May 25, 2005

Cited By

by Cliopatria

Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt sent me to Donald Kagan's Jefferson Lecture. Despite Kagan's warnings against the dangers of over-generalization, his critique of contemporary historiography struck me as so non-specific--apparently, we're still stuck in 80s crusades against DWM--that I had a hard time finding the "there" there. I've already had an earful about this lecture from a classicist's perspective, and I'll leave his call for history as a "sound base for moral judgments" to other historians. Being an English professor, albeit of the old-fashioned literary-historical variety, I naturally pricked up my ears (eyes?) when I stumbled across some references to Stanley Fish and Paul de Man. I was a tad puzzled to discover that Kagan didn't cite Stanley Fish and Paul de Man directly, but only from excerpts: Fish from Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals and de Man from David Lehman's Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. When I teach my graduate students how to evaluate secondary sources, I always ask them to consider how many times the author chooses to cite primary sources that have been quoted in other works, as opposed to citing directly from the original texts. While it's legitimate to cite a primary source "quoted in" another work when you cannot access the original text (e.g., it's a manuscript on the other side of the planet), there's no excuse for citing easily available sources in such a fashion. How can you tell if the quotation has been taken out of context or misquoted? What if your secondary source hasn't understood the original text? There's something rather depressing about reading a paean to traditional historical inquiry, only to discover that the author is generalizing about something that he apparently knows only in snippets and at secondhand. (Do historians really read a lot of Paul de Man? I wouldn't have thought he would be even remotely useful. Conceivably, the early Stanley Fish's reception theory might be more helpful.) Now, Richard J. Evans does a fine job of critiquing postmodern theories of history, precisely because he's done the reading, has clearly thought about it at some length, and can separate the wheat from the chaff. No vague handwaving there. (Incidentally, Evans' response to his critics is quite delightful.)

[X-posted from The Little Professor, with a minor tweak.]

More Comments:

Greg James Robinson - 5/25/2005

I did not say that Professor Kagan, whom I have never met, suffers from bitterness. I mean that he is a "bitter partisan"--meaning "hard-nosed, convinced." I direct you to Websters' dictionary's second definition of bitter (i.e., after the 1st, "not sweet-tasting")

2 : marked by intensity or severity...b : being relentlessly determined : VEHEMENT <a bitter partisan>

Jim Williams - 5/25/2005

I have known Don for 30 years now; one thing he is not is "bitter". He is an articulate advocate of the centrality of classical civilization to the culture of which we are now part, but with him disagreements about ideas never descended to personal animosities. His graciousness of manner rather frustrated Yalies who wanted their advocacy of multiculturalism to devolve into a personal attack.

Don is a Kennedy liberal who bought into the Reagan foreign policy in the face of the fecklessness of many Democrats after Vietnam.

However, he worked very successfully chairing departments and even team-teaching classes with people with whom he disagreed (Paul Kennedy, e.g.). He also is one of the two best classroom teachers I have seen in my academic career!

Do not consider this an endorsement of Don's Machtpolitik. As a vet who cares deeply for my brothers and sisters in arms, I don't buy into Kagan's zeal for a "muscular foreign policy". Saddam was a rat, but Colin Powell and Bush Sr. recognized the dangers inherent in regime change. They were right; I do not want to see American lives lost enforcing a global Pax Americana.

Greg James Robinson - 5/25/2005

Donald Kagan has a long history of involvement in "the culture wars" as a bitter right-wing partisan, and more recently as a drumbeater for Amerian miliraqy aqdventurism. Given his prestigious chair and his extreme views, his citation of a book called "Tenured Radicals" contains a certain unconscious irony.