the greatness of man. Possibly that was because this greatness had not yet been thoroughly considered in the whole ofit.~ In 1977,David Stannard approached the same problem differently: Whatever labels we may care to give the activity, virtually all cultures and individuals experience a constant, if generally slight, changing of structure or focus as adjustments aremade to new cognitive or conceptual conflicts .... Resolution of conflict-for reasons that probablv can be infinitely varied-may in certain situations seem for a time irreconcilably blocked. And on those occasions when accommodation does not take place for an extended timeparticularly in relatively closed cultures and when the matter at hand is of primary cultural significance-the reverberations of the continuing clash may cause extreme confusion and discomfort to those participating in that culture's ongoing social life.... A culture, no lessthan an individual cannot long endure such pressure. One of the principal ways of reducing such tension, Festinger and others agree, is "by changing one or more of the dissonant relations," and this, it now seems clear, is what happened in New England in the eighteenth century.5 Whereas Miller created a drama carried along by characterization, narrative and plot, Stannard makes his argument using an analytical mode of discourse built explicitly around models and hypotheses borrowed from the social sciences. Many intellectual historians seem now to be choosing this approach to historical explanation. At the Wingspread gathering of American intellectual historians in 1977,John Higham reports, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz was "virtually the patron saint of the conference." 6 The Wingspread historians debated the usefulness of paradigms, definitions of culture andthe discourse of intellectual communities. In this paper, I would like to chart the development of the more explicit use of social-science theory, assessits consequences for the conceptualization of early American intellectual history, and note some changes in the relationship between intellectual historians and their audience. To focus this...