"A Companion to American Thought"

Edited by Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg

Blackwell

804 pp.; $39.95

Despite some fine moments, "A Companion to American Thought" is a bad book. The editors declare their intention to bring the adversaries in the Cultural War into respectful contention, but they end by providing one more extended, superficial polemic for radical ideology. They do provide some welcome lapses from the current hypocrisy of suppressing debate while claiming to advance diversity, but their penchant for accommodating intellectual and political fads ruins their effort.

The positive features of "A Companion to American Thought" include some good articles on discrete subjects--Diane Paul on "Heredity," to mention only one. The editors, to redress balances, include articles on Indian, Asian, and Latino contributions to American culture, some of which are worth reading. The many articles on black movements and individuals are generally well done. Especially noteworthy are those by David W. Blight and James Smethurst's fine piece on Amiri Baraka.

The articles on religion expose the strength but the greater weakness of this book. Most are solid, and some, like Roland A. Delattre's "Jonathan Edwards," are superior. Most notably, Mark Noll is splendid on "Evangelicalism," "Fundamentalism," and "Charles Hodge." As might be expected, most of the articles promote theological liberalism in one form or another, but the principal problem lies in a ghettoization of subject matter that recurs with other subjects. Thus, despite the excellent work on the impact of religion on late colonial and early national American history, the generally interesting article on the "American Revolution" ignores the impact of religious movements and ideas.

Certain editorial decisions defy understanding. I am no fan of Horace Bushnell but must ask why he gets only passing notice while William Ellery Channing gets full treatment. The decision to give Samuel Hopkins a long article and dismiss Nathaniel Taylor in a paragraph is similarly puzzling when we consider their respective influence. The article on Paul Tillich provides a good biographical sketch but has almost nothing on his theology. The influence of Karl Barth, who long dominated theological discourse in Europe and America, can hardly be gainsaid, but he is mentioned only once in passing. An exceptionally long article on "Critical Race Theory" adds up to little, but does introduce "black spirituality" without, however, enlightening us about its theological content.

In general, "A Companion to American Thought" focuses largely on the twentieth century--a defensible if regrettable editorial choice. Most articles give short shrift to earlier developments and plunge into present controversies. And prepare yourself for some major embarrassments. The articles on imperialism, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the like are fluffy when they do not descend to the Orwellian hint that, maybe, the capitalist powers did not really win the Cold War after all.

Everyone will complain about the slighting of favorites, and most of the complaints will probably be unfair, including my own. But I do gnash my teeth at the dismissal of the great Emily Dickinson in one paragraph while Walt Whitman, whom I cannot abide, gets a long article. The editors are entitled to reply, "If you do not like our choices, shut up and put together your own book." But reviewers may fairly ask the editors to defend decisions that look ideologically loaded, if not bizarre. I cannot wait to hear them explain the reasons for giving Abigail Adams as much space as John Adams. Or for giving Emma Goldman five times as much space as Samuel Gompers, who gets only an unsigned paragraph. Or for giving Dwight Macdonald, Edmund Wilson, and Philip Rahv seven times as much as James McCosh, John Crowe Ransom, and Joseph Schumpeter. Joseph Story, the intellectual giant of nationalist constitutional theory, the great scholar who wrote the pioneering works on a half-dozen principal aspects of the law, and the man who built Harvard Law School, also gets one paragraph, as does Francis Wayland, whose work on moral philosophy, we are correctly told, dominated higher education for a half-century or so.

Throughout, we are treated to the supposedly vast influence of postmodernist blather on the writing of history, but if the work of any first-rate American historian reflects such influence, the editors might name him or her. Several long articles treat the latest rage with language and symbols, but viewpoints that challenge reigning pieties, such as those provided by Eric Voegelin, Richard Weaver, and M. E. Bradford, are not to be found here. And we get not a word about the methodological revolution wrought by the econometricians. For undisclosed reasons, Charles Beard, Richard Hofstadter, and C. Vann Woodward get long articles but not Robert W. Fogel, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in economic history. But then, Fogel's work on slavery is loathed by leftist historians, who, despite scurrilous attacks in the Nation and elsewhere, remain incapable of mounting serious criticism. Speaking of the "Nation," the editors assigned "The New Republic" to Robert Westbrook, who did a good job, but--would you believe?--assigned the "Nation" to Victor Navasky, the Nation's longtime editor (and now publisher and editorial director), whose cynical apologetics ought to embarrass Fox and Kloppenberg.

That those with strong left-wing views, including the editors themselves, can be incisive, informative, and fair-minded need not be belabored. Indeed, that much becomes clear from a number of articles on law: Sanford Levinson on "Law"; Robert Gordon on "Legal Realism"; and William Fisher III on "Critical Legal Studies" and "Law and Economics." But throughout "A Companion to American Thought" we are deluged with a radical egalitarianism presented with precious little intellectual defense. Gay and lesbian "rights" are strewn across the book with barely a hint that opponents may have arguments worthy of serious attention.

Everywhere there are explicit and implicit attacks on "hierarchy" and "oppression," but, alas, no articles on those subjects. Smart move: For such articles would have had to clarify terms. In particular, our radical egalitarians would have to define oppression, a term that they apply to just about every relation in which authority is asserted--that is, every human relation worthy of notice. They might also have to explain the disappearance of exploitation, a term to which Karl Marx and Joan Robinson gave explicit meanings subject to scientific verification. There is, in fact, no article on "Marxism," which has surely had a deep influence on our intellectual life. Another smart move: A competent article would expose the great majority of our "Marxist" historians and literary critics as people who have never even read Capital.

Numerous articles--"Authority," for example--flaunt attacks on elitism and hierarchy that assume everything they need to prove. We get much on feminist theory but nothing serious on Christian teaching. We are inundated with "rights-talk" that hardly attempts to establish ground for the endless array of rights we are called upon to honor. An article on "Animal" gravely calls upon us to "integrate animal rights positions and older arguments," although the grounding for such "rights" remains obscure. The article does not notice the blatantly anti-Christian character of this latest attack on "hierarchical thinking," but then, if men do not have souls, the problem disappears.

The editors, to their credit, did not follow the usual course of ignoring the South. They tried to remember that the South provided a counterpoint to northern society until the unpleasantness of 1861-65 and remained a bastion of conservative thought long after. Hence we find articles by able scholars on southern intellectual history, southern agrarianism, the proslavery argument, and a few individuals. But Thomas Roderick Dew, whose contributions to southern thought were immense, gets only a paragraph, and completely missing are William Gilmore Simms, the South's leading novelist; William Henry Trescot, the father of American diplomatic history and a principal figure in shaping the conservative interpretation of the American Revolution; George Tucker, whose edition of Blackstone's Commentaries shaped early American legal studies and laid out the constitutional theory on which John Taylor of Caroline, Calhoun, and others built the doctrine of states' rights. Mark Noll's excellent account of Charles Hodge is not supplemented by accounts of Hodge's southern Calvinist brethren, notably James Henley Thornwell and Robert L. Dabney, whose theological contributions and contemporary influence in the southern church matched that of Hodge's in the northern and who exercised much greater influence in political circles.

The real story, however, lies in the ghettoization. The South disappears from articles on "Industrialism," "Cultural Criticism," "Domesticity," "Environmentalism," and--most incredibly--"Community." The article on "Education" mentions the South only in connection with segregation. You would not guess that more southern youth than northern were attending college before 1861 or that the South's remarkably high literacy rate suggested successful educational efforts despite the strong opposition to public schools. "Cultural Criticism" finds space for Leon Trotsky but not for Richard Weaver. "Individualism" does not even hint that the southern concept diverged from the northern in ways that bear on the debates of our own time. In general, the broad critique of industrialism and the rape of the environment, which permeated southern thought from John Taylor to the agrarians and beyond, virtually goes unnoticed.

These silences are inexcusable since Edward Ayers and Mitchell Snay, in their respective articles on the "Civil War" and "Proslavery Thought," alert readers to the strength and significance of the southern alternative to northern culture. But then, nowhere is the work of Lewis P. Simpson even cited. That too, one supposes, is a matter of editorial discretion, but, for whatever my own judgment is worth, Simpson ranks as our greatest interpreter of the "high culture" of the South, even if the postmodernists have not caught up with him.

The editors' tactic of ghettoization vitiates their effort to be fair to conservatives and conservatism. The articles on conservatism and particular individuals are well-balanced--Alan Ryan's on "Libertarianism" is outstanding--but I do wonder what justified the silence on Richard Weaver and on M. E. Bradford, a remarkable scholar who skillfully challenged the egalitarian constitutional and political doctrines paraded in this book and who emerged as the principal theorist of those who are today mounting a formidable conservative-populist revolt against the Republican Party's establishment. Wilmoore Kendall, another forgotten man, does not even get the one-paragraph notice devoted to Fredric Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, and to no few others. One would never know how much of Garry Wills's work, much cited in this book, derives from Kendall's.

Incredibly, we get a long article on the Frankfurt School and a mere paragraph on Eric Voegelin. I know that the editor's club takes the Frankfurt School more seriously than some of us--which is fine--but do they not know of the formidable influence that Voegelin exercises in other clubs? Paul Breines's long article on Herbert Marcuse is well-crafted, although he fails to mention Alasdair MacIntyre's withering critique. But as Breines admits, few of the New Leftists who worshiped Marcuse ever bothered to read him. Yet no one could doubt the enormous influence of Russell Kirk in shaping the conservative movement or doubt his standing among the most influential American intellectuals of this century. Astonishingly, Kirk gets only two passing comments, and none of his books appears in a bibliography.

The editors' shameless pandering to the radical feminists defies description. "Gender" is the rage throughout the book. Although here and there articles take some notice of the difference between "sex" and "gender," sex largely disappears as a category in accordance with the demands of the radical feminists. Countless articles on sundry subjects drag in, or focus on, "feminist criticism"--and at excruciating length--but virtually none of the devastating criticism directed against it is in sight. From the article on "Feminist Jurisprudence" we learn virtually nothing of the severity of the critiques or even of their existence. We hear about feminist contributions to theology but not of the replies. The editors were wise to avoid specifics, for if they had allowed space for, say, the ludicrous feminist critique of Trinitarianism, they might have felt compelled to mention the thoroughness with which its authors have been exposed for theological incoherence and ignorance of church history.

As for the articles directly on feminism and its leading ideological targets, never mind that Ellen DuBois on "Women's Rights" is vacuous or that an article on "Femininity" turns out to be about Freud and his critics with nothing on the subject supposedly under discussion. But what are we to make of this sage observation in "Feminism": "Some feminists, however, believe that natural differences between women and men do exist"? Still, I do not want to beat up on these ladies, for, in truth, the stuff peddled by the men who pander to them in articles on all sorts of subjects--"the womanizers," as they are known outside their own club--is even worse.

Women in bad odor in feminist circles get the treatment accorded Trotsky, Bukharin, and other evildoers in Stalin's Great Soviet Encyclopedia: They do not exist. The National Organization of Women is ballyhooed, but unmentioned is the conservative Concerned Women for America, which has more than twice as many members as now. Here, as in the media, you would never know that a large and powerful women's movement exists outside the Left and includes some of the country's leading intellectuals. In literary matters, Flannery O'Connor rates only one passing reference and no separate article. Kate Chopin gets a paragraph that tries to turn her into a proto-feminist while ignoring her Catholic roots. Augusta Jane Evans is not to be found, notwithstanding the recent reprinting of her work and the increasing attention paid her by historians and literary critics outside the radical-feminist club. But then, since Evans was proslavery, antifeminist, and a serious Christian, she doubtless deserves to be thrown into the dustbin of history. The antebellum womens' rights advocates are here in force, but don't expect a single reference to their southern critics. You will not, for example, find Louisa Susanna McCord, whose collected works are now justly if belatedly being published.

Christopher Lasch, whose recent untimely death impoverished American letters, contributed eight articles that rank among the best in the book. As a plus, Richard Wightman Fox offers a strong, sensitive article on Lasch in which he alludes to Lasch's powerful criticism of feminism. So, why did Fox and Kloppenberg let their array of radical-feminist propagandists get away with failing to mention Lasch's work in any of their self-serving articles and attendant bibliographies? That question leads to another: Why do the bibliographies ignore the work of antifeminists, pro-life feminists, and conservative feminists and recommend only works from their own club? The article on "Abortion" by Reva Siegel concentrates on the Casey decision without grasping the essentially free-market ideology that underlies it. But then, Siegel's one-sided discussion of abortion does not mention Elizabeth Mensch and Alan Freedman's admirable "Politics of Virtue" or other works that would have shown up the superficiality of her own analysis. The bibliographies on feminism and women's issues do not mention Mary Ann Glendon, although Glendon is twice noted elsewhere. Jean Bethke Elshtain contributes a superior article on Jane Addams, but her influential books and articles will not be found in any of these bibliographies. Also absent are any references to Christina Hoff Sommers's "Who Stole Feminism?," which exposes much of the irrationality and dishonesty of the feminist leading lights; Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge's "Professing Feminism," which searchingly explores women's studies programs; and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's "Feminism Without Illusions," which Lasch warmly praised. These women and others like them are treated as nonpersons in accordance with the radical-feminist version of diversity that informs this book.

"A Companion to American Thought" properly never lets us forget the ravages of the McCarthy era, but it is silent on the reign of terror to which our campuses are being subjected by the editors' favorite feminists and other leftists. A question: Which of the Women's Studies programs, from which the editors have drawn contributors, have antifeminists, conservative feminists, or right-to-life feminists (many of whom are left-wing on everything except abortion) on their faculties? Or invite speakers to present opposing points of view? Or assign their students the works of critics? Or permit students to challenge radical assumptions, viewpoints, and policies?

On page 254, we read, "The feminist slogan 'the personal is political' implies that sexism must be addressed on the psychological level if it is ever to be eradicated." No notice is taken of the totalitarian origins and uses of that pernicious slogan--of the quasi-Maoist "sensitivity training" that now disgraces our campuses. Those interested in the philosophical foundations of "the personal is political" should turn to the work of Giovanni Gentile, Italian fascism's premier philosopher, who laid it out cold. And for the political outcome, turn to the writings of Benito Mussolini and Josef Stalin, two bright chaps who knew a great deal about the "psychological level."

The performance of "A Companion to American Thought" is especially sad--and alarming--since we had every reason to expect much better of the editors. We may assume that they did intend to provide a book that clarified ideological positions and establish a basis for reasoned debate, but in the end they failed. For they could not bring themselves to provide anything like equal space to those outside the radical-egalitarian camp and to insist that those who uphold radical doctrines seriously engage opposing viewpoints fully and fairly. They could not or would not compel their authors to defend the endless array of assertions peddled as self-evident truths.

Ironically, the editors faithfully lay bare the priorities, prejudices, and ideological agenda of the cultural radicals who now constitute the academic establishment and from whom they seem to want to distance themselves. Yet, if inadvertently, they wind up teaching the radicals how to improve their tactics: Include articleson the opposition and by opponents, but make sure that the articles on the principal subjects (abortion, authority, feminism, rights) toe the party line, and make sure that readers never know about the authors and books that offer refutations. Fox and Kloppenberg have demonstrated just how much ground even good and honest scholars are surrendering to the irrationalities that today ravage academic life.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 19

bcjul96mrj6B40196618