Intellectual Historians Confront the Present

The intellectual historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, has been a stellar interviewer of a broad range of intellectuals. He agreed to turn the tables with The Ideas Letter and make himself the interviewee. Our center of gravity is intellectual history, but we span far and wide and discuss the role (or absence thereof) of public intellectuals today and the role of ideas generally in public debate.  

This month-long epistolary exchange was lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Leonard Benardo: I thought I would begin by asking you why you think the field of Intellectual History has made such an unanticipated resurgence in recent years. At some point, only a decade or so ago, it was seemingly on the brink of turning moribund, and if you were interested in the area you would have been well advised to go to law school instead. Jobs were scarce. What happened? What were the triggers that reignited the field? How do you account for the turn in terms of structure, ideology, and otherwise? 

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: I do think intellectual history has been revitalized but primarily outside the confines of the academy. Of course, there are plenty of great intellectual historians currently writing, but the field has experienced the same fate as the general history profession in terms of the so-called academic jobs crisis that has significantly deepened since 2016. Even if one was to be admitted to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton to study intellectual history, it is probably unlikely that doing so would lead to a tenure-track job. I think there is a hesitancy for professors at even these places to take on students as they know there is a good chance it will not result in a tenure-track offer. Whenever one of my students at Wesleyan says they want to go to grad school to become a history professor, I feel an ethical obligation to explain to them the risk involved in that decision. In terms of your comment about law school, I encourage them to do a PhD/JD so that if a history job doesn’t materialize, they at least have the fallback option of a law career or even becoming a law professor. Of course, some students are privileged enough so as not to have to worry about the risk, which means that we might end up with a profession, in a generation, dominated by a particular class.  

The most recent breakthrough for hiring in intellectual history occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I’m just thinking about my respective field of modern European intellectual history, and it is amazing to see how many jobs Martin Jay and Dominick LaCapra’s students landed. There’s been nothing even close, in terms of hiring, since. Perhaps this is also due, in part, to the global turn in intellectual history, which is where cutting-edge research is primarily now taking place. Indeed, it might be professionally limiting for a younger person just to frame themselves as an intellectual historian of France or Germany instead of something like “Europe and the world.” This is interesting because the world in which we are living is becoming increasingly nationalistic, suggesting that perhaps the turn to the global in academia is widely out of touch with the turn to nationalism in contemporary politics. 

Academic job precarity explains, in part, why so many young intellectual historians are writing in places like Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin Magazine, N+1, The Drift, etc. I did my PhD at Columbia, for instance, with David Marcus (literary editor The Nation), Thomas Meaney (editor at Granta) and Tim Shenk (former editor of Dissent who, after several years, landed a job at George Washington). It is at the level of the essay and the book review that some of the best intellectual-history writing is taking place today. Indeed, it has now become acceptable for an intellectual historian to publish their first book with a trade press, which, in part, is due to the academic job crisis—if you can’t get a job, why not try for a big contract with a trade press?

I’m reminded that small magazines thrived in the U.S. in the period between the World Wars because young writers, often Jewish and limited by university quota systems, had little chance for an academic career. Not by coincidence, once this system was lifted after the war and academic hiring exploded, many of these little magazines went out of business. All of which is to say that, yes, intellectual history is thriving in a sense, but a lot of this is taking place outside of the academy, academic journals, and university presses. This is a tragic situation for the profession, but it also has allowed intellectual historians to use their skills to address the political crisis of our times, and for a general audience desperate for answers.  

LB: I suppose the exciting, tantalizing even, possibility is that despite the tragedy of the humanities in academia there is a potential rebirth of the public intellectual.  We remember a few decades ago Russell Jacoby and others bemoaning the paucity of citizen intellectuals who would have household resonance across social spheres. Can the academy’s implosion breathe new life into what we thought was dead and buried: the hallowed public intellectual? And as a corollary to that, might this become, as you imply, a new boon-time for small magazines? In other words, might the current contradictions produce unanticipated intellectual benefits? 

DJ: Historians are, no doubt, heavily involved with magazines, podcasts, Substacks and other forms of social media. I’m not quite sure, however, this entails a renewal of the public intellectual, because they are typically speaking to disconnected individuals sitting in front of their computers at home or taking the train to work. Of course, this isn’t to deny the intellectual benefits of these outlets, which keep their listeners very well informed.  

Ultimately, I tend to think of it as a good development, but in terms of my field of history, many professional historians express concern about the matter. There is anxiety in some corners of the profession regarding a turn to presentism in history. The fear here is that by trying to inform their audiences of how history can illuminate the present, the distant past—say, ancient and medieval history—will prove of less interest. This, in turn, is connected, whether fairly or not, to the history profession’s anxieties about decreasing student enrollments in these same distant eras of history.  

I believe such concerns have some level of legitimacy. I think of a historian like Timothy Snyder who, in an overtly political way, essentially uses Russian history as a Rosetta Stone for interpreting every major contemporary event—’lessons on tyranny’ quickly follow, which can be purchased at the local Starbucks.  

At the same time, I think a lot of the concerns over presentism are misguided, as the attempt to understand the present can offer a springboard for understanding the past and show obvious differences with the present in doing so. The Stanford scholar of French thought Dan Edelstein, for instance, has a very interesting forthcoming book that tries to show how the modern understanding of revolution has generally been viewed in a positive light, especially since the French Revolution. This differs from ancient/medieval interpretations of revolution, which typically were viewed with horror. In other words, any historical analogy involves substantive disanalogies, which mitigate against presentist concerns.  

There is one turn toward public intellectual life, which I think has a fundamental limitation. Many liberals and leftists have taken to social media, podcasts, newsletters, and essays to fully devote themselves to knowing their rightwing enemies. As someone who just edited a collection on the American fascism debate and teaches a class on the history of conservatism since 1945, I have learned much and appreciate these efforts—and particularly, Corey Robin’s 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind, which is probably most responsible for starting this trend.  

However, it now seems to me that left/liberal writers—of which I count myself—are at a general loss in articulating a robust political, intellectual, and economic alternative to Trumpism. My sense is that the other side, instead of just obsessing about the Left—which it of course does—has been much more constructive in articulating a rightwing vision of the US and the world. Liberal/Left intellectuals need to follow their lead instead of being totally consumed by the politics of fear, pinpointing when the clock broke and parsing the minutiae of every rightwing thought.  

I’ve mentioned this before to friends and was immediately asked what such a vision would involve and how I would contribute to it. Exit polls suggest that Harris lost because of inflation, immigration, and wars. These are three areas where the Left has rich resources for articulating a new political vision of the future. I myself am now, at the level of the essay, writing about non-violent/antiwar thought as a modern tradition in the history of political thought; one which is in desperate need of revival today.  

LB: Is there a way to address the anxieties over presentism that have been in full swing in the wake of George Floyd, but also, as you say, in the writing of scholar-pundits like Tim Snyder? You are of course right to point out that we live by analogy, and it would be ludicrous to deprive historians, or anyone else, from making a sound case for looking at history comparatively, both past and present (the name of a famous history journal, by the way!). But when it is used for a particular political project, does it cause concern for you? I think that has been the fear of those who are anxious about its practice. As you say, it might be a springboard for a richer discussion—a gateway, if you will, for those otherwise resistant to thinking historically to see parallels in human history.   

You play your hand, if you will, in your critique of the left’s intense focus with understanding the right, by noting its interest in “knowing their …enemies” and “pinpointing when the clock broke.” We know of whom you write! Have these podcasts and books not enriched an understanding for the left, furnished it with a deeper set of explanations of why politics and institutions have shifted as they have? Must it be a constraint on fashioning a new and different left/liberal project? Can’t both be achieved? 

DJ: Historians have played a leading public role in the so-called liberal resistance against MAGA. Indeed, the efforts of historians have been so great in this regard that they have been called “Resistance Historians”—I can’t think of another academic field that has been given a similar label. At no point in my lifetime can I recall historians playing such a significant public role. Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Kevin Kruse, Heather Cox Richardson—the list goes on—have become household names on MSNBC and other media outlets. As Trump is suspected of fascism or white supremacism, these historians have used their expertise to inform their audience what that is and how to resist it.  

Many professional historians have been critical of these efforts.  I will offer just two criticisms that have nothing to do with their work as historians, for which I have a high level of respect. First, Trump won in 2016, didn’t lose by much in 2020, and in 2024 established the biggest multiracial GOP coalition since Ulysses S. Grant. Clearly, the efforts of the Resistance Historians, the bulk of whom work in the Northeast at private universities, have not succeeded in resisting Trump. Most Americans do not care about their warnings of fascism, just like most Americans didn’t care about the warnings of the New Atheist who said after 9/11 that religion poisons everything. Of course, many liberal academics and the highly educated do, but they don’t speak to the increasing number of working-class Blacks and Latinos voters who are moving more in the direction of the Republican Party. In other words, the Resistance Historians have an audience problem. They are preaching to the choir.  

Second, they rarely have a positive message to articulate because they are fixated on reducing the current moment to Hitler’s rise in Germany, or the failures of Reconstruction. I do believe that historians can play a powerful role in the public sphere but right now they are just too depressing. The average person wants to get out of bed in the morning with some minimal motivation to go to work, to have a decent life. They appreciate a bit of inspiration and encouragement. Telling them apocalyptic stories about the end of democracy will leave them depressed and in bed. Even Trump is more positive, in this regard, than the Resistance Historians. Yes, I totally disagree with his message, but he has a fall-and-rise story about America that the Democrats sorely lack—and the Resistance Historians contribute to this lack by offering bleak history.  

What they should instead do is use their expertise to look at how peoples, citizens, nations, etc, in the past sought to articulate a progressive way forward given the transitional period in which they found themselves. We can let the world burn, or we can be like Cooper in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and find the wormhole to human progress. 

As mentioned, I am an advocate of using history to understand the present—I teach a class on it, have written about it, etc.—primarily because looking to the past is simply an unavoidable existential need that humans have when trying to make sense of their times. However, I have grown in my concerns about presentism, and especially because of the overly political way it has been used to resist Trump, which has led to some rather poor history, in my opinion. When making historical analogies it is essential that they be accompanied by disanalogies since no era is exactly the same. As Samuel Moyn puts it, “The past is not simply a mirror for our own self-regard.” Of course, the present is, in a sense, a product of the past. Holding these together in tension can do much to avoid crude forms of presentism.  

All of this, of course, relates to your last question regarding the recent proliferation of literature written by liberals and leftists devoted to unpacking the rightwing historical origins of our current moment. I can remember being in grad school around 2009 and a history professor lamenting the fact that historians have taken so little interest in the history of conservatism. In his thinking, liberals ignored, to their peril, conservative thought. I think that sentiment is why, since the election of Trump in 2016, there has been so much literature devoted to Trump’s origins: They failed to see him coming. Also, there was the 2008 financial crisis that gave way to a liberal/leftist avalanche of literature on neoliberalism and its history.  

I’m not saying this is a bad development, but it needs to be accompanied by even more of an effort to articulate a new progressive vision. It is my belief that the GOP remains the party of ideas, at least that’s the impression given by the literature examining those ideas. Meanwhile, every other year a piece appears in the New York Times saying that John Rawls’s highly academic Theory of Justice published in 1971, holds the keys for saving and revitalizing the Democratic Party.  

LB: I appreciate what you share here about the so-called Resistance Historians. I wonder, at least in the U.S. context, whether this hasn’t always been the case. Weren’t the “Resistance Historians” of the 1950s (Richard Hofstadter maybe, Louis Hartz perhaps) also preaching to the choir? Were they making any greater traction with the working classes? There were, however, radical historians who were writing accomplished history and were part of movement-building that wasn’t divorced from their scholarship (Herbert Gutman, EP Thompson, WEB Du Bois, and Philip Foner come to mind). Snyder is beloved in Ukraine and likely across classes, but outside that country who knows of him except over-educated elites? No different, I don’t think, from other periods. But today we have a new class of intellectuals fully outside the academy, some even eking out (or better) a living through Substack. In fact, the fiercest debates are often happening via electronic media and Substack postings that put to shame the loudest intellectual contestation on any campus. Podcasts are where most will turn to for a deeper understanding (or underscoring) of their positions. Getting back to our original question on intellectual history: Are intellectual historians accounting for this far more plural and ramified environment when interpreting how ideas travel and gain traction? Does the intellectual history subfield of conceptual history need freshening up? 

DJ: My sense regarding mid-20^thconsensus historians like Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, etc., is that they were writing in large measure to resist hysteria, not tocreate hysteria by talking up civil wars or Red Scare warnings of Fifth Columns in our midst.  They, no doubt, worried about conspiracy theories and rightwing populism, but they offered socio-economic historical explanations as well as rigorous intellectual explanations that in a sense demystified these phenomena—even as their interpretations represented the liberal political establishment.  

I think Resistance Historians almost succumb to offering their own conspiracy theories of these sorts of things today by tracing everything, for instance, to Moscow. Granted, who knows how well-known Snyder is, but millions of Democrats believed Russiagate would succeed in exposing and impeaching Trump, which it ultimately didn’t, and many still buy into that thesis, which has proven to be a distracting sideshow. And I am in complete agreement with what you say about Gutman, Thompson, Du Bois, and Philip Foner. Again, I am totally for doing the history of the present—I am offering a class right now with that very title at City College—but having a PhD in history doesn’t necessarily make one an expert on contemporary politics (just like knowing the history of dentistry doesn’t suffice for making one a dentist). There seems to be some slippage here, in which expert historical knowledge of the past gives a historian some kind of political-guru status. 

I agree with you that the intellectual energy today is to be found in podcasts, Substacks, etc. The history profession, in general, is wrestling with how to adjust to media such as these. There have been numerous discussions, for instance, about this in the American Historical Review. Regarding the field of intellectual history, of course, there are rich resources, especially in a journal like History and Theory, which has long focused on issues of temporality and spatiality as it relates to the writing of history. The field of Global Intellectual History has devoted significant attention to the transformation, circulation, and globalization of ideas. Indeed, intellectual history is one of the few fields of history where you can find serious discussions devoted to theorizing how the discipline can reconcile itself to some acceptance of presentism—here I have in mind the excellent piece by the Harvard historian David Armitage, “In Defense of Presentism.”  

There are also plenty of intellectual historians/historians of ideas involved with podcasts and Substacks. My sense is that intellectual historians can devote more attention to theorizing and discussing these matters, but that they are probably the most advanced at doing so compared to other subfields in the profession. It should be said that for the last decade there has been a revival of interest in conceptual history, and particularly the work of Reinhart Koselleck. There are also a number of works devoted to intellectual history and the subject of temporality that are influenced by Koselleck. Here, I’m thinking of the recent edited collection, Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History co-edited by Natasha Wheatley, Dan Edelstein, and Stefanos Geroulanos. 

LB: I am intrigued by your earlier jab at these Resistance Historians for proffering unrelentingly bleak history. Would you say something similar about the 1619 debate? Does history need stories that can ensure that, despite always-existing power differentials, there must be something we can historically point to that empowers, affirms, even deepens solidaristic bonds? Can you say a bit more about your counsel for Resistance Historians (and hopefully others) to “articulate a progressive way forward?” What does that exactly mean?   

DJ: Yes, 1619 offered bleak history insofar as it presumed that the original sin of slavery—unless somehow atoned for—rendered ineffective emancipatory political doctrines of equality, freedom, and the like. As Matt Karp argued in Harper’s, the project typically presumed what he called, “history as end,” which entailed a kind of genetic fallacy that reduced human destiny to its origins. One possible implication of such a view is that, even as the various contributors of the 1619 Project are presumably Democrats, the philosophy of history the project entails seems to be conservative as it’s not exactly clear how change in the present day, which is to say wide-ranging progressive change for Africans Americans, can truly happen given the original sin of slavery.  

There is a similar point of comparison here with Resistance Historians but only in a limited sense. Whereas 1619 defines the Black predicament, the post-Cold War period under Clinton or Obama defines the self-understanding of many Resistance Historians. Any kind of progressive doctrine that calls into question the liberal international order birthed out of the Cold War is viewed with all-out skepticism because history has shown, in their eyes, that of the 20th century’s myriad ideologies, only liberalism succeeded. Thus, many Resistance Historians, or just liberals in general, think the answer to Trump is not to articulate a new political vision, but rather to find the next Obama and return to the status quo of 2012. Like with the 1619 Project, this is a backward-looking view of how politics should function, and it implies an underlying philosophy of history.  

And so does my argument that Resistance Historians should spend more time devoted to articulating a progressive way forward. I would say—and I know this sounds overly academic—that a return to the philosophy of history is essential for those historians interested in getting out of the rut of either pessimistic accounts that lead to the present and future being trapped in the past or even moderate liberal thinking that reduces a progressive philosophy of history to being ideological and thus dangerous. I take it that most historians have relegated the philosophy of history to the dustbin of history—a vestige of the 19th century inseparable from Europe’s Age of High Imperialism, for giving birth to totalizing illiberal philosophies or positivist conceptions of history proven wrong by the horrors of the World Wars.  

But it would be impossible to think of how progress happened in the past, and in turn, how it can be reimagined today, without some philosophical account of positive historical change. Here resources can be found in such philosophical traditions as American pragmatism, neo-Hegelian and Marxist thought, and notions of the social imaginary. That so many liberals take for granted either a pessimistic or moderate understanding of change is a tacit belief that needs to be made more explicit and needs to be questioned since it is premised on philosophical assumptions that themselves can be questioned, especially given the crisis in which liberalism now finds itself. 

LB: I am particularly struck by your insistence on the need for reflecting on one’s philosophy of history as a way out of the current impasse. Questioning one’s first principles, normatively or intellectually, is not the general habit of most historians. So much stands in its way: publishing/perishing, advancing one’s career, mounds of teaching, and so on. Digging deep into one’s customary tropes and questioning foundational assumptions might be as attractive as a root canal. Yet, as you imply, not to do so, especially in this extraordinarily complicated and anything-goes historical moment, would be a dereliction of intellectual responsibility. Can a historian be self-reflexive about their intellectual priors and theoretical commitments and, at the same time, address thorny issues of academic history, and find avenues to bring those academic issues to a broader audience to address vexing intellectual questions of the day? Sounds like a tall order.  

DJ: Your question reminds me of the adage attributed to Keynes (rightly or wrongly): “When the facts change, I change my mind.” Tony Judt named a collection of essays with exactly that title, which in part, captured his turn from a biting critique of the French Left to a critic of the American empire. One thing that can allow for this is the willingness for historians to not remain content with simply historicizing the distant past but also historicizing themselves.  

As you mention, this is no easy task, as it might involve admitting that assumptions are wrong. I think the inability to practice self-historicization explains why many historians rely on so many stale historical analogies to explain the current state of democracy. Rather than interrogating, for instance, an assumption that liberal democracy necessarily entails the greater diversification of the Democratic Party over time, there’s a tendency instead to say that Latinos or Black men are low-information voters duped by the internet. I’m reminded of the long-held secular liberal assumption that expanding science, education, and modernization will necessarily lead to a decline of religious belief—a thesis that at best applies to parts of Europe and nearly nowhere else. This way of thinking is what Roberto Unger famously described as “false necessity.” False necessity happens on both the Left and the Right. Coming to terms with the contingency of the present allows for an openness to the contingency of the future, allowing for creative thought about the possibility for a better future—not a return to some imaginary golden age. 

I think there are a number of historians and theorists whose work proves valuable in this regard. There is the relatively new book by Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, which essentially is a book about what a political order constitutes, and what gives rise to their success and decline. A lot of scholars have taken interest in the idea of “worldmaking” and specifically Adom Getachew’s book, Worldmaking After Empire, which looks at how post colonial leaders imagined a new, more just, world order on account of decolonization. Samuel Moyn, in Liberalism Against Itself, attempts to return liberalism to its more romantic, creatively progressive 19th century roots. There is, of course, the classic book by Geoffrey Barraclough titled An Introduction to Contemporary History, which provides a rich account of how historians can try to grasp the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. 

Leonard Benardo is senior vice president for the Open Society Foundations.