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Selected Bibliography for Scholarship on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Historicism, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism on November 8, 2012 at 8:20 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following bibliography is far from exhaustive; it consists of the works that I’ve found most helpful in my own research.  This list was created in November 0f 2012.

Books:

Aichele, Gary J.  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Soldier, Scholar, Judge (Boston: Twayne, 1989).

Alschuler, Albert W. Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Baker, Liva.  The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).

Bent, Silas.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932).

Biddle, Francis.  Mr. Justice Holmes (New York: Scribner, 1942).

Bowen, Catherine Drinker.  Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1944).

Burton, David H.  Taft, Holmes, and the 1920s Court: An Appraisal (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998).

______________.  Political Ideas of Justice Holmes.  Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992). 

______________.  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980).

Cohen, Jeremy.  Congress Shall Make No Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes, the First Amendment, and Judicial Decision Making (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989).

Collins, Ronald K. L. and David M. Skover.  On Dissent: Its Meaning in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013).

Gibian, Peter.  Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).  [This book focuses on Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. but reveals much about the environment in which Holmes Jr. grew up.  It also uses Harold Bloom to make sense of Emersonian communication and rhetoric.]

Hoffheimer, Michael H.  Justice Holmes and the Natural Law (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1992).

Howe, Mark DeWolfe.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol. One: The Shaping Years, 1841-1870 (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1957).

______________.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol. Two: The Proving Years, 1870-1882 (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963). 

Kellogg, Frederic R. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Legal Theory and Judicial Restraint (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Menand, Louis.  The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).  [This book situates Holmes alongside other classical pragmatists such as C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.]

Novick, Sheldon M.  Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1989).

Pohlman, H. L.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Utilitarian Jurisprudence (Harvard University Press, 1984).

______________.  Free Speech and the Living Constitution (New York: New York University Press, 1991).

Rosenberg, David.  The Hidden Holmes: His Theory of Torts in History (Harvard University Press, 1995).

White, G. Edward.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law & the Inner Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Editions of Holmes’s Writings and Letters:

Burton, David H., Editor.  Progressive Masks: Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Franklin Ford (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982).

______________.  Holmes-Sheehan Correspondence (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993).

Gordon, Robert W., Editor.  The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Stanford University Press, 1992).

Howe, Mark Dewolfe, Editor.  Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932, Vol. 1 and 2 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1941).

______________.  Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916-1935 (Harvard University Press, 1953).

Lerner, Max, Editor.  The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters & Judicial Opinions (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1943).

Mennel, Robert M. and Christine L. Compston, Editors.  Holmes & Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1912-1934 (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1996).

Peabody, James Bishop, Editor.  The Holmes-Einstein Letters: Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Lewis Einstein, 1903-1935 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964).

Posner, Richard.  The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Articles:

Alschuler, Albert W.  “The Descending Trail: Holmes’ Path of the Law One Hundred Years Later.”  Florida Law Review, Vol. 49 (1997).

Bernstein, Irving.  “The Conservative Mr. Justice Holmes.”  New England Quarterly, Vol. 23 (1950).

Blasi, Vincent.  “Reading Holmes Through the Lens of Schauer: The Abrams Dissent.”  Notre Dame Law Review, Vol. 72 (1997).

Bogen, David S.  “The Free Speech Metamorphosis of Mr. Justice Holmes.”  Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 11 (1982).

Caplan, Gerald.  “Searching for Holmes Among the Biographers.”  George Washington Law Review.  Vol. 70 (2002).

Cate, Irene M. Ten.  “Speech, Truth, and Freedom: An Examination of John Stuart Mill’s and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Free Speech Defenses.”  Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Vol. 22 (2010).

Feldman, Stephen M.  “Free Speech, World War I, and Republican Democracy: The Internal and External Holmes.”  First Amendment Law Review, Vol. 6 (2008).

Ferguson, Robert A.  “Holmes and the Judicial Figure.”  Chicago Law Review, Vol. 55 (1988).

Frankfurter, Felix.  “The Constitutional Opinions of Justice Holmes.”  Harvard Law Review.  Vol. 29 (1916).

Grey, Thomas C.  “Plotting the Path of the Law.”  Brooklyn Law Review, Vol. 63 (1997).

Haack, Susan.  “On Legal Pragmatism: Where Does ‘The Path of the Law’ Lead Us?”  American Journal Jurisprudence, Vol. 50 (2005).

Leonard, Gerald.  “Holmes on the Lochner Court.”  Boston University Law Review, Vol. 85 (2001).

Luban, David.  “Justice Holmes and the Metaphysics of Judicial Restraint.”  Duke Law Journal, Vol. 44 (1994).

Mendenhall, Allen.  “Holmes and Dissent.”  The Journal Jurisprudence, Vol.12 (2011).

______________.  “Dissent as a Site of Aesthetic Adaptation in the Work of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.”  British Journal of American Legal Studies, Vol. 1 (2012).

Ragan, Fred D.  “Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and The Clear and Present Danger Test for Free Speech: The First Year, 1919.”  Journal of American History, Vol. 58 (1971).

Rosenblatt, Rand.  “Holmes, Peirce, and Legal Pragmatism.”  Yale Law Journal, Vol. 84 (1975).

Shea, Thomas F.  “Great Dissenters: Parallel Currents In Holmes and Scalia.”  Mississippi Law Journal, Vol. 67 (1997).

Snyder, Brad.  “The House that Built Holmes.”  Law & History Review.  Vol. 30, No. 3 (2012).

Wells, Catherine Peirce.  “Old-Fashioned Postmodernism and the Legal Theories of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.”  Brooklyn Law Review, Vol. 63 (1997).

______________ [published under the name Catherine Wells Hantzis].  “Legal Innovation Within the Wider Intellectual Tradition: The Pragmatism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.” Northwestern University Law Review, Vol. 82 (1988).

 

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American Literary History and Pragmatism

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Emerson, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Walt Whitman, Writing on August 29, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

American literary history, even before C.S. Peirce named “pragmatism” as a philosophy, validates much of what pragmatism has to offer.  Joan Richardson speaks of “frontier instances” whereby certain writers become aesthetic outposts from which we can trace continuities of thought and artistic representation.  She treats literature as a life form that must adapt to its environment; similarly, Richard Poirier looks to a tradition of linguistic skepticism in American literature to show the role that artistic influence and troping have had on American culture.  Long before Richardson and Poirier, George Santayana exercised his own literary flair in his celebratory, summative essays about American culture and experience.  If American literary history can undergo operations of tracing and mapping, it might be because—as Richardson, Poirier, and Santayana have suggested—the unfolding and development of an American literary canon have been processes of evolution.  Literary texts and movements have shown a tendency toward growth that is responsive to the natural and changing circumstances of the time.

Richardson begins A Natural History of Pragmatism with 17th century Puritan ministers and then quickly moves to Jonathan Edwards.  Edwards is representative of the Calvinist notion of limited disclosure, the idea, in other words, that God reveals his divinity to us through the shapes, forms, and outlines he provides to us in the phenomenal world.  From this idea (and others like it) began the uniquely American insistence on the value of nature and the physical universe to thought and the spiritual or psychological realm.  As Americans sought to make themselves culturally and intellectually independent from Europe, both in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they used the New World landscapes and vastly unexplored (by Europeans at least) terrains as objects of their fascination and as sources of inspiration.  Even figures like Jefferson insisted upon the scientific study of the natural world in order to authorize theories about law and politics, which he wished to distinguish from European ways.  Jefferson, like William Bartram, another naturalist, lionized Natives as being more in tune with nature and hence more “lawful” in the sense that their communal governments were in keeping with the laws of nature.  However problematic we may consider these romanticized depictions today, we should at least say of them that they inspired further attention to sustained observation of nature as a critical component of what was intended to be a new way of thinking divorced from the Old World of Europe.

Santayana says that when orthodoxy recedes, speculation flourishes, and accordingly it is no surprise that as Puritanism solidified into an orthodoxy of the kind against which it once defined itself, there was a resistance among artists and writers and thinkers.  Emerson, for one, adapted the thinking of the Calvinists while maintaining their commitment to the natural world as a means for realizing higher truths.  Instead of God revealing himself to man through the forms of the natural world, God, according to Emerson, was realized within the person with a poetical sense, who was inspired by the natural world to discover the divinity within himself.  To become one and to see all—that is, to become a “transparent eyeball”—was something of a religious experience for Emerson.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Abolish the Bar Exam

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, History, Humanities, Law, Libertarianism, Nineteenth-Century America on July 20, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following piece first appeared here at LewRockwell.com.

Every year in July, thousands of anxious men and women, in different states across America, take a bar exam in hopes that they will become licensed attorneys. Having memorized hundreds if not thousands of rules and counter-rules – also known as black letter law – these men and women come to the exam equipped with their pens, laptops, and government-issued forms of identification. Nothing is more remote from their minds than that the ideological currents that brought about this horrifying ritual were fundamentally statist and unquestionably bad for the American economy.

The bar exam is a barrier to entry, as are all forms of professional licensure. Today the federal government regulates thousands of occupations and excludes millions of capable workers from the workforce by means of expensive tests and certifications; likewise various state governments restrict upward mobility and economic progress by mandating that workers obtain costly degrees and undergo routinized assessments that have little to do with the practical, everyday dealings of the professional world.

As a practicing attorney, I can say with confidence that many paralegals I know can do the job of an attorney better than some attorneys, and that is because the practice of law is perfected not by abstract education but lived experience.

So why does our society require bar exams that bear little relation to the ability of a person to understand legal technicalities, manage case loads, and satisfy clients? The answer harkens back to the Progressive Era when elites used government strings and influence to prevent hardworking and entrepreneurial individuals from climbing the social ladder.

Lawyers were part of two important groups that Murray Rothbard blamed for spreading statism during the Progressive Era: the first was “a growing legion of educated (and often overeducated) intellectuals, technocrats, and the ‘helping professions’ who sought power, prestige, subsidies, contracts, cushy jobs from the welfare state, and restrictions of entry into their field via forms of licensing,” and the second was “groups of businessmen who, after failing to achieve monopoly power on the free market, turned to government – local, state, and federal – to gain it for them.”

The bar exam was merely one aspect of the growth of the legal system and its concomitant centralization in the early twentieth century. Bar associations began cropping up in the 1870s, but they were, at first, more like professional societies than state-sponsored machines. By 1900, all of that changed, and bar associations became a fraternity of elites opposed to any economic development that might threaten their social status.

The elites who formed the American Bar Association (ABA), concerned that smart and savvy yet poor and entrepreneurial men might gain control of the legal system, sought to establish a monopoly on the field by forbidding advertising, regulating the “unauthorized” practice of law, restricting legal fees to a designated minimum or maximum, and scaling back contingency fees. The elitist progressives pushing these reforms also forbade qualified women from joining their ranks.

The American Bar Association was far from the only body of elites generating this trend. State bars began to rise and spread, but only small percentages of lawyers in any given state were members. The elites were reaching to squeeze some justification out of their blatant discrimination and to strike a delicate balance between exclusivity on the one hand, and an appearance of propriety on the other. They made short shrift of the American Dream and began to require expensive degrees and education as a prerequisite for bar admission. It was at this time that American law schools proliferated and the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) was created to evaluate the quality of new law schools as well as to hold them to uniform standards.

At one time lawyers learned on the job; now law schools were tasked with training new lawyers, but the result was that lawyers’ real training was merely delayed until the date they could practice, and aspiring attorneys had to be wealthy enough to afford this delay if they wanted to practice at all.

Entrepreneurial forces attempted to fight back by establishing night schools to ensure a more competitive market, but the various bar associations, backed by the power of the government, simply dictated that law school was not enough: one had to first earn a college degree before entering law school if one were to be admitted to practice. Then two degrees were not enough: one had to pass a restructured, formalized bar exam as well. Read the rest of this entry »

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Law in Melville and Hawthorne

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Historicism, History, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Writing on July 11, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Law was a common trope in the writing of nineteenth century American authors.  The jurist Roscoe Pound referred to nineteenth century America as a “frontier society” that was struggling to define what law was.  Justice John Marshall was carving out the jurisdiction of the nation’s high court, even as Andrew Jackson challenged Marshall’s authority to do so.  (Jackson supposedly said, in regard to Worcester v. Georgia, that Marshall had made his decision, “now let him enforce it.”)  American jurisprudents were seeking to reconcile the contradictions between liberty and equality on the one hand—the ideals of the revolutionary generation—with the peculiar institution of slavery on the other.  The ethos of republicanism and the ideal of open discourse clashed with the legislative attempts among the Southern states to resurrect Roman code to validate slave laws, even as the judiciary, on all levels and in all states, attempted to incorporate British common law into a new setting with unique problems.  In short, law was in flux during the nineteenth century in America, and writers like Melville and Hawthorne picked up on this problem and gave it unique and sometimes troubling articulation in their literature.

The “facts” in Benito Cereno are strikingly similar to the facts in one of America’s most memorable cases: U.S. v. The Amistad, in which John Quincy Adams, among others, served as an attorney.  In both “cases,” slaves took over a slave ship, killed some of their white captives, and demanded that the remaining white shipmen return the boat to Africa.  Rather than doing that, however, the white shipmen steered a path toward America, where the unsuspecting crew of another ship, sensing something wrong, came to assist.  These fact patterns raise sensitive and disturbing questions about the law.  What is justice?  How should it be determined?  Which party is right, and what does it mean to be right or to have rights?  For that matter, what is the law to begin with?

In Benito Cereno, Cereno is the captain of the ship bearing slaves, and it is from Delano’s perspective that we learn, gradually, that a slave revolt has occurred and that Cereno is being held captive by Africans.  Delano is the captain of a different ship who has come aboard Cereno’s ship to assist Cereno’s apparently distressed crew.  The leader of the slave revolt, Babo, himself a slave, is always by Cereno’s side, thereby giving Delano the impression that Cereno has a loyal servant.  What Delano eventually discovers is that the slaves have spared the lives of only Cereno and a few other whites in order that these whites return the ship to Africa.

In Amistad as in Benito Cereno, the African slaves had been removed from their homeland, without their consent, and taken to a foreign land among alien peoples for the sole purpose of perpetual enslavement.  On the other hand, the white shipmen had, it could be argued, complied with the law of the sea in conducting these actions, and they were murdered by mutinying slaves.  The problem here is that neither side seems to represent an unquestionably moral or obviously right position.  Slavery is evil, but so is murder.  Melville, perhaps realizing the literary possibilities created by this tension, subjects this challenging set of circumstances to rigorous interrogation by way of a captivating narrative. Read the rest of this entry »

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Review of Coleman Hutchinson’s Apples and Ashes

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Fiction, Historicism, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Southern History, Southern Literary Review on June 20, 2012 at 8:00 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following review first appeared here at the Southern Literary Review.

Confederate literature and literary culture have not received the critical consideration that they warrant.  Not only that, but they have been dismissed as scant and mediocre.  Scholars of the South and of the Civil War—even those whose work has reached wide audiences—have paid more attention to other humanistic fields than to literature, particularly to Confederate literature and particularly during the so-called “fighting” years of 1861-1865.  This neglect, argues Coleman Hutchison in Apples and Ashes, is regrettable because “the Confederacy gave rise to a robust literary culture.”

Several factors account for the dearth of scholarship on Confederate literature, not least of which is the fact that the Confederacy existed for only a short time, during which Confederate writers had to overcome, among other things, ink and paper shortages; many of these men and women struggled to see their work reach print in cities occupied by Union troops.  Accordingly, much of what might have become Confederate literature was lost or unpublished, yet the relative shortage of Confederate literature was not due to lack of talent, but to printing paralysis.

Another reason Confederate literature has failed to become a common subject of study is the presumption that this topic is not worthwhile, largely because Confederate cultural values have been discredited.  There is, today, the tendency to demonize or denounce any person who would take seriously the claims and writings of Confederate partisans, politicians, and highbrows.  Yet to take something seriously is not to endorse it, and to proclaim certain intellectual matters off-limits—even if those matters are highly complex and, when studied carefully, telling about contingencies and urgencies of our own day—is dangerous and foolish indeed.  Hutchison is just as aware of the importance of Confederate literature as he is of the importance of disclaiming it.  “To write about the Confederate nation,” he says, “is to risk being seen as endorsing its right to exist.”  He adds, emphatically, that his book “is by no means an apology for the Confederacy or Confederate nationalism,” and that he “finds almost nothing that is admirable in the politics and culture of the Civil War South.”  That Hutchison feels compelled to disassociate himself from Confederate ideology at all suggests how strangely anxious the impulsive, opportunistic, or lazy readers will be to either condemn or celebrate (depending on their perspective) this book as pro-Confederate.

Mostly uninterested in matters of taste and judgment regarding the literary quality of his subjects, Hutchison submits that Confederate literature teaches literary scholars not only about the nuances and cultures of nationalism, but also about nineteenth century American (read: non-Confederate) letters generally, since Confederate literature was in conversation with—and in contradistinction to—American literary nationalism.  Among the distinguishing features of Confederate literature were its aspirational impulses and its focus upon an imagined and impossible future.  In some respects, the South’s belles lettres recognized the poignancy of a lost cause narrative before the cause was actually lost. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sidney Morgenbesser on the American Pragmatists

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on June 13, 2012 at 8:00 am

Sidney Morgenbesser was a philosophy professor at Columbia University.  Among his students were Jerry Fodor, Raymond Geuss, Robert Nozick, and Derek Parfit.  In the following videos, Professor Morgenbesser speaks to Bryan Magee about the American Pragmatists.

Section One

Section Two

Section Three

Section Four

Section Five

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Emersonian Individualism

In America, American History, Art, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Emerson, Epistemology, Essays, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Santayana, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on April 4, 2012 at 6:48 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following essay originally appeared here at Mises Daily.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is politically elusive. He’s so elusive that thinkers from various schools and with various agendas have appropriated his ideas to validate some activity or another. Harold Bloom once wrote, “In the United States, we continue to have Emersonians of the Left (the post-Pragmatist Richard Rorty) and of the Right (a swarm of libertarian Republicans, who exalt President Bush the Second).”[1] We’ll have to excuse Bloom’s ignorance of political movements and signifiers — libertarians who exalt President Bush, really? — and focus instead on Bloom’s point that Emerson’s influence is evident in a wide array of contemporary thinkers and causes.

Bloom is right that what “matters most about Emerson is that he is the theologian of the American religion of Self-Reliance.”[2] Indeed, the essay “Self-Reliance” remains the most cited of Emerson’s works, and American politicians and intellectuals selectively recycle ideas of self-reliance in the service of often disparate goals.

Emerson doesn’t use the term “individualism” in “Self-Reliance,” which was published in 1841, when the term “individualism” was just beginning to gain traction. Tocqueville unintentionally popularized the signifier “individualism” with the publication of Democracy in America. He used a French term that had no counterpart in English. Translators of Tocqueville labored over this French term because its signification wasn’t part of the English lexicon. Emerson’s first mention of “individualism” was not until 1843.

It is clear, though, that Emerson’s notion of self-reliance was tied to what later would be called “individualism.” Emerson’s individualism was so radical that it bordered on self-deification. Only through personal will could one realize the majesty of God. Nature for Emerson was like the handwriting of God, and individuals with a poetical sense — those who had the desire and capability to “read” nature — could understand nature’s universal, divine teachings.

Lakes, streams, meadows, forests — these and other phenomena were, according to Emerson, sources of mental and spiritual pleasure or unity. They were what allowed one to become “part and parcel with God,” if only one had or could become a “transparent eyeball.” “Nothing at last is sacred,” Emerson said, “but the integrity of your own mind.” That’s because a person’s intellect translates shapes and forms into spiritual insights.

We cannot judge Emerson exclusively on the basis of his actions. Emerson didn’t always seem self-reliant or individualistic. His politics, to the extent that they are knowable, could not be called libertarian. We’re better off judging Emerson on the basis of his words, which could be called libertarian, even if they endow individualism with a religiosity that would make some people uncomfortable.

Emerson suggests in “Self-Reliance” that the spontaneous expression of thought or feeling is more in keeping with personal will, and hence with the natural world as constituted by human faculties, than that which is passively assumed or accepted as right or good, or that which conforms to social norms. Emerson’s individualism or self-reliance exalted human intuition, which precedes reflection, and it privileged the will over the intellect. Feeling and sensation are antecedent to reason, and Emerson believed that they registered moral truths more important than anything cognition could summon forth.

Emerson’s transcendentalism was, as George Santayana pointed out in 1911, a method conducive to the 19-century American mindset.[3] As a relatively new nation seeking to define itself, America was split between two mentalities, or two sources of what Santayana called the “genteel tradition”: Calvinism and transcendentalism.

The American philosophical tradition somehow managed to reconcile these seeming dualities. On the one hand, Calvinism taught that the self was bad, that man was depraved by nature and saved only by the grace of God. On the other hand, transcendentalism taught that the self was good, that man was equipped with creative faculties that could divine the presence of God in the world. The Calvinist distrusted impulses and urges as sprung from an inner evil. The transcendentalist trusted impulses and urges as moral intuition preceding society’s baseless judgments and prevailing conventions.

What these two philosophies had in common was an abiding awareness of sensation and perception: a belief that the human mind registers external data in meaningful and potentially spiritual ways. The Calvinist notion of limited disclosure — that God reveals his glory through the natural world — played into the transcendentalists’ conviction that the natural world supplied instruments for piecing together divinity.

The problem for Santayana is that transcendentalism was just a method, a way of tapping into one’s poetical sense. What one did after that was unclear. Santayana thought that transcendentalism was the right method, but he felt that Emerson didn’t use that method to instruct us in practical living. Transcendentalism was a means to an end, but not an end itself.

According to Santayana, Emerson “had no system” because he merely “opened his eyes on the world every morning with a fresh sincerity, marking how things seemed to him then, or what they suggested to his spontaneous fancy.”[4] Emerson did not seek to group all senses and impressions into a synthetic whole. Nor did he suggest a politics toward which senses and impressions ought to lead. Santayana stops short of accusing Emerson of advancing an “anything-goes” metaphysics. But Santayana does suggest that Emerson failed to advance a set of principles; instead, Emerson gave us a technique for arriving at a set of principles. Emerson provided transportation, but gave no direction. This shortcoming — if it is a shortcoming — might explain why Bloom speaks of the “paradox of Emerson’s influence,” namely, that “Peace Marchers and Bushians alike are Emerson’s heirs in his dialectics of power.”[5]

For Emerson, human will is paramount. It moves the intellect to create. It is immediate, not mediate. In other words, it is the sense or subjectivity that is not yet processed by the human mind. We ought to trust the integrity of will and intuition and avoid the dictates and decorum of society.

“Society,” Emerson says, “everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” Society corrupts the purity of the will by forcing individuals to second-guess their impulses and to look to others for moral guidance. Against this socialization, Emerson declares, “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”

Emerson’s nonconformist ethic opposed habits of thinking, which society influenced but did not determine. Emerson famously stated that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. What he meant, I think, is that humans ought to improve themselves by tapping into intuitive truths. Nature, with her figures, forms, and outlines, provides images that the individual can harness to create beauty and energize the self. Beauty therefore does not exist in the world; rather, the human mind makes beauty out of the externalities it has internalized. Beauty, accordingly, resides within us, but only after we create it.

Here we see something similar to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism stripped of its appeals to divinity. Rand believed that reality existed apart from the thinking subject, that the thinking subject employs reason and logic to make sense of experience and perception, and that the self or will is instrumental in generating meaning from the phenomenal world. Read the rest of this entry »

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Bogus on Buckley

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communism, Conservatism, Historicism, History, Humanities, Libertarianism, Politics, Writing on February 9, 2012 at 8:34 am

Allen Mendenhall

It was customary practice in my family to gather at my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner after church.  Loyal to our Southern traditions, we would, after eating, divide company: men into the living room, women into the kitchen or den.  My brother and I, still children, would sit silently, for the most part, while my grandfather, father and uncles bandied about the names of politicians and discussed the day’s sermon or newspaper headlines. 

I first learned of William F. Buckley Jr. during these Sunday afternoons, as he was often the topic of conversation.  I was too young to know much, but young enough to learn a lot quickly, so I began to follow this man, this Buckley, to the extent that I could, from those days until the day that he died in February 2008.  

Overcommitted to supposedly universal political ideals and to the spread of American liberal democracy throughout the world, Buckley was not my kind of conservative.  He could be tactless and cruel, as when he violated the ancient maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum (“Of the dead, speak no evil”) in an obituary to Murray Rothbard wherein he wrote that “Rothbard had defective judgment” and “couldn’t handle moral priorities.”  Buckley then trumpeted some unflattering anecdotes about Rothbard before likening Rothbard to David Koresh. 

Despite such tantrums and vendettas, I always liked Buckley.  Something in the way he conducted himself—his showy decorum, flaunted manners and sophisticated rhetoric—appealed to me.

Carl T. Bogus, an American law professor and author of the biography Buckley, seems to share my qualified respect for Buckley, despite disagreeing with Buckley on important political and theoretical issues.  “I should tell the reader up front,” Bogus warns, “that I am a liberal and thus critical—in some instances, highly critical—of Buckley’s ideology.”  Yet, adds Bogus, “I admire William F. Buckley Jr. enormously.”     

Unlike bobble-headed television personalities and think tank sycophants, Bogus does justice to his subject, treating Buckley’s ideas evenhandedly on the grounds that he (Bogus) is “disheartened by the present state of partisan animosity,” one solution to which, he says, “is to take opposing ideas seriously.”  Bogus not only takes Buckley’s ideas seriously, but credits them for changing America’s political realities.    Read the rest of this entry »

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Review of Lions of the West by Robert Morgan

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Historicism, History, Humanities, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Southern History, The South, Writing on January 31, 2012 at 6:46 am

Allen Mendenhall

This review originally appeared here at the Southern Literary Review.

Good histories don’t just tell stories; they make arguments.  Robert Morgan’s arguments in Lions of the West, subtle though they are, run as follows: historians and storytellers cannot help but view dramatic shifts of history as products of the actions of famous individuals; nevertheless, what happens in the course of history is attributable to numerous common folk acting independently and with disparate motivations.  Even the most comprehensive history cannot tell the stories of all these individuals, each of whom, in the narrative of the American West, could be numbered among the great “lions.” 

“While it is understandable,” Morgan explains, “that we see history mostly in terms of the deeds of a few, our grasp of what actually happened will be flawed and limited if we do not consider the story of the almost invisible many who made the notable deeds possible, even inevitable.”  Despite this claim, Morgan seems taken by the Great Man theory of history, and one of the epigrams to his book, which gets repeated in the Prologue, is Emerson’s remark that there is “properly no history; only biography.”

Morgan’s stated purpose is to “create a living sense of the westward expansion of the United States through brief biographies of some of the men involved.”  In realizing this goal, he offers a nod to other popular historians and storytellers such as Joseph J. Ellis, Gordon S. Wood, and David McCullough.  Each of these men writes histories free of the monotony and tendentious urgency of academic historians, yet each is also committed to facts and small details as indicia of greater narrative patterns. 

Morgan admits, as he must, that Lions of the West is, at best, “only a partial story.”  That’s not a shortcoming peculiar to Morgan’s narrative but a reality of human experience: all histories, like all memories, are partial.  Morgan himself submits that “written history is distortion through selection,” and that by its nature “narrative can represent only by implication, explicit about some parts, suggesting the many.”  No history could recount all the constituent parts that make up the whole; no history, in other words, could recreate the past.  For that reason, an author’s values and priorities are reflected in the subjects he or she chooses to undertake. 

Morgan’s values and priorities can be gleaned from his decision to profile ten individuals whose lives and toils characterize the American West in all its outlandishness and glory: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, John Chapman (“Johnny Appleseed”), David (“Davy”) Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams.  Of these, all but Chapman and Adams maintained significant ties to the South or would have considered themselves, or by others would have been considered, Southerners. Read the rest of this entry »

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Agrarianism vs. The Life Well-Lived

In America, Arts & Letters, Conservatism, News and Current Events, Politics on January 16, 2012 at 12:05 am

James Banks is a doctoral student studying Renaissance and Restoration English literature at the University of Rochester. He also contributes to the American Interest Online. He has been a Fellow with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Honors Program; in addition to The Literary Lawyer, he has written for the Intercollegiate Review, First Principles and The Heritage Foundation’s blog The Foundry. A native of Idaho’s panhandle, he lives in upstate New York and serves in the New York Army National Guard.

Agrarianism has been an organized antagonist of American capitalism for longer than Marxism has, and it provides a welcome avenue for those who reject the gospel of a bourgeoisie paradise but are averse to the cosmopolitan and authoritarian tendencies of Marxism. It has occasionally found its way into public policy, such as the Second Bush Administration’s efforts to turn all Americans into property owners (though, by that point, “the family farm” had become a suburban home with a two car garage and white picket fence). Most recently, a debate boiled up in the blogosphere over a comment made by First Things editor Joe Carter arguing that Agrarianism was essentially utopian in nature.

Front Porch Republic—which, from what I can make out, is not explicitly Agrarian but is highly sympathetic to its tenets—was quick to come back with a number of repartees. Nonetheless, these repartees (for this reader anyway) only accentuated some of the problems with the ideology that they sought to defend. Front Porch Republic’s best contribution to the debate is Mark T. Mitchell’s. Professor Mitchell is an author of considerable ability and one who—in as far as I can make out—comes pretty close to living the philosophy that he advocates. I would not question the consistency of his views, just the correctness.

In his discussion of Wendell Berry’s Agrarianism, Mitchell writes:

The agrarian is guided by gratitude. He recognizes the giftedness of creation and accepts the great and awful responsibility to steward it well. Such a recognition “calls for prudence, humility, good work, propriety of scale.”[3] In the use of the land, soil, water, and non-human creatures, the final arbiter, according to Berry, is not human will but nature itself.[4] But this is not to suggest that Berry is some sort of pantheist. Instead, “the agrarian mind is, at bottom, a religious mind.” The agrarian recognizes that the natural world is a gift, and gifts imply a giver. “The agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking, good eating, and gratitude to God.” By contrast, the “industrial mind “begins with ingratitude, and ramifies in the destruction of farms and forests.”

I can sympathize with the desire to live close to the soil (and would purchase a farm could I afford it). The problem with the argument, though, is that it implies a fundamental distinction between the “agrarian mind” and the “industrial mind”; in truth, the difference between the two is one of degree rather than fundamental difference. Perhaps the agrarian mind “recognizes that the natural world is a gift,” but does it recognize it as such more than does the mind of the hunter/gatherer? And, if not, why should we not go further and work to incorporate elements of the hunter/gatherer’s economy into our postmodern existence? Read the rest of this entry »