Review of Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations translated by Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967)

Wight suggests that Aron’s book, first published in 1962, has not won the recognition it deserves, owing in part to ‘Anglo-American intellectual insularity’ and ‘the massiveness of the book itself’. Wight praises Aron for grounding his work in history: ‘Rich in historical reference, it abounds equally in acute analysis.’ The book raises the questions of preventing and containing nuclear war. ‘Cautiously, tentatively, himself a political Clausewitz, Aron accumulates the considerations which may make it possible that a nuclear war would not expand to its fullest violence.’ Wight shares Aron’s judgement that, ‘if war should come, we can still seek to restrict violence. Aron repeatedly asserts the indeterminacy of politics. Diplomacy is the realm of the contingent and the unforeseen, and the statesman’s supreme virtue is prudence, which means acting in accordance with the concrete data of the particular situation.’

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction provides an introduction to the history of American thought from the sixteenth century up until the present. Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European commentators and explorers. American thought grew from this foundation of expectation and experience, both enriched and challenged over the centuries by developments including the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the rise of capitalism, the proliferation of diverse religions, immigration, industrialization, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower. This introduction provides an overview of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American thought, while showing how ideas have been major forces driving the course of American history.

7. The opening of the American mind

‘The opening of the American mind’ challenges the perception of postwar American intellectual life as a period of staid traditionalism, stifling uniformity, complacency, and consensus. While some aspects of the 1950s and early 1960s Cold War culture were intellectually suffocating, others helped to widen Americans’ intellectual horizons. America’s new status as a global superpower stimulated the development of its intellectual and cultural institutions at a pace unprecedented in its history. The dramatic expansion of higher education, think tanks, and the print culture marketplace contributed to the opening of mid-century American thought. Varieties of existentialism, the creation of a lively conservative tradition, and the growing American interest in intellectual movements and spiritual practices from around the world helped Americans “breathe a larger air.”

Introduction

‘Introduction’ examines the scope and aims of American intellectual history. It shows how it is an approach to understanding the American past by way of ideas and the people who made or were moved by them. Intellectual history seeks to understand where certain persistent concerns in American thought have come from and why some ideas, which were important in the past, have faded from view. Intellectual history also concerns itself with the myriad institutions that are sites of intellectual production and dissemination. Ultimately, intellectual history invites thinking about thinking, both in the past and today. It seeks to demonstrate that thinking is where so much of the historical action is.

The Fellowship Church

The Fellowship Church explores the evolution of the American religious Left through a case study of the African American intellectual and theologian Howard Thurman, and the physical embodiment of his thought, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. The Fellowship Church, which Thurman cofounded in San Francisco in 1944, was the nation’s first interracial, intercultural, and interfaith church. Amid the growing nationalism of the World War II era and the heightened suspicion of racial and cultural “others,” the Fellowship Church successfully established a pluralistic community based on the idea “that if people can come together in worship, over time would emerge a unity that would be stronger than socially imposed barriers.” Rooted in the belief that social change was inextricably connected to internal, psychological transformation and the personal realization of the human community, it was an early expression of Christian nonviolent activism within the long civil rights movement. The Fellowship Church was a product of evolving twentieth-century ideas and a reflection of the shifting midcentury American public consciousness. This book explores a broad scope of modern historical themes, including the philosophy of pragmatism; mysticism and Christian liberalism; racism and imperialism; cosmopolitanism and pluralism; war and pacifism; and nonviolence. It not only expands our understanding of twentieth-century American intellectual history and the origins of the civil rights movement, it offers and exciting look into underexplored methods of democracy-building that can inform contemporary social movements.

Good Neighbor in the American Historical Imagination: Mexican American Intellectual Thought in the Fight for Civil Rights, 1930s–1940s

This article argues that historical narrative has held a significant role in Mexican American identity formation and civil rights activism by examining the way Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s used history to claim full citizenship status in Texas. In particular, it centers on how George I. Sánchez (1906–1972), a scholar of Latin American education, revised historical narrative by weaving history and foreign policy together through a pragmatic lens. To educators and federal officials, Sánchez used this revisionist history to advocate for Mexican Americans, insisting that the Good Neighbor policy presented the United States with the chance to translate into reality the democratic ideals long professed in the American historical imagination. The example of Sánchez also prompts us to reexamine the historiography in our present day: How do we define the tradition and trajectory of Mexican American intellectual thought in U.S. history? This article posits that when Sánchez and other Mexican Americans thought about their community’s collective identity and civil rights issues through history, they were contributing to a longer conversation driven by questions about identity formation and equality that first emerged at the end of the U.S. War with Mexico in 1848. These questions remain salient in the present, indicating the need for a historiographic examination that will change how we imagine the tradition of intellectual thought in the United States.

Anthropology and the politics of alterity: A Latin American dialectic and its relevance for ontological anthropologies

Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.

Pragmatism

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical engagements with the uniquely American intellectual tradition often referred to as American pragmatism. After introducing pragmatism, the foundational feminist work and influence of Jane Addams is presented, followed by a discussion of other noteworthy contributors to feminist pragmatism. Significant themes in feminist pragmatism including race and identity, epistemology, care ethics, utopian thinking, and environmentalism are explored. The chapter addresses the extent to which feminist work has changed or entered the mainstream of the American pragmatism, as well as current and future directions of feminist pragmatism. In addition to offering a history of the development of feminist pragmatism, the chapter considers how feminism is a resource for pragmatism and how pragmatism is a resource for feminist philosophy.

Home Sweet Home?: Recent Studies of Chinese Indonesians

This article reviews two books on Chinese Indonesians in post-Suharto Indonesia written by two young scholars: Chong Wu-Ling (2018), and Toshio Matsumura (2017). Both books illustrate the recent stream of academic publications on Chinese Indonesians by a young generation of non-Indonesian scholars who are mostly based in the East Asia region. Their works are promising as they rely on continuous fieldwork and pose new questions that reflect the socio-political changes in Indonesia and the rise of China in the region. Despite these welcomed developments, we have yet to see any paradigm shift from the works of earlier scholars. Concurrently, young scholars in the region are challenged to develop their studies beyond the Euro-American intellectual hegemony.