\n<\/p>\n
We are honored to share reflections on the life and scholarship of Dorothy Ross, a pioneering intellectual historian and longtime supporter of this organization, in a special forum. My deepest thanks to everyone who joined us for our panel at the 2024 annual meeting in Boston. Please share your reminiscences of Dorothy and her work in the comments below. \u2013Sara Georgini, S-USIH President<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
In Memory of Dorothy<\/p>\n
Howard Brick<\/p>\n
Two years ago, for the S-USIH meeting (scheduled for this hotel, the first fully \u201clive\u201d post-pandemic conference for this organization), a group of us had planned a session in Dorothy\u2019s honor\u2014featuring Jim Kloppenberg, Kim Phillips-Fein, Jefferson Cowie, and Dan Geary (what a line-up!!) and intended to comment on and discuss Dorothy\u2019s two blockbuster essays in Modern Intellectual History<\/em> on \u201cWhatever Happened to the Social in American Social Thought?\u201d (December 2021 and March 2022).\u00a0 Unfortunately, we had to cancel the meeting, after Dorothy emailed me around Labor Day, reporting that she had suffered a very bad case of COVID, with a number of complications, and wouldn\u2019t be able to make it.\u00a0 I am still saddened to think of her passing last May, but as a colleague once told me at another memorial meeting when too much sadness was voiced, \u201cWhere I come from, we want to enjoy stories about the departed that make us happy.\u201d \u00a0Or, to paraphrase Joe Hill, \u201cDon\u2019t mourn:\u00a0 talk, think, and write!\u201d\u00a0 So here goes.<\/p>\n Sometime in the early 1990s, when I was a very insecure assistant professor, I was invited to write quite a long essay under the simple title, \u201cSociety,\u201d for the intellectual-history section (and hence the topic was \u201cideas thereof\u201d) of a grand, 4-volume Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century<\/em>, edited by Stanley Kutler along with David Hollinger, Robert Dallek, and Thomas McCraw.\u00a0 Quite nervous about the whole thing, I received a reader\u2019s report on my draft, which began (as I recall) with the simple word, \u201cSplendid!\u201d\u00a0 Phew\u2014what a relief and what wonderful encouragement!\u00a0 That was from Dorothy Ross, whom at the time I knew by reputation (and some of her work) but not personally.\u00a0 What a boost that was! And I got to know her better over the subsequent years. Thereafter I was but one of the younger colleagues\u2014many, I think\u2014that she supported, encouraged, befriended with great warmth.\u00a0 And she offered honest critique as well.\u00a0 At some conference, in the mid-teens I suppose, I had lunch with her and Charlie Capper, where I tried to describe the book-in-progress by Dan Borus, Casey Blake, and me that was to survey \u201cAmerican thought and culture\u201d in a \u201clong\u201d 1950s.\u00a0 When I finished my attempt (long-winded, no doubt) to sum up the guiding theme of the book-to-be, Dorothy quietly said, \u201cWell, that\u2019s not the way I see it.\u201d\u00a0 It turned out she did not so very much disapprove of the volume when it was finished, and she agreed to write the \u201cseries\u201d introduction to the book.\u00a0 It turned out she actually had much more to say in criticism of an earlier book of mine, which she paired with Daniel Rodgers in what I think may have been her final publication\u2014the two \u201cWhatever Happened\u201d pieces which hadn\u2019t yet been finished.\u00a0 In time, though, before she published them, Dorothy\u2014gracious as always\u2013showed me a draft and I replied in self-defense.\u00a0 Now when I re-read the articles, I see that after pairing me with Dan Rodgers in the first paragraph, she cites my book very seldom in the notes\u2014which leads me to think my work really wasn\u2019t her target but she was just being nice in associating my work with Dan\u2019s much more significant stuff!<\/p>\n Citing my book Transcending Capitalism <\/em>next to Rodgers\u2019s Age of Fracture<\/em> as her two targets, Dorothy argued that the decisive historical turning point in US social thought against what Rodgers would call \u201cthick\u201d accounts of social relations to the \u201cthin\u201d free-market ideal of individualistic exchange occurred in the 1950s, under the influence of the reigning concept of \u201ctotalitarianism\u201d\u2014not in the 1970s, as Rodgers indicated and (presumably) I did as well.\u00a0 Consequently, the drastic thinning of liberal values from freedom, equality and social justice to individualistic freedom alone, imagined to buffer the effects of a threatening, overpowering State. \u00a0In her words: \u201cI will show that liberals produced communal and mutualistic conceptions of the social early in the 20th<\/sup> century\u2026 but retreated from those conceptions during the long 1950s.\u201d<\/p>\n I still plead in self-defense:\u00a0 my book did not generalize across American political and social thought as a whole but referred to a specific current of ideas, of some significance but hardly dominant, that originated among \u201clate Progressive\u201d thinkers and persisting even through the 1950s to gain a bit of further traction in the 1960s and early 1970s \u2014a mildly socialist-inflected or social-democratic current that advanced some expectations of social change in a thoroughly nonrevolutionary sort leading toward a coming \u201cpostcapitalist\u201d society (the term was mine, only occasionally voiced openly in the US but more common to some co-thinkers in Britain and western Europe).\u00a0 Mind you, I had not embraced that current, but argued its proponents were quite deluded\u2014as demonstrated by the rightward drift ascendant by the 1980s and the full-throated celebration of \u201ccapitalism\u201d in its own name\u2014which led a writer such as Robert Heilbroner who had drifted from a left-liberal kind of \u201ccreeping socialism\u201d argument of the late 1940s and 1950s through the 60s, leading to a qualified embrace of Marxism in the 1970s, but ending with a confession in 1989 that \u201ccapitalism has won.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Dorothy\u2019s argument resembles two other key works:\u00a0 David Ciepley\u2019s Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism<\/em> (Cambridge, 2006), which Dorothy in fact cited quite prominently.\u00a0 I wish David were here right now\u2014for some 20 years ago, when he and I were both at Washington University in St. Louis, I vigorously argued with him\u2014always congenially, I must say\u2014that the broadbrush argument (that the widespread totalitarianism doctrine eviscerated all liberalism\u2019s more robust, reformist aspirations) missed some other currents such as the one I meant to describe. And now we see Samuel Moyn\u2019s Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times <\/em>(2023), which actually runs quite consistent with Dorothy\u2019s argument.\u00a0 Like her, Moyn\u2014who clearly embraces as his own political stance a kind of mix of socialism and liberalism\u2014argues that 1950s liberals utterly deserted precisely that kind of fluid mixture of principles that had some considerable resilience in the early 20th<\/sup> century . . . and which he seeks to revive.\u00a0 Liberalism Against Itself<\/em> is an impressive work of analysis and polemic though Moyn\u2019s limited examples of \u201cliberal\u201d thinkers deserting any<\/em> socializing disposition strikes me as standing quite to the right edge of the liberal spectrum: viz., Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, for instance along with a few others such as Judith Shklar and Hannah Arendt who indeed had some rather conservative leanings but remain more open to alternative readings.\u00a0 Surely, a more left-leaning disposition manifested itself through the 1950s and 1960s in journals such as Dissent<\/em>, Partisan Review<\/em>, and Commentary <\/em>before Podhoretz\u2019s sharp move right at the end of the 1960s.<\/p>\n Moreover, I\u2019m surprised at the broad-brush approach of such accounts (Ciepley, Ross, Moyn) in the context of the dispositions current in the practice of American academic historical and social-scientific work, which have run leftish or leftward for some decades now, starting with a long post-New Left generation and having a successor generation in such figures today as Mathew Karp, Gabriel Winant, Elizabeth Hinton, and others.\u00a0 Perhaps this left-leaning academic culture doesn\u2019t quite count for intellectual clout in the mainstream\u2014and will no doubt be under growing attack in the coming years.\u00a0 But I do hope, along with Moyn, that some kind of regeneration of left-leaning political discourse might be possible\u2014despite all.<\/p>\n But let\u2019s think some more about Dorothy.\u00a0 Clearly, her downcast remarks about liberalism in her time rested on her own (shall I say) left-liberal disposition.\u00a0 I never got to know her as well as others on this panel did, or a number of you in attendance.\u00a0 As I recall reading somewhere, she began as a young student active in the \u201cJoe Must Go!\u201d campaign against McCarthy in Minnesota.\u00a0 And in the book of hers I know best, I thought it was clear she thought most highly of (though still sharply criticizing) those she called \u201clate-Progressives\u201d of the \u2018teens and right after World War I.\u00a0 In conversation after the 2020 election and in the wake of Biden\u2019s most salient legislative wins, I asked\u2014vis-\u00e0-vis her regrets over the absence of a more social-democratic liberalism\u2014whether she perceived movement there in her direction.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 She said, again quietly and with I guess her typical reserve, \u201cWell, we\u2019ll see.\u201d The outcomes right now suggest the potential reversal of whatever such hopes one might have held.\u00a0 Of course, we have no choice but to persist.<\/p>\n