Lewis H. Lapham and His Present-Day Soapbox for Voices of the Past
Lewis H. Lapham leans forward behind his wide wooden desk and within minutes of speaking has mentioned Mark Twain, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Goethe, Cicero, John Locke, Hamilton, Adams and Madison. A laptop on a side table is piled high with papers.
As the media metabolism becomes endlessly speeded up, Mr. Lapham has slowed down. Two years ago he moved from a monthly, Harper’s magazine, to publishing four times a year with Lapham’s Quarterly, a scholarly journal that he has tried to give more mass-market appeal. The target audience, he said, is “people who wished they had paid more attention in school.”
It has a Web site, laphamsquarterly.org, but up-to-the-minute is not the mantra: recently the home page featured an audio interview with Gordon S. Wood, the Brown University historian of early America, that was recorded more than a year ago during the presidential campaign.
“The idea was to bring the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present,” said Mr. Lapham, describing the quarterly’s mission, before quickly paraphrasing Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” (He sashayed straight to Schlesinger’s “notion of history as an antidote to folly.”)
Mr. Lapham, 74, left Harper’s in 2006, after serving as editor since 1983, following an earlier five-year stint. Last year he started his nonprofit quarterly as a selection of historical writings with a single topic for each issue. War was the first topic, and others have been money, nature and crime.
The current issue is about medicine, and includes selections from Hippocrates, Plato, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all noteworthy for being — among other things — dead and therefore cheap. It is fronted by a long essay by Mr. Lapham that begins with a quotation from Montaigne and near the end quotes Socrates...
... Politically, the Obama era is an odd time for Mr. Lapham, who in one of his last columns before leaving the editorship of Harper’s called for President George W. Bush’s impeachment. The disconnect between his upbringing and his affinity for the country club life, and his words and purported values — on paper he has been a stalwart liberal and defender of meritocracy — are perplexing to some.
In many ways Mr. Lapham’s views are a remnant of a period of radicalization of the American ruling class that began in the 1960s, reflecting a politics that blends a certain populism with aristocratic values. William F. Buckley Jr., who founded the conservative magazine National Review, was the embodiment of this on the right.
“I think the mix of high culture and populism and redistributionist politics doesn’t fit with liberalism,” said Jacob Weisberg, chairman of the Slate Group and author of “The Bush Tragedy.” “It falls to the left and the right of liberalism.”
He added, “I suspect Lewis would be the first to agree that it is outside the prevailing political consensus.”...
Read entire article at NYT
As the media metabolism becomes endlessly speeded up, Mr. Lapham has slowed down. Two years ago he moved from a monthly, Harper’s magazine, to publishing four times a year with Lapham’s Quarterly, a scholarly journal that he has tried to give more mass-market appeal. The target audience, he said, is “people who wished they had paid more attention in school.”
It has a Web site, laphamsquarterly.org, but up-to-the-minute is not the mantra: recently the home page featured an audio interview with Gordon S. Wood, the Brown University historian of early America, that was recorded more than a year ago during the presidential campaign.
“The idea was to bring the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present,” said Mr. Lapham, describing the quarterly’s mission, before quickly paraphrasing Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” (He sashayed straight to Schlesinger’s “notion of history as an antidote to folly.”)
Mr. Lapham, 74, left Harper’s in 2006, after serving as editor since 1983, following an earlier five-year stint. Last year he started his nonprofit quarterly as a selection of historical writings with a single topic for each issue. War was the first topic, and others have been money, nature and crime.
The current issue is about medicine, and includes selections from Hippocrates, Plato, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all noteworthy for being — among other things — dead and therefore cheap. It is fronted by a long essay by Mr. Lapham that begins with a quotation from Montaigne and near the end quotes Socrates...
... Politically, the Obama era is an odd time for Mr. Lapham, who in one of his last columns before leaving the editorship of Harper’s called for President George W. Bush’s impeachment. The disconnect between his upbringing and his affinity for the country club life, and his words and purported values — on paper he has been a stalwart liberal and defender of meritocracy — are perplexing to some.
In many ways Mr. Lapham’s views are a remnant of a period of radicalization of the American ruling class that began in the 1960s, reflecting a politics that blends a certain populism with aristocratic values. William F. Buckley Jr., who founded the conservative magazine National Review, was the embodiment of this on the right.
“I think the mix of high culture and populism and redistributionist politics doesn’t fit with liberalism,” said Jacob Weisberg, chairman of the Slate Group and author of “The Bush Tragedy.” “It falls to the left and the right of liberalism.”
He added, “I suspect Lewis would be the first to agree that it is outside the prevailing political consensus.”...