Word: nineteenth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...study of history has its equivalent of Dupin the relaxed thinker puffing on his meerschaum, scoffing at the scurrying police as they collect their clues. Worried because "the nineteenth-century pre-eminence of history in the sphere of intellect no longer obtains," intellectual and musical historian Jacques Barzun (University Professor at Columbia, author of Darwin, Marx. Wagner) has undertaken to incite resistance to modern modes of history. In Clio and the Doctors: Psycho History Quanto-History, and History (University of Chicago Press) he cites the depths of the problem he and some other older historians see: The historical sense...
...sterilization of history. Barzun seeks the victory of historical artist over historical statistician, without considering the possibility that someone might be both. Yet Stephen Thernstrom's heavily statistical studies are as sensitive to the unquantifiable as any previous works on social mobility. Richard Sennett's book on nineteenth-century family life in Chicago (Families Against the City) is as audacious and speculative, though not as wide-ranging, as anything Barzun has written--but, unlike Barzun, Sennett presents carefully examined statistics to support his conclusions. Statistical gaffs of the sort Barzun describes, such as a study (a half-century...
Time on the Cross is heavily influenced, for example, by many of the conceptual biases of neo-classical economics, which are even more out of touch with the early nineteenth century than they are with the modern world. In the same way, many earlier historians of slavery were influenced by racism. These are the real problems. The muse Clio, to whom Barzun appeals, should be more tolerant of methods than either Barzun or Fogel, but far more attentive to preconceptions--aware still that history never embraces more than a small part of reality, and coupling whatever means of reason with...
...connection is this: the unprecedented extremism of recent student radicalism is seen by Lipset as an attack on the very academic freedom that provided the source for the liveliness of intellectual thought and political activity at Harvard. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Harvard had fostered an "academic culture" that promoted scholarship for scholarship's sake, intellectual research relatively free of social constraint, and a solemn respect for creative academic thought. Because of its commitment to this ideal (and to a lesser extent, according to Lipset's analysis, because of its access to influence and financial resources), Harvard came...
...institutions have made aloofness from external control an illusion. The illusion is based on the ability of those institutions to throw their chips in with the non-academic rulers of society. The merger may be a long-lasting one, but it will not be a happy one for the nineteenth-century vision promulgated by Lipset. At one point, the fiddler will change his tune, and the university will find itself in the position of having to dance. That will happen, one way or another. But more important, the university by its own means has destroyed the myth of scholarship...