American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines / Edition 1

by Thomas Bender, Carl E. Schorske, Stephen R. Graubard

Overview

In the half century since World War II, American academic culture has changed profoundly. Until now, those changes have not been charted, nor have their implications for current discussions of the academy been appraised. In this book, however, eminent academic figures who have helped to produce many of the changes of the last fifty years explore how four disciplines in the social sciences and humanities—political science, economics, philosophy, and literary studies—have been transformed.


Edited by the distinguished historians Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, the book places academic developments in their intellectual and socio-political contexts. Scholarly innovators of different generations offer insiders' views of the course of change in their own fields, revealing the internal dynamics of disciplinary change. Historians examine the external context for these changes—including the Cold War, Vietnam, feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism. They also compare the very different paths the disciplines have followed within the academy and the consequent alterations in their relations to the larger public.


Initiated by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the study was first published in Daedalus in its 1997 winter issue. The contributors are M. H. Abrams, William Barber, Thomas Bender, Catherine Gallagher, Charles Lindblom, Robert Solow, David Kreps, Hilary Putnam, José David Saldívar, Alexander Nehamas, Rogers Smith, Carl Schorske, Ira Katznelson, and David Hollinger.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691058245
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	06/07/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	370
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Intellect and Public Life; New York Intellect; and Community and Social Change in America.
Carl E. Schorske is Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and German Social Democracy, 1905 -1917. Together, Bender and Schorske edited Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Stephen Graubard vii

Acknowledgments xi

INTRODUCTION Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske 3

PART I HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Thomas Bender Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945-1995 17

PART II TRAJECTORIES OF INTRA-DISCIPLINARY CHANGE: PARTICIPANT PERSPECTIVES

ECONOMICS

Robert M. Solow How Did Economics Get That Way and What Way Did It Get? 57

David M. Kreps Economics—The Current Position 77

William J. Barber Reconfigurations in American Academic Economics: A General Practitioner's Perspective 105

ENGLISH

M. H. Abrams The Transformation of English Studies, 1930-1995 123

Catherine Gallagher The History of Literary Criticism 151

Jose David Saldivar Tracking English and American Literary and Cultural Criticism 173

PHILOSOPHY

Hilary Putnam A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed From Within 193

Alexander Nehamas Trends in Recent American Philosophy 227

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Charles E. Lindblom Political Science in the 1940s and 1950s 243

Rogers M. Smith Still Blowing in the Wind: The American Quest for a Democratic, Scientific Political Science 271

PART III INTER-DISCIPLINARY COMPARISONS: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Carl E. Schorske The New Rigorism in the Human Sciences, 1940-1960 309

Ira Katznelson From the Street to the Lecture Hall: The 1960s 331

David A. Hollinger The Disciplines and the Identity Debates, 1970-1995 353