Notes on Intellectual History
At the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, Martin Burke introduces us to the International Dictionary of Intellectual Historians project. As a wiki, it invites your collaboration. Its sample articles – Cheikh Anta Diop, Michel Foucault, Anneliese Maier, and Masao Maruyama – and articles in process – Nicola Abbagnano, Benedetto Croce, Joseph Richmond Levenson, Benjamin Isadore Schwartz, and Giorgio Tonelli – reflect the intention of the project's editors that it be truly international.
Yesterday, Emory University unsealed 300 letters from Flannery O'Connor to Betty Hester, an obscure, chain-smoking lesbian who lived here in Atlanta. This correspondence is apparently among the most personal of O'Connor's.
Richard Byrne,"Princeton U. Press Republishes Seminal Works of American Political Life," CHE, 11 May, introduces a new reprint series, the James Madison Library in American Politics, edited by Sean Wilentz. It's begun with Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) and John Kenneth Galbreath's The New Industrial State (1967). The Weekly Standard (scroll down) blanches at the choice of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. –"recovering heroin addict and radio conspiracy theorist" – to write a new afterword for Conscience of a Conservative. It is, says the Standard,"a 17-page diatribe that, for sheer incoherence and irrelevance, must be endured to be believed."
There's a remarkable family story in HarperSanFrancisco's announcement that it will reprint another American classic: Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis. In the centennial year of original publication, it will appear in August as Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic that Woke Up the Church. The editor of this new edition is Paul Raushenbush, whose paternal great-grandfathers were Walter Rauschenbusch and Louis D. Brandeis. Young Raushenbush (the spelling of the family name was changed in the 1940s) has recruited a remarkable group of contemporary writers, including Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, Stanley Hauerwas, Cornel West, and his own uncle, Richard Rorty, to write responses to individual chapters in the book. Except for a brief mention in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Rorty has publicly ignored his grandfather's legacy.
Richard Rorty's socialist parents, Walter Rauschenbusch's daughter Winifred and her husband James Rorty, moved from churchly circles into the cosmopolitan company of the old New York Intellectuals and at least for a season loved Trotsky more than Jesus. Their son Richard was born in 1931 into a family circle of leftist politics and very progressive social hopes. Frequent guests in the Rorty home included John Dewey, Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca and John Frank (Trotsky's secretary who lived with the Rortys under an assumed name). Richard Rorty confesses that as a boy of 12 he knew the point of being human was to give one's life to fight against social injustice. He also knew the temptations and terrors of radical politics. He knew that Stalin had ordered the assassinations of Trotsky, Tresca, Frank and scores of other anti-totalitarian leftist leaders and intellectuals.
-- Scott Holland,"The coming only is sacred: self-creation and social solidarity in Richard Rorty's secular Eschatology," Crosscurrents, Winter 2004.
Thanks to Tim Lacy for the tips.