William W. Fisher III 30 and Perry Miller^ - typically painted on smaller canvasses but shared Parrington’s central ambition; to chart “the dreams and purposes ... in the turbulent adventures of the American people.”^ Buoyed by the successes of those ventures and by the post-war confidence of the nation as a whole, the next cohort of intellectual historians, led by Louis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin, sought to construct “a fresh vision of the meaning of America.” “According to this approach, a unifying framework of ideas and values had created a distinctive American people [and] explained the durability of their society and institutions.”^ The Hartz-Boorstin synthesis was popular and powerful during the 1950s, but ultimately proved disastrous. Its premises - that societies tend to be integrated and that a shared culture maintains that integration - were soon undermined by sociologists and anthropologists, and its central assertion - that there exists a coherent, durable “American character” — was falsified by an enormous body of work in social history that exposed the variety of groups and ideologies that together have comprised American culture.^ The unfortunate result was to discredit for manv vears not just the consensus interpretation of American history fashioned by the postwar cohort of intellectual historians, but the entire field of intellectual history. In the late 1970s, after a bleak period of approximately fifteen years, the field was revitalized and transformed by a methodological shift known as the “linguistic turn.” Drawing on recent advances in linguistics (especially the work of Saussure, Whorf, and Sapir), anthropology (especially the work of Geertz), the history of science (especially the work of Kuhn), and philosophy (especially the work of Wittgenstein), intellectual historians reconceived their task as the study of the cultural production of meaning - in particular, how “meaning is constituted in and through language.” Repudiating the positivist and empiricist assumptions that hitherto had dominated intellectual history (and that continue to dominate the fields of political, economic, and social historv), they reconstructed their work on the assumption that languages are partially “self- ^ See, e.g.. Perry Miller, The Neii- England Alind in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard Univ. Press, 1939). Two great historians of the same generation whose work bridged the disciplines of intellectual history and political history arc Richard Hofstadter, see, e.g.. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948), and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., see, e.g.. The Age oj Jackson (Boston; Little, Brown, 1945). * John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), xi. See also John Higham, “The Rise of American Intellectual History,” American Historical Review 56 (1951), 453-71; Robert Allen Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966). ^ Higham, New Directions, supra n. 6, xii. ** See John Higham, “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus:’ Homogenizing Our History,” Commentary 27 (1950): 93; Jtshn P. Diggins, “Consciousness and Ideology in American History: The Burden of Daniel J. Boorstin,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 99; William Fisher, “The Defects of Dualism,” University of Chicago Law Review59 (1992): 972-74.
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