Read more
This book is a comprehensive overview of the history of modern American thought and examines a wide range of modern thought and thinkers from 1860, when Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published in the United States, to the end of the twentieth century.
The focus of this volume is on the destabilizing effects of modern challenges to notions of fixed order and absolute truths, and the contradictory consequences for philosophical, political, social, and aesthetic thought. The intellectual response to the unprecedented changes of this era produced visions of both liberation from the hierarchies of the past and new forms of control and constraint. One of the central contradictions in modern thought was between biological and cultural ideas of social, psychological, and moral order. This is the first work to provide an interpretive vision of the entire period under consideration. Topics covered include evolutionary thought, philosophical Pragmatism, ideas of race and gender, pluralism and cultural relativism, Cold War Liberalism, science and religion, feminist thought, evolutionary psychology, and the late twentieth-century Culture Wars. Thinkers from William James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman through Judith Butler and Cornel West are analyzed as historical figures.
This volume is an ideal resource for a general audience as well as undergraduate and graduate students in the field of American intellectual history.
List of contents
PART I: AMERICAN MODERNISMS: 1865-1919
1. DARWINISM AND THE EVOLUTIONARY SENSIBILITY
2. PRAGMATISM AND ANTIFOUNDATIONAL THOUGHT
3. THE RESEARCH UNIVERSITY, THE IDEA OF CULTURE, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
4. PROGRESSIVISMS
5. RETHINKING WOMAN AND MAN
PART II: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGINATION: 1920-1962
6. CULTURAL RELATIVISMS AND MODERN HIERARCHIES
7. SCIENCE AS CULTURE: THE MORAL ORDER OF MODERNITY
8. FROM PROTESTANT HEGEMONY TO RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
9. PLURALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM
10. SELF AND SOCIAL ORDER IN THE COLD WAR WORLD
PART III: RETHINKING MODERNISM: 1963-2000
11. CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS AND RUPTURES
12. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF EVERYTHING
13. THE RETURN OF NATURE
14. GENDER AND SEXUALITY
15. CULTURE WARS
About the author
Daniel Wickberg has taught intellectual history at the University of Texas at Dallas for over 25 years. His primary areas of research are the history of American social thought and historiography. He is the author of The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (1998).
Summary
This book is a comprehensive overview of the history of modern American thought and examines a wide range of modern thought and thinkers from 1860, when Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in the United States, to the end of the twentieth century.
Report
It will not surprise anyone acquainted with Dan Wickberg that he has written a magisterial history of the rise of modern ways of thinking in the United States. The book tracks Americans' quest, since the mid-nineteenth century, for frameworks to make sense of a newly unsettled and fluid world. But at its core are the deep contradictions marking modernity: the fresh possibilities inherent in indeterminacy on the one hand, and the conceiving of new modes of coercion and unfreedom on the other. Deftly noting intellectual conflicts and cross-currents yet still able to identify the "lenses, categories, and sensibilities" that have remade modern thought, the book sparkles. From his very first chapter specifying what was novel and generative (and what was not) about Darwin's Origin of Species, to his last-on the dissolving border between the realms of culture and politics in the late twentieth century, unleashing the "culture wars" and much else-Wickberg offers a lucid, compelling, and even gripping retelling of modern American intellectual history.
Sarah E. Igo, Vanderbilt University, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
