In the Presence of the Past: Essays in Honor of Frank Manuel (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées)

297 Pages·1990·14.03 MB·English

by  R.T. Bienvenu

IN THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
118
R.T. BIENVENU and M. FEINGOLD
IN THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST
Directors: P. Dibon (Paris) and R. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis)
Editorial Board: J.F. Battail (Paris); F. Duchesneau (Montreal); A. Gabbey (Belfast);
T. Gregory (Rome); S. Hutton (Hatfield Polytechnic); J.D. North (Groningen);
M.J. Petry (Rotterdam); J. Popkin (Lexington)
Advisory Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); A. Crombie (Oxford); H. de la Fontaine Verwey
(Amsterdam); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (paris); K. Hanada (Hokkaido
University); W. Kirsop (Melbourne); P.O. Kristeller (Columbia University); Elisabeth
Labrousse (paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles); J. Malarczyk (Lublin); E. de Olaso (C.LF.
Buenos Aires); J. Orcibal (Paris); Wolfgang Rod (Miinchen); G. Rousseau (Los Angeles);
H. Rowen (Rutgers University, N.J.); J.P. Schobinger (Ziirich); J. Tans (Groningen)
IN THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST
Essays in Honor of Frank Manuel
edited by
RICHARD T. BIENVENU
University of Missouri. Columbia. USA
and
MORDECHAI FEINGOLD
Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg. USA
tI...
"
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
DORDRECHT j BOSTON j LONDON
Library of Congress Cataloging.in·Publication Data
In tne presence of the past essays in honor of Frank Manuel I edited
by Richard T. Bienvenu and Mordechai Feingold.
=
p. cm. -- (International archives of the history of ideas
Archlves lnternatlonales d'hlstolre des ldies ; v. 118)
Includes bibllOgraphlcal references and index.
ISBN 0-7923-1008-X (alk. paper)
1. Europe--H1story. 2. Europe--Intellectual life. 1. Manuel,
Frank Edward. II. BIenvenu, RIchard. III. Feingold, Mordechai.
IV. SerIes, ArchIves lnternatlonales d'hlstolre des idees; 118.
06.1453 1991
940--dc20 90-48482
ISBN O· 7923-1008-X
Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers,
P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
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the publishing programmes of
D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press.
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In all other countries, sold and distributed
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Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Frank Manuel: An Appreciation
Martin Peretz 1
The Diffusion of Science and the Conversion of the Gentiles in the
Seventeenth Century
Michael T. Ryan 9
Good Aristocrats / Bad Aristocrats: Thomas Hobbes and Early
Modem Political Culture
Michael Walzer 41
John Selden and the Nature of Seventeenth-Century Science
Mordechai Feingold 55
Reason and Revolution: Political Consciousness and Ideological
Invention at the End of the Old Regime
Keith M. Baker 79
Victor Considerant: The Making of a Fourierist
Jonathan Beecher 93
Utopia and the Sharpest Anguish of the Age?
Richard T. Bienvenu 121
Auguste Comte and the Nebular Hypothesis
Silvan S. Schweber 131
The Profits of America: Early Nineteenth-Century British Travel in
the United States
Stephen R. Graubard 193
Hawthorne in Utopia
Judith Shklar 215
vi Table of Contents
Human Rights and Democracy
Sanford A. Lakoff 233
Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sciences: Liberal Social
Thought in the Second Reich
Jacques Kornberg 249
Above and Beyond Party: The Dilemma of Dossiers de l' Action
Populaire in the 1930s
John W. Padberg 269
Index 287
Preface
The broad canvas covered by the articles in the present volume celebrates the
diversity and richness of the writings of Frank Manuel during a scholarly career
that spans over five decades. The subjects of the articles - ranging from science
to utopia, from theology to political thought - mirror many of the themes
Manuel has written about with erudition, flair and uncommon perception. It is
only fitting that in paying tribute to such a defiant intellect each author brings to
his treatment a distinct perspective and texture, the result of his own original
forays into the history of ideas. Yet underlying all the essays is the conviction
that the study of the intersection of individuals and ideas still yields a rich
harvest. Presented to Frank on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, In the
Presence o/the Past honors a teacher, a friend and, above all, a scholar.
R.T. Bienvenu and M. Feingold (eds).ln the presence of the past. vii.
MARTIN PERETZ
Frank Manuel: An Appreciation
It was finally because of Frank Edward Manuel that I decided (however
belatedly) to forgo a proper academic career. Since I had not left so much as a
leafscar on the tree of the scholarly culture this is not a fact which anyone else
would have reason to notice. It is also not, I am happy to add, something for
which Manuel will be especially remembered. But I suspect that there are many
others, besides myself, whom he deflected from misspent lives in university
libraries and obscure archives. After class one day, some thirty-odd years ago,
he said, in what sounded to me like unmistakably decisive terms, that "under no
conditions" should I "do history." Oh, it was perfectly all right that I studied
history as an undergraduate. But I certainly shouldn't pursue it as a graduate
student, if, that is, I contemplated graduate work at all. I must have looked
mystified and perhaps even hurt. He was obliged to say more, to explain
himself, and he did. Rippling his hands casually over some text, he expounded
further: "You read like this ... and not like that," by which time his hands
seemed to be plumbing the depths to some infinite source. "Do you mean I
skim," I asked anxiously. "You said it, not I," he responded. And then, offering
not solace but salve, he concluded that, given my interests, I "might harmlessly
still go on to study and teach politics."
Manuel's deterrent did not always need to be so explicit. It operated, in fact,
by example. Riveting teaching, luminous scholarship, sweeping erudition,
incandescent generalizations are their own norms. They inspire and they also
intimidate. How much more degraded the life of the mind in America would be
if they did not do both. Only someone very arrogant or someone very gifted
could really set Manuel up as a model. But he could be a challenge, a
provocateur. In any case, there was, there is still, an aura about him, though I
write inevitably from my first impressions, which date to the mid-fifties. But
then those same memories include disparate impressions of other formidable
intellectuals like Max Lerner, Irving Howe, Erich Heller, Herbert Marcuse, Paul
Radin, Arnold Hauser, Marie Syrkin, E.H. Carr, Ludwig Lewisohn, Lewis
Mumford, Philip Rahv, Louis Kronenberger and not just these who composed
for a brief moment at Brandeis University a cohort so intensely engrossed with
ideas (and in battle over ideas) that I cannot believe that such intensity has been
R.T. Bienvenu and M. Feingold (eds),ln the presence of the past, 1-8.
© 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 Martin Peretz
duplicated in any other institution, before or since. These were people, most of
them, at least, who were convinced that ideas not only illumined; they also
liberated. Still, even in a company like this, Manuel was somehow and all at
once intellectually more austere and more daring, a man apart.
Actually, he was that from childhood. Born in Boston's West End on
September 18, 1910 Frank was already by the time he was six known as a boy
orator. We can assume that his precocity did not inordinately endear him to his
contemporaries. And why should it have? His prodigous little discourses on
sacred texts, commentaries and themes were aimed, by dint of his sterling
example, to induce the city's rich Jews to build and maintain schools of Torah
learning for the immigrant young daily arriving from Eastern Europe. The
disciplines of these schools, their subject matter and their social mannerisms,
were, of course, at odds with the ways of the new country. It was hard to study
talmud and play stickball too.
Late nineteenth, early twentieth century Boston was a highly stratified city.
The antagonism between the Protestant Brahmin and the Irish and Italian
Catholics is the well-known stuff of its history, dating to the great potato
famine. The mass of Jews, however, had come only later and in lesser numbers,
though by the time Frank graduated from Harvard College in 1930 there were
already 130,000 of them in the metropolitan area and no less than 50
synagogues. Indeed, already two decades earlier the president of Harvard, A.
Lawrence Lowell, was so traumatized by the presence in the college of so many
bright young Jews that he put in place a numerus clausus which survived
through World War II. But that runs a bit ahead of the story and simplifies it
too. There were, broadly seen, two Jewish communities in Boston. The first was
of German origin and dated to the 1840's. Assimilation was the ideology of
these Jews, and Reform Judaism their none-too-exacting mode of worship.
They were also educationally and economically upwardly mobile in ways that
marked them off (and was to mark off the later waves of Jewish immigrants)
from both the Irish and Italians. None of this, however, admitted the newly
arrived Jews into the great houses on Beacon Hill. A measure of their separate
ness, and a reminder of it too, was the nearly successful campaign mounted in
1916 by the Protestant elite of the area - its leading bankers and lawyers, its
Adamses and LowelIs, including the aforementioned presidents of Harvard
University - to defeat Woodrow Wilson's nomination to the U.S. Supreme
Court of an eminent and scholarly Boston attorney named Louis Dembitz
Brandeis the "people's attorney," a son of the earlier Jewish migration. And
Brandeis was one of those rare Jews who had actually been to the great
Brahmin houses on the Hill.
The other Jews, who hardly noticed that there were great houses, came from
Eastern Europe; among them were Manuel's parents. His father, a baker, in
whom stirred some mild version of socialism, helped organize the local Hebrew
Bakers Union, a rather militant contingent in its day. It is probably from his
father that Frank got his pugnacious flair. Frank's mother ... well, she was
doting, supportive, proud. If anyone took great pleasure in Frank's perfor-
Frank Manuel: An Appreciation 3
mances as a young genius it was probably her. At twelve he entered the Boston
Latin School, the meritocratic academy of the local public education system
which, since it opened its doors in 1635 with a program based on the classics,
made intellectual rigor its own reward. From there Frank went to Harvard
where he concentrated in History and Literature, possibly the first
"interdisciplinary" major at an American university. It was there that a sixteen
year-old freshman began to master the history and cultures of Christian Europe.
At the same time, however, he was enrolled at the Hebrew Teachers' College
(now called the Hebrew College), an expression of the Hebraist revival which
was so central to the success of the Zionist revolution in Jewish life. The
college's standards were apparently quite demanding, and it attracted to its rolls
many quite brilliant young men and women. Among Frank's generation, for
example, were two who went on to become accomplished Sinologists, the
scholar Benjamin Schwartz and the journalist Theodore H. White. These are not
idiosyncratic cases.
Tied though he was to Jewish leaming the excitement in college was in
discovering what was still for him a relatively unknown world. He did so with
such zest and care that his promise was already widely noted among peers and
teachers. Finishing his senior year Manuel enrolled as a graduate student, now
in history proper, and received his Ph.D. barely three years later. The world
outside the academy was not inviting. The depression seemed to sink both
spirits and ambitions, to say nothing of the ways of ordinary life. In Europe,
where Manuel travelled, the spectre of a rising fascism haunted just about
everyone, except, of course, those who welcomed it. And even for committed
Jews this wider peril made their own concerns appear narrow and indulgent.
(Would they have seemed so had the ugly reapings of German fascism been
then even dimly envisioned?) In any case, Manuel's psychological and
intellectual universe had already been opened up at Harvard. He fell in with a
group of young philosophers in the orbit of Alfred North Whitehead, among
them Willard Van Orman Quine,the seminal American logician. And, thinking
of himself as an economic historian, he began, with his friend Paul Sweezey, to
read Marx or, to be more truthful to the superficiality of the enterprise, Sidney
Hook's Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx. Then, under the tutelage of
Edward S. Mason and in the company of Wasily Leontief and Shigeta Tsuru, he
actually studied the Marxist classics and what went for Marxist scholarship, a
remarkably primitive activity at the time.
Manuel's academic career did not prosper. His teacher, Crane Brinton, did, it
is true, secure for him some research money to take him to Europe. The
chairman of the history department, Clarence Haring, succeeded in arranging
that Manuel might teach in the summer school; and another of his teachers,
Charles McIlwain, allowed him to teach a section or two on medieval political
theory and English constitutionalism. But a half century ago it was just about
inconceivable to think that a Jew might receive an appointment in Harvard's
department of history. (In other departments it was inconceivable even years
later.) If antisemitism was not a constant topic of conversation it was a constant