In Memory of Dorothy, by Howard Brick

In Memory of Dorothy

Howard Brick

Two years ago, for the S-USIH meeting (scheduled for this hotel, the first fully “live” post-pandemic conference for this organization), a group of us had planned a session in Dorothy’s honor—featuring Jim Kloppenberg, Kim Phillips-Fein, Jefferson Cowie, and Dan Geary (what a line-up!!) and intended to comment on and discuss Dorothy’s two blockbuster essays in Modern Intellectual History on “Whatever Happened to the Social in American Social Thought?” (December 2021 and March 2022).  Unfortunately, we had to cancel the meeting, after Dorothy emailed me around Labor Day, reporting that she had suffered a very bad case of COVID, with a number of complications, and wouldn’t be able to make it.  I am still saddened to think of her passing last May, but as a colleague once told me at another memorial meeting when too much sadness was voiced, “Where I come from, we want to enjoy stories about the departed that make us happy.”  Or, to paraphrase Joe Hill, “Don’t mourn:  talk, think, and write!”  So here goes.

Sometime in the early 1990s, when I was a very insecure assistant professor, I was invited to write quite a long essay under the simple title, “Society,” for the intellectual-history section (and hence the topic was “ideas thereof”) of a grand, 4-volume Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, edited by Stanley Kutler along with David Hollinger, Robert Dallek, and Thomas McCraw.  Quite nervous about the whole thing, I received a reader’s report on my draft, which began (as I recall) with the simple word, “Splendid!”  Phew—what a relief and what wonderful encouragement!  That was from Dorothy Ross, whom at the time I knew by reputation (and some of her work) but not personally.  What a boost that was! And I got to know her better over the subsequent years. Thereafter I was but one of the younger colleagues—many, I think—that she supported, encouraged, befriended with great warmth.  And she offered honest critique as well.  At some conference, in the mid-teens I suppose, I had lunch with her and Charlie Capper, where I tried to describe the book-in-progress by Dan Borus, Casey Blake, and me that was to survey “American thought and culture” in a “long” 1950s.  When I finished my attempt (long-winded, no doubt) to sum up the guiding theme of the book-to-be, Dorothy quietly said, “Well, that’s not the way I see it.”  It turned out she did not so very much disapprove of the volume when it was finished, and she agreed to write the “series” introduction to the book.  It turned out she actually had much more to say in criticism of an earlier book of mine, which she paired with Daniel Rodgers in what I think may have been her final publication—the two “Whatever Happened” pieces which hadn’t yet been finished.  In time, though, before she published them, Dorothy—gracious as always–showed me a draft and I replied in self-defense.  Now when I re-read the articles, I see that after pairing me with Dan Rodgers in the first paragraph, she cites my book very seldom in the notes—which leads me to think my work really wasn’t her target but she was just being nice in associating my work with Dan’s much more significant stuff!

Citing my book Transcending Capitalism next to Rodgers’s Age of Fracture as her two targets, Dorothy argued that the decisive historical turning point in US social thought against what Rodgers would call “thick” accounts of social relations to the “thin” free-market ideal of individualistic exchange occurred in the 1950s, under the influence of the reigning concept of “totalitarianism”—not in the 1970s, as Rodgers indicated and (presumably) I did as well.  Consequently, the drastic thinning of liberal values from freedom, equality and social justice to individualistic freedom alone, imagined to buffer the effects of a threatening, overpowering State.  In her words: “I will show that liberals produced communal and mutualistic conceptions of the social early in the 20^th century… but retreated from those conceptions during the long 1950s.”

I still plead in self-defense:  my book did not generalize across American political and social thought as a whole but referred to a specific current of ideas, of some significance but hardly dominant, that originated among “late Progressive” thinkers and persisting even through the 1950s to gain a bit of further traction in the 1960s and early 1970s —a mildly socialist-inflected or social-democratic current that advanced some expectations of social change in a thoroughly nonrevolutionary sort leading toward a coming “postcapitalist” society (the term was mine, only occasionally voiced openly in the US but more common to some co-thinkers in Britain and western Europe).  Mind you, I had not embraced that current, but argued its proponents were quite deluded—as demonstrated by the rightward drift ascendant by the 1980s and the full-throated celebration of “capitalism” in its own name—which led a writer such as Robert Heilbroner who had drifted from a left-liberal kind of “creeping socialism” argument of the late 1940s and 1950s through the 60s, leading to a qualified embrace of Marxism in the 1970s, but ending with a confession in 1989 that “capitalism has won.”[1]

Dorothy’s argument resembles two other key works:  David Ciepley’s Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, 2006), which Dorothy in fact cited quite prominently.  I wish David were here right now—for some 20 years ago, when he and I were both at Washington University in St. Louis, I vigorously argued with him—always congenially, I must say—that the broadbrush argument (that the widespread totalitarianism doctrine eviscerated all liberalism’s more robust, reformist aspirations) missed some other currents such as the one I meant to describe. And now we see Samuel Moyn’s Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023), which actually runs quite consistent with Dorothy’s argument.  Like her, Moyn—who clearly embraces as his own political stance a kind of mix of socialism and liberalism—argues that 1950s liberals utterly deserted precisely that kind of fluid mixture of principles that had some considerable resilience in the early 20^th century . . . and which he seeks to revive.  Liberalism Against Itself is an impressive work of analysis and polemic though Moyn’s limited examples of “liberal” thinkers deserting any socializing disposition strikes me as standing quite to the right edge of the liberal spectrum: viz., Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, for instance along with a few others such as Judith Shklar and Hannah Arendt who indeed had some rather conservative leanings but remain more open to alternative readings.  Surely, a more left-leaning disposition manifested itself through the 1950s and 1960s in journals such as Dissent, Partisan Review, and Commentary before Podhoretz’s sharp move right at the end of the 1960s.

Moreover, I’m surprised at the broad-brush approach of such accounts (Ciepley, Ross, Moyn) in the context of the dispositions current in the practice of American academic historical and social-scientific work, which have run leftish or leftward for some decades now, starting with a long post-New Left generation and having a successor generation in such figures today as Mathew Karp, Gabriel Winant, Elizabeth Hinton, and others.  Perhaps this left-leaning academic culture doesn’t quite count for intellectual clout in the mainstream—and will no doubt be under growing attack in the coming years.  But I do hope, along with Moyn, that some kind of regeneration of left-leaning political discourse might be possible—despite all.

But let’s think some more about Dorothy.  Clearly, her downcast remarks about liberalism in her time rested on her own (shall I say) left-liberal disposition.  I never got to know her as well as others on this panel did, or a number of you in attendance.  As I recall reading somewhere, she began as a young student active in the “Joe Must Go!” campaign against McCarthy in Minnesota.  And in the book of hers I know best, I thought it was clear she thought most highly of (though still sharply criticizing) those she called “late-Progressives” of the ‘teens and right after World War I.  In conversation after the 2020 election and in the wake of Biden’s most salient legislative wins, I asked—vis-à-vis her regrets over the absence of a more social-democratic liberalism—whether she perceived movement there in her direction.[2]  She said, again quietly and with I guess her typical reserve, “Well, we’ll see.” The outcomes right now suggest the potential reversal of whatever such hopes one might have held.  Of course, we have no choice but to persist.

Dorothy is gone; long live Dorothy Ross!