Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. I'm Erica Monaghan, your host today for this... History X Silo Conversation on the New Books Network. History X Silo is a New Books Network podcast series supported by the scholarly journal Critica. explorations in Russian and Eurasian studies.
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If you are interested in the mission of History Exilo, or if you think you have an idea for a History Exilo conversation, please reach out to us. You can subscribe to the podcast series and find our contact information on the History Exilo. page on the NewBooks Network. Today, I am pleased to have two scholars who together will discuss major questions of the 19th century.
One of our scholars is rooted in American history and one in Eastern European history. One of the books we will talk about stays with a particular question, but of course, as every deep historical analysis reveals, There's never just one question. While the other book tries to make sense of why so many major questions arose simultaneously in the 19th century.
Both of our brilliant intellectual historians today have, in large part, a transatlantic view, which is part of the reason I'm so excited to hear this conversation. I will begin by naming their books, but I'll ask our authors to introduce the books quite briefly for us so that we as listeners can attach a voice to the book. Holly Case is a historian of modern Europe at Brown University. Her work focuses on the relationship between foreign policy, social policy, science, and literature.
in the European state system of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her first book was Between States, the Transylvanian Question and the European Idea During World War II. This book shows how the struggle for mastery among Europe's great powers was affected by the perspective of small states. Her next book and the book we'll be discussing today is called...
The Age of Questions, with a monster subtitle. The Age of Questions, or a first attempt at an aggregate history of the Eastern, social, woman, American, Jewish... Polish, bullion, tuberculosis, and many other questions over the 19th century and beyond. This was published in 2018 by Princeton University Press. And this book sets out to explain why people started thinking in terms of questions and how it altered their sense of political possibility.
So today we're putting the age of questions in conversation with a new book by Leslie Butler. Leslie Butler is a professor of history at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She is an American intellectual and cultural historian with an emphasis on the 19th century. Her first book was Critical Americans, Victorian Intellectuals, and Transatlantic Liberal Reform.
published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2007, where we already see that transatlantic scope. And her second book is Consistent Democracy. The Woman Question and Self-Government in 19th Century America, published by Oxford University Press in 2023. And so... With that, let me turn to Holly and I'll ask you to introduce your book and then Leslie to introduce hers to ours briefly. Thanks so much, Erica.
And thanks for inviting me. And I'm very glad to be having this conversation with Leslie, whose book is really outstanding. And I've enjoyed being given this chance to think about it more deeply. My own book, The Age of Questions, I'll skip the long subtitle, was derived from...
A couple of things. One is I wrote my first book on the Transylvanian question and the European idea. And in that book, I had a chapter that... dealt with the Transylvanian question and the Jewish question and the relationship between the two. And it was striking to me how these questions kind of like interfered with each other and they were so important for thinking about. the matters of the time and place, which was World War II in Transylvania, contested territory between Hungary and Romania.
And someone asked me a question at a conference. So you've got this Transylvanian question and this Jewish question, and you've shown the relation between the two, but there are lots of other questions, women, social. the Eastern, the Polish. Is there any relationship between those? And I just looked at the guy. It was Paul Hannebrink, who's a good friend of mine. And at that moment, he was not my friend. And I didn't have an answer. And this book is an attempt to find an answer.
and to try to think about whether there was something like an age of questions. And for a long time, I presumed that I might never find the answer to that. question, because it was very difficult to detect patterns. And the moment that I did, I felt like, well, what if I'm hallucinating because there was always a counterexample or something that complicated the case?
and i just kept reading and reading and reading and eventually um i either uh became convinced or, you know, went mad and such that I think Leslie and I both have references to wallpaper in our texts. If you look at the cover of my book, it is actually from wallpaper that I saw and that started to give me some sense, an imagistic sense of...
what was happening in the 19th century. And it shows a series of converging and diverging lines. And this is somehow how I saw the various perspectives on the 19th century converging and diverging around the matter of questions.
And one of the phenomena that I trace over the 19th century and into the 20th is a series of developments whereby the question is defined as a problem these problems are often bundled together in so far as they're shown to be related to one another the presumption becomes that they can't be solved at all unless
They're solved together. But if they're not solved together, there will be a universal war, some kind of horrible conflict. But the conflict itself could give the total... social and geopolitical reset required to do the massive restructuring that a lot of... Aquarists is what I call them, had come to expect and anticipate. And so there is some kind of momentum across the 19th century, even as there are kind of ebbs and flows and contradictory counter-currents.
if you will. And one of the phenomena that I also speak about is the emergence of the notion of the final solution. impact that notion had on the age of questions more broadly. So I think I'll leave it at that. And I'm looking forward to the discussion with Leslie. Thank you. And thank you, Holly and Leslie. Please tell us about Consistent Democracy.
Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much. And a huge thank you to Erica for having the idea and for organizing us and to Holly for agreeing. It's really, it's kind of exciting to be doing this. So my book is a... sort of a cultural intellectual history of one of Holly's 19th century questions, right? The woman question in the United States. And it traces the way debates about that specific question overlapped with and informed a broader public discussion or exploration of democracy.
what democracy meant, how it should be practiced, questions like what makes a good citizen, what prepares one for democratic citizenship, how far should democratic governance extend, all those sorts of questions. I saw these as kind of women questions as kind of containing and informing those other questions. I think just a word about how this...
book project Evolved might be helpful for this conversation. And it started as a fairly conventional intellectual history, kind of like my first book. You know, I was sort of tracing a group of what I'd call proto-feminist. intellectuals, activists, thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, mostly UK and the US and some France.
mostly what I'd call movement figures, right? Like what they were writing from within a sort of liberal feminist, proto-feminist tradition. But as I was doing that research... I became like super intrigued with all these weird published sources I'd never encountered before, never read about. I was particularly, I was writing an essay on the sort of American reception of John Stuart Mill's subjection of women. And I couldn't believe how much I was finding. I mean, I just, it was just, you know.
multiple book-length responses in addition to what you'd expect of all the newspapers and periodical responses. And, you know, sometimes this discussion, this commentary was produced by movement figures, but often it was not. And so, you know, these were conversations happening.
well outside the movement. And I just got the sense that the historiography was kind of too binary on this, that people were either in the feminist, proto-feminist camp, or they were anti-feminists. But as I was reading this material, I was thinking like... Maybe, you know, what if it wasn't that clear-cut at the time? What if most people were sort of neither overtly feminist nor overtly anti-feminist, but generally, you know, fell somewhere in between? And what if...
woman questions, plural, were sort of vital to how Americans thought through the meaning and practice of democracy in its first century formulation. So that was kind of, you know, I was having this sort of crisis about the project as it was originally constructed. And then I... As I was working on this mail paper, I started to think about, for another essay I had to write, about a shift from thinking of a movement to a problem. And so that was in 2013, I think, and an essay eventually...
that I eventually published from that paper was called something like The Woman Question in the Age of Democracy from Movement to Problem. And I was thinking about what does it mean? What does it mean to think of something as a problem that's emerging and to think about... sort of the parameters and structures of public discussion of when a question emerges, when a problem emerges. I wasn't thinking at all in these meta terms that
Holly was, except for thinking about problems. And in fact, someone at that conference also asked me, well, when does the idea of movement, a social movement, Is that a 20th century concept? And I was like, whoa, next project. So I have some thoughts on that, but that's a different thing. But anyway, I was trying to think of the woman question as a problem rather than as a sort of category.
for the movement. And then Holly's excellent modern intellectual history appeared on The Social Question. What was that, Holly? Like 2016 or something? 2015? Somewhere around then. So, you know, this was very, very, like...
productive for me to encounter this article. I got really excited by it, of thinking that you could sort of study something in this sort of structural way rather than just the ideas or the content of the ideas, but think about how they worked, what they meant. So I invited actually Holly to Dartmouth and she came. to our 19th century group. And I've just been hugely excited about the work. And when the book I finally did publish long after that, 10 years after that...
Um, when I first started, you know, rethinking the project, it was a good deal to her sort of meta-analysis of like X question formulations, which you can see in my introduction. you know, prologue in the notes and whatnot. So Holly's book has been really important to this. Just as Holly, I think, in your introduction, she kind of lays out like, you know, this is just an attempt and I hope other people go run with it. So this is like one little...
One little stroll. Anyway, so I'll leave mine there as well. And I think I'll start by asking a question, which I think is the biggest and meta-est question I could think of, which is basically how you ended up... writing this book. The Age of Questions, it's such an intriguing...
kind of unconventional book in lots of ways. And I just remember when it appeared and I, you know, eagerly acquired it and started reading it, having loved the MIH piece. You know, I was really excited for it. And I'm not sure what I expected. I'd never had like a clear sense.
in my head of what this book would be, but certainly I did not expect this book, right? I think I'd probably, well, I don't know, actually. I'd like to hear. So I guess my question is, how did you land on this structure of the book?
you know, not moving through question by question or not moving through time, but kind of coming at it with lens and lens and lens and kind of overlapping those lenses. So that's the big question. I have some follow-ups within that that I'm super curious about, but you'll probably hit them in your answer.
And also, like, just as you, you know, please tell me it was, like, kind of painful to get here and that you didn't just think of the structure from the dome. I need to know that, Holly. If it's any consolation, it was extremely painful. And I think it came out of because you saw probably in the acknowledgments how many times I presented on this work. And every time I would present on it.
I would get someone in the audience who would say, well, isn't this really just about X? Or isn't it really about emancipation? Or isn't it really about modernity? Or isn't it really about... you know, whatever. And everyone had like a word or a concept or something that does work for the 19th century. Or isn't this really about...
the rise of socialism or, you know, like there are all kinds of answers that, you know, like they weren't wrong. There was something to them, but they didn't capture everything that I saw going on. And so... I caught myself trying to have, you know, interactions with people who would say, isn't this just about X? And then I realized that I had had serial, you know, interactions around multiple concepts in terms that are very common in the historiography of the 19th century.
I feel like the historiography around the intellectual history of the 19th century was both important for thinking those questions, if you will, but also it was getting in the way of seeing something. thing, like that I couldn't really see. Because so much had been filtered through these conceptualizations. And it was a great, it wasn't a moment. It was many painful things where I started to see that.
The question formula, if you will, it behaves in some slant way with respect to pretty much all of the ideologies and concepts that we use. talk and think about the 19th and the 20th centuries. Like Kozelik doesn't see it as a concept, right? So it's not, you know, the question formula is not a concept. It doesn't... It's not an ideology. It's more elusive, but it's very particular. It has its boundaries. It has its forms. It has its...
the things that it can contain, but often in things that it generally doesn't. And so the attempt to describe all of that had to go through, I felt, things that people already knew.
But if you went too much through the things that people knew, you couldn't get them to see this other thing. And so I felt like only through... presenting a variety of perspectives that people already had, you know, and showing them in some kind of conflict with each other or the places where they overlap, the places where they diverge. Could you start to see how this form is working in the world? Could you start to look at something else and see it out of those interactions and convergences?
And so the format was a device that I used because one of the challenges of historiography when you're trying to describe something for which people have kind of ready terms, but their terms don't necessarily match what you're seeing in the sources, is how do you get them to see both what they know and something new you know like to connect it to something they know but that it's different and so
I thought and thought, how am I going to do this? And this is where the project, you know, like was almost broke down or where I almost broke down doing it is this challenge. And it took me a good long time to figure out how I wanted to do it. And I don't know if this works, but I became convinced that this was the only way that I could. to it and so the question of whether it serves the function for which it was intended
is another matter. But if I could ask you a question in return, because I really enjoyed the setup of your book and also... I like that you make a distinction, or I'm intrigued by this distinction between the activist and the queerist. And I feel like this is significant. This is a distinction that I do not make in my book. And I would love to ask you, you know, like, can you talk a bit more about this distinction and what it means to you to and how you arrived at the separation?
between the activist and the queerist. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I can't remember when it was conscious in my head, but it did, as I was playing around with the woman question... And really trying to track that term, right? When does it appear? When does it appear as not just, you know, like the very specific usage that I begin the book with, which is among abolitionist circles, and it's very procedural and narrow and kind of confined to this one set of debates. It tends to be...
a concept, a phrasing used not by movement figures. So, you know, John Stuart Mill doesn't call his book the woman question and attempt to solve it. It's subjection of women, right? It tended to be, I mean, it's not never used by movement figures, because it becomes so familiar that they have to kind of use it. But generally, anything that took that as a title of an article.
that offered itself as an entry on the woman question was writing from outside a movement. And that's actually, in some ways, to me, they were like classic queerists in some ways because they often weren't writing as anti-feminists either. necessarily. I mean, they may not have been on board everything, but even, you know, some of the people...
that either like in the very beginning of the book in the 30s and the 40s, when that discussion is kind of getting started, and then even in the 60s and 70s, when it's a little bit more polarized, you have people who are kind of like, yeah, you know, the legal code, the legal system, it doesn't work. We have these vestiges.
from an earlier era. But, you know, like political enfranchisement is too far. So, you know, you can't put them in this kind of feminist, anti-feminist camp because they are sort of... you know, they're a little bit like most people, kind of complicated on the issue. And so it seemed important to me to distinguish... To recognize, I guess, that it was a movie. And I think your larger point in your book about, you know, you say something like...
the age of questions was allergic to the status quo or allergic to the present. Like, the whole notion of questioning is a, there's a reformist impulse there, right, in raising things for questions. Like, this is something, a category we've taken for granted, now we're not. But when I really, really narrowed down into these 19th century debates from the 1830s to the 1880s and 90s, there was a kind of a more reformist version of those conversations that was not using that formulation.
They just, I don't know, there was something almost like, that's how I came up with the concept of published opinion too. It was sort of like, we're going to kind of give this reflective, we're going to be really impartial. All these poses that you talk about in your book, right? It's like...
We're kind of modeling how you have calm, reflective conversations. We're not flamethrowers here. We're not in the heat of battle. We're sort of like stepping back. And that pose itself, it seemed to me, was very different than, at least in the... American context, the people who were very involved in the women's movement, who didn't really have patience with calm reflection, who were kind of
more, you know, the Garrisonian, I mean, coming out of the Garrisonians, the anti-slavery, those are the most radical activists in, you know, in the U.S. by quite a bit. And so it did seem like a kind of an important distinction. I don't know, it probably doesn't hold for all the questioning questions, but it might on... the slavery question, I'd have to actually think through that, but it might be that people who invoke the slavery question are trying to kind of call a very
contentious public debate by both anti-slavery abolitionist activists on the one hand and pro-slavery ideologues on the other hand. And that kind of guys have like, let's just kind of reflect on this debate a little bit and think about who's right and who's wrong and how we can maybe modify, but now. blow it all up, that that pose itself was not an activist pose, was my sense. Again, it probably doesn't work for the Eastern question or the Jewish question, but it might. I don't know.
Can I speak on that? Because I think this is super interesting. Because I think you're right, or that there is something going on there. You know, when in the early formulations of the Jewish question, for example, or in general, the trajectory of the Jewish question is very interesting in this regard, because, you know. one of the presumptions as you get farther into the 19th century is that the Jewish question is an anti-Semitic question.
that basically it's when you turn Jews into an ontological problem, that's when you have the Jewish question and the Eastern question sometimes takes that character. And so there is something. to that. To question is to problematize, and to problematize is to interrogate the foundation of consideration of some matter. in general, which, you know, many of the most radical voices are unwilling to do because the most radical voices are like, this is self-evident or should be.
And I think this is an interesting and very important kind of general insight into... you know, like one of the constraints of the queristic formula. It's not that, you know, like... The most radical figures never used it. They sometimes did. And sometimes they would frame their interventions in these terms. But oftentimes, and I think the decision that you made to...
Talk about the woman question in many respects, but many of your actors are not using that formulation. And so what you're focusing on is not so much the formulation and the constraints that it... lays out, but on the series of issues and the ways in which something like a women's place in society affects the way people think. about democracy and the way they imagine it being practiced.
And that's a that's a broader, you know, like consideration for, you know, like and I knew that I was going to lose a lot by not taking those things on board. And so my main concern was. with dealing with, okay, what do people mean when they're using this formulation? But I like the distinction between activist and queerist.
And I think it's quite interesting. And it probably doesn't hold across all, but it might be a more general distinction that makes perfect sense. But I'm sorry I interrupted you. No, it may be that it doesn't work, especially when you think of...
question as problem. It may not work with a people right like making a people a problem whether that be jews or women or you know that that might be like the more in those cases that that might come under the most pressure of who's coming up with that category and who's comfortable using that using that formula
and who's not? I mean, the bullying question, the slavery question, the tuberculosis question, like, those might be less difficult to sort of say, like, you are a problem, right? W.E.B. Du Bois is famous. Like, what is it? How does it feel to be a problem? I mean, it's...
And it really depends because some people, you know, like... in the discussions around the Jewish question, for example, like in Hungary, when they started doing those edited volumes, there were some people who were Jewish who would straight up say, okay, here are the issues and here's... um what what needs to be done and other people who are like no this is this is your problem not you know this is you making stuff up and so i think this variety of perspectives uh that
comes to be manifest around these questions. And, you know, I think you also alluded to this point, and it's certainly, you know, like something in my book as well, where there is no fixed content to questions. And so A lot depends on what you consider even the content of a question to be. So even though they're discussed and you talk about the ubiquity of the women question, you have a lot of points where you're like, people are so sick of this.
You know, like they talk about it all the time. Everyone presumes that everyone has a position on it. It's been done to death. This happens with a lot of questions. You know, this general ennui after decades that sets in. among them. But you also point out that this doesn't mean that everybody means the same thing. And I think you refer to a lot of conceptual, I can't remember the phrase you use, but a lot of conceptual ambiguity or like...
that it gets a little bit weird when people start talking about it because it's not always clear that they're talking about the same thing. And yeah, this is certainly a phenomenon that I raise in the book when I talk about You know, like what people it comes to be in the late 19th century that what people want the solution to be defines what they.
how they define what the question is and so they start to front load you know the solution and back load the question whereas i think in the early 19th century it was a bit more open Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. And this is where I, you know, I just find it so, again, when I first read your NIH piece, I mean, the idea of thinking about what the structuring force is of using that formulation. You know, so even though you're right, I mean, they absolutely...
people say like, oh God, not again, the woman question, but they say it, they say it in 1840 and they say it in 1870 and they say, you know, they just, it's, it kind of comes with it, which is fascinating. But so it's like... use of that formulation gives it a structure that people at the time, I think, perceived to...
It has the weight of some big, serious conversation that's been ongoing, even though it is of recent. I mean, people debated women, people debated Jews, but the formulation, as you say, really starts in the 1920s and 30s. So I think there's something about how that structure lands.
itself to a notion of fatigue and also papers over all these differences. And that's true, as you say, of every question. I mean, the woman question, for sure, you'd be talking about a million different things, but certainly in the slavery question as well.
Yeah, I mean, another, like, thinking of it, this is kind of going back to the structural piece of your book, but I am really curious when you, you know, like a really conventional, but also probably kind of boring version of your book would have been a chapter question, right?
Like, now we're doing the jokes. And it wouldn't have, I think, given us this insight into not just... how structures work, how cultures have structures, but actually how, as you say, all these interpretive lenses are working. Was there a logic to how you organize those chapters? Like, so, I mean, I get how like the emancipationist chapter, I mean, I love how chapter three basically starts and says like, yeah, chapters one and two, they're kind of half right, but they're like also totally wrong.
You know, so it's a way that they contradicts each other. So there's, I can see a logic with the emancipation in this chapter being followed by like the dark side. Did you know you had to start with the nationalism chapter? Was there a logic in place for those chapters and how you presented them? Oh, I'm not switching my team to some fancy work platform that somehow knows exactly how we work. And its AI features are literally saving us hours every day. We're big fans. And just like that.
teams all around the world are falling for monday.com. With intuitive design, seamless AI capabilities, and custom workflows, it's the work platform your team will instantly click with. Head to monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. Yeah, no, that's a good question there. I think there was a logic. It would be difficult for me now to reconstruct all of its ins and outs. I think I introduced things in...
some kind of order. It was semi-chronological in the sense that the phenomena that occur or became sort of primary fixations start to, you know, like... emerge out of this structure a little. But I also think that the one on... farcical, you know, the questions, you have to be ready for that. And you almost have to feel the exhaustion yourself. And so that one had to be when.
the exhaustion had already set in among the you know with the reader um and so that was part of the logic there the matter of where to put the one on timing was tricky um because i think this one crosses periods. And so I just put it to the back when the reader would be more likely to be able to appreciate. And actually, you have a great... There's another interesting parallelism that we have, I think, beyond the wallpaper. One is you have this Osgood at the very beginning.
And you have Osgood writing one intervention and then a subsequent one. And you do such a wonderful job of showing how... Osgood's two interventions reveal a lot about what's changing over time. And, you know, like I have Czartoryski who writes two interventions that similarly like do this kind of... this work. And I really liked how you framed that. that Osgood at the beginning. I thought that was very apt. I would love to ask you a question, and this maybe doesn't speak too much.
to overall structure. But I became fascinated in reading your book about where democracy happens and the scale at which people think democracy, because it seems like... You know, there's marriage and, you know, like very domestic situations. But then there's the self-cultivation and the self-governance, which is individual.
on the one hand, but it's oftentimes connected. The whole consistent democracy thing is such a wonderful framing for the book because it speaks to how the individual is presumed to be connected. or, you know, like that some, you know, deep in the family buried thing is connected to the fate of democracy the world over. And I've been thinking about this for a variety of reasons, the scale at which democracy is thinkable and doable. And I was wondering if you could speak a bit.
And, you know, like for your own purposes about how you see scale operative in the kinds of thinking that go into. imagining democracy from the perspective of the woman question. Yeah, thanks for that. Actually, something I would like to, I don't want to forget, so I'm just going to say.
I say this in the book, so you've seen it, but there is no democracy question as such. I mean, you could say the social question, that's a piece of it, but it is kind of interesting because everybody's talking about democracy. Certainly after Alexis Tocqueville. I mean, I see that book is really important for, you know, kind of a mainstreaming of the term. It's not a partisan term because there is a Democratic Party and it's also not doesn't have any of the kind of.
18th century usages still. But anyway, that's kind of fascinating to me. But yeah, you know, I think, I don't know that this works, and I don't know that anyone else buys this but me, but for me...
It became really important thinking about self-government. And this was kind of late. This was like probably between draft two and three or one and two. I don't know. It was not in the original conception, but really subjecting self-government as a... as a term to a little more scrutiny and trying to think about when it does jump from this kind of moral
sense of just self-control and self-possession which mostly ministers are using you know it's a very kind of seems like a very religious and moral uh conception to you know more of the sense that we would use it today in terms of kind of being a loose synonym for popular government or for democracy. I mean, I think we're, you know, we're a little sloppy about how we maybe, you know, same with democracy and republic. I mean, there's a moment at which that just...
ceases to become a meaningful distinction for people in the 19th century, even though before it was, and I think today a lot of people really want to make, you know, we don't have a democracy, we have a republic. That's why we can do the things that we want to do. I mean, I think... There's a way that that distinction is sort of neither apparent nor real for the 19th century, I think, after a certain moment. But anyway, self-government, I thought thinking of that a little bit harder.
allowed me to kind of move out of what has been the most pervasive ideology for thinking about, I think, women and feminism, which is liberalism, right? Thinking of the liberal individual, and it's always individual, it's always the self, it's always a sort of individual emancipation. To think of self-governance is also about the cultivation of the self, but that self does...
happen, as you say, it happens in all kinds of institutions and contextual communal settings, starting with a family. And that that's not just a conservative contention. That's, I think, the thing that I really... wanted to emphasize, and certainly in the piece I wrote on Mill's subjection of women, I mean, the sort of shaping influence of the family.
is definitely what you see among conservatives, right? They talk about that all the time, the shaping influence of the family, but it's actually one of Mill's main arguments in subjection of women and for the people who are writing in his wake that... It's precisely because the family is so important that we can't have it be this school of...
you know, values and virtues that would be kind of inimical to a democratic society, right? It can't be this school of inequality and a school of domination on the one hand and subjection on the other. And it can't be a, you know, marriage can't be a... partnership of unequals because you know you learn you learn sort of practice in tyranny the the husband learns practice in tyranny and the and the woman practices subjection and then that's that's not a recipe for a healthy um
self-governing society, so that the self-government of the individual has this kind of important... role to play in how we think about the larger process of software. And that seemed like kind of important when I sort of finally figured that out. And it did seem a way to get out of the box that I think sometimes liberal feminism...
has constructed, which is a very narrow sort of box. And I thought it might help us to kind of restore more expansive 19th century understandings of selfhood that aren't.
strictly liberal that are more democratic, but it is, you know, it's tricky because democracy does get so hollowed out as a concept through the 20th century, right? I mean, it's... talk about ubiquity i mean it's ubiquitous and meaningless um you know today and which is why there is so much i think like kind of i mean most of my colleagues who work on democracy in any other moment are just are cynical about it and it it's it means
kind of nothing it's a cover for just a lot of really bad behavior and that's you know not how this sort of first generation i think really saw it and i kind of wanted to jump back a little bit and think about that. And there's some really good work by legal scholars, too, that are trying to rethink the 19th Amendment as not just about a procedural democracy, about suffrage, but actually rethinking the family.
in really important ways and and they get They make that argument not by reading the text of the 19th Amendment, the Women's Suffrage Amendment in 1920, but by reading these debates from the 1860s and 1870s, where the 19th Amendment is first conceptualized right after the 15th Amendment.
In people's heads, it's the 16th Amendment. And those debates had all this richness about family and equality and, you know, partnerships of equals and all that. And that kind of gets lost from our conversation in the 20th century. So I'm not sure that answers. what you were asking exactly, but it's like, how much does democracy intrude? How much should it intrude? How much is it? Is it an ethos or is it a procedure? All these sorts of questions. It seemed like...
It was a way to talk about the woman question and women without just being a book about suffrage, which I didn't want to write. And that's why the timeframes are not on the suffrage timeframes. I mean, the women's movement even is not a suffrage movement until after the Civil War. So all those discussions in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s.
And into the 60s, they're kind of prior to suffrage, but they are political. They're just not about enfranchisement. They are democratic. They are thinking through democracy, but they're not making it only about voting. which is what it kind of does become in a way. Yeah. And this is one thing that, you know, you get to the end of your book and, you know, women still don't have the right to vote.
Well, but I mean, it's a testament to how long these matters were discussed. And here, you know, like my question would be something about... Well, and I was thinking about the phrase you used, ubiquitous and meaningless, you know, that there is something about democracy required, you know, acquired a sort of every every state.
of the order before this one, insisted that it was a democracy. And the very terrain of what is democracy was the thing that was most hotly contested, arguably, during the Cold War. And, you know, that there were people's democracies. And so, I mean, I have... And at the same time, more recently, you see... you know, like a crisis of democracy, if you will, and an increasing open kind of transition, you know, where Trump talks about being king, you know.
and et cetera, or like eliminating term limits by Putin and Xi, and just kind of going back to some... Or, you know, forward, if you will, into some different kind of conception. let's say, non-democratic and increasingly openly non-democratic. And at the same time, you have a bunch of places where democratization is happening. the workplace and increasing, you know, also the home. But, you know, like various structures within society are...
have experienced their own waves of democratization. And one of the questions that I had is, you know, like this ubiquitous matter. Is there like, for some of the people that you're most interested in, do you have a sense as to whether... democracy is something that has to happen at all levels in order for it to happen at all.
whether they're, you know, like that its main function is to operate at this level, be it the state or the national or the municipal or. And so that once, you know, training, if you will, or self-cultivation is towards the end. of participating in this kind of democracy, or whether that shifts over the 19th century and into the 20th.
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, like, that's the very question I was, not to use question, that's the very issue I was kind of interested in is how, I think, you know, we sometimes, maybe we as people living in our own time. take for granted that we know what we mean when we say democracy I mean when I teach the students I'll think they know and then you start to break it down and you know we go but this is you know really thinking about this kind of first generation of people who are
trying to figure it out themselves. And there's been a really excellent scholarship on this. So, I mean, I'm just doing the little, the woman piece, but there's been some really great work that's kind of like...
theory and practice of people sort of being like, oh, here's a glitch in the system. We haven't really thought about minority rights or here's we haven't really thought about how public opinion works. And so, you know, you have all these kind of activists, theorists thinking through problems of democracy in the 80s. in the 1840s, in the 1850s. And, you know, kind of not wanting to predetermine what that is, but let the people at the time tell us their different visions of what that meant.
I think the most hopeful thing would be that maybe it's always capable of being reimagined and being something more. But I mean, I did see it as kind of... If I had to like draw an arc through the century, I see it as like this kind of this big set of questions with all these tensions and contradictions, obviously slavery being the largest one and one that foreign writers, you know, are observed. That was kind of one of the main...
One of the main tensions that foreign observers like to write about in all those books that come out, there's so many foreign commentaries that come out, you know, Tocqueville's the most famous, but in the 1820s through 50s, slavery is kind of the big issue. And then the...
non-citizenship of free Blacks, as Harry Martiner calls it. So that's the really big, but there's a lot of big questions, not just about who's in and who's out, but what does it mean? How should it be practiced? What's the scale of it? All of these questions. I do find this kind of shutting down.
By the late 19th century, I mean, you know, I think I ended probably fairly quickly. I tried to think about actually a little bit about the professionalization of political science and the way that those, you know, if we think of Tocqueville as being... eight species of political thinking, political theorizing in the 1830s.
that's not what it looks like in the 1890s, right? It's like, so there is a way that they're kind of, I see, and I don't want to put too much emphasis on this, but I do see that that becomes kind of the domain of political scientists or political theorists and they wall off a lot of questions or they're able to kind of
you know, frame things that like, well, we're not talking about the Philippines. We're not going to worry about self-government because that's extra to the conversation we're having, which is just about how do state legislatures work or how do constitutions work or, you know, very, very kind of procedural in a way.
So, I mean, I think that would be my, the trajectory I would sort of trace that I would see that if it's like opening, it's closing. I think that's probably pretty, that's probably not a very novel. interpretation. I think most people, most Americanists would agree with that. Even at the time when the term itself and the concepts itself is taking off all over. And of course, I mean, in a way, the more narrow you make it, the easier it is to then be it.
Right. I mean, if you, if you only mean this one little thing by it, like the ubiquity and the legitimacy, like it's, it's a form of legitimacy at a time. It becomes this, this mode of legitimating yourself as a state at a time when it means not very much, maybe, or not as much as.
we might we might want yeah and the creation of these kind of big umbrella you know and you know the the the upscaling to world upscaling to human you know like um is very interesting also early in the book you i think I don't know, I can't remember if it's your first, if it's Osgood or somebody else, but refers to the increasing privileges of women. And I was wondering, you know, like if what the relationship...
is, you know, that it's inevitable that women's privileges will be increased over time. And, you know, I don't know if this is a pattern, but obviously rights becomes the... speak later on. But I thought it was quite interesting, the formulation of privileges. And I was wondering if there was something about a sort of the way that the horizon of democracy was considered early in that period that's somewhat different from the later
rhetoric in terms of, you know, what is happening with something like emancipation, broadly speaking. But I also... You have wonderful images in your book. I was very envious. But I noticed that most of the images are depictions of grotesque, kind of, you know, like... here's why you should never let this happen. And I was wondering if you could comment a bit on why, you know, like, is this... a skew that is not necessarily in the published literature that, you know, like some other...
kinds of images were present, but these were particularly encapsulating positions? Or does this skew that visualization is oftentimes of the grotesque, like, you know, like, here's the... horrible world that we might inhabit if you let women's emancipation proceed apace. Like, what is it about visualization that would cause that to be... For that to be the preferred medium for that kind of argument, or for those kinds of arguments to be accompanied most regularly by illustration.
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it's sort of, you know, it's kind of like one of the things I try to track a little bit also is when the woman question when that receives when that's met with ridicule. or when it's met with gravity or seriousness or responsiveness, right? And so I think caricature and satire and those images are attempts to just...
completely delegitimize the conversation. Right. And so when you think about, if I was trying to think about what a more positive, I mean, I, you know, the other images I have are just of like. feminists are being, you know, John Stern Mill's picture images printed 12 times in like an eight-year period in periodicals. That tends to be what the sort of more positive looking things are that you don't have. I mean, I didn't find pictures of.
women doing political things in positive ways, but you have portraits. And Alison Lange has a lovely book on this called Picturing Political Power, and she sees women's self-portraits and feminist leaders' self-portraits and carte de visite and all that. That's, that would be the counter rather than like, you know, when you're, it's kind of in the category of, you know, like the lowest common denominator, I guess a little bit. I mean, John Stuart Mill is not going to put.
cartoons in his book, right? But if you want to mock his book, a cartoon is a really good way to do it. Right. And so I think that's why the images tend to be of more of the anti-democratic and anti-woman. and anti-Black woman category and anti-Black people category, right? Rather than... But there are other ones. I mean, there are... I teach a class on voting. That does a lot with visual culture. And especially after the 15th Amendment, you do see a lot of images that are...
really trying to, you know, bring a kind of dignity and gravity to images of Black voters, you know, Black voters going to the polls for the first time, that kind of thing. So those do exist in there. I probably focused more because it was making my argument, which is that... you know, the public culture, this sort of published opinion, this larger world was not so sure actually about women for sure, but also not so sure about democracy.
And you kind of saw that. I saw that coming out in the images. In fact, the cover image I use in the book was when I found that one, I was like, oh my God, this is my, this image is like making my argument that it's not really, it's about women, but it's actually about democracy more than it's about women. Right. It's a nightmare vision of what universal suffrage looks like from the perspective of...
I don't know, middle class white man. He was like, this is what it would look like. And it's, you've got an Irish woman, you know, you've got Irish woman, you've got a black woman, you've got a sort of middle class white woman, middle class or working class white women, all these people come into the polls and it's, you know, it's just this sort of nightmare. uh democratic vision so then this i mean we can talk about like i i i don't know i'm curious if when you started thinking about
This is related to the images because I thought a lot about how the images worked. I really wanted the visual to be a part of this because I actually think that is how... published opinion and public sphere was working i think we know when we think about a print and that's so important the you know as you say like the emergence and proliferation of i think you call it like
the genre of public pedagogy, right? I mean, this kind of this new way of informing people that's only made possible by increased literacy, increased... communications technology, all these sorts of things. It does bring out something new in the 19th century, I think.
Early modernists, Erica, you can jump in here. I mean, you know, I know my medieval and early modernist colleagues will always push back on things I think are distinctive about the 19th century. But I do think, I mean, I'm totally convinced, obviously, by... the X question formulation. And I do think the X question formulation is dependent on these developments about around communications technology, around literacy, around increased political.
representation, that kind of thing. And I think those are related to but distinct from another aspect that your book argues is distinctive in this period, which is the international. public sphere, as you call it. I think Jürgen Osterhammel calls it, I think, the transnational civil society. I think those are, you know, again, it's not that there wasn't international... opinion-making before but there's something distinctive about
how the form that these things take and the ability to spread through images, through pamphlets, through texts, and cheaply to a lot of people. A lot of people are involved in these conversations rather than just a set.
a handful of people. I mean, I see that even, even in like the so-called travel wars, you know, the difference between the 18 teens and twenties and the 18 thirties and forties, you know, suddenly you have bestsellers and people are buying it and writing back to Tocqueville or whatever. So there is something I know. your 19th century is much longer than mine. Yours goes all the way to the 1970s, I think. But, you know, there's a question for you. I mean, how...
I'm convinced that these are distinctive features of the 19th century. So both this kind of expansion of this really, really robust print sphere with all these... interesting innovations and that there's an internationalization of it how significant is that for political thought for social thought yeah um i think i think quite obviously and um one of the the things that i became kind of interested in and i didn't realize this until i had to revisit this book for this conversation is
how much something that emerged out or that I observed as a result of this book has stuck with me and informed my thinking. Subsequently, I sort of forgot where it came from. But there are a couple of phenomena in here that, and these are, you know, one of them at least is in your book as well. It's this matter of consciousness where, you know, the notion that democracy requires a particular kind.
of knowledge and that this knowledge can be endowed through some form of education or that self-education and that you either You either acquire it by experience of democracy, and I love the section on Americans knowing that they're being watched, but also thinking about how their reactions to being watched are also being watched. And sort of this, they get a meta sense of themselves starting in already in the first half of the 19th century. And this.
the extent to which this metasense, this sense of how others are seeing you see yourself, produces some interesting effects on consciousness. Because it's not just that you have to be conscious of experience, but you also increasingly are conscious of how your behavior works. looks to someone outside and how it's being read.
on the outside and so you're both you know like trying to train for your democracy however that happens but you're also conscious of being in some kind of experiment box and so you have to contemplate okay am I performing it properly? Or what are they seeing when I'm doing this? And that metaconsciousness that I see emerging out of a lot of your...
figures, I think, is what I see coming out of the 19th century most powerfully. And, you know, people have talked about how Marx, you know, when he's talking about the Jewish question or, you know. in various of his essays that he gets this kind of, you know, like metaconsciousness. But I actually think you show quite... interestingly how you know metaconsciousness was happening to a lot of people at around that time anyway like um and i it caused me to think of the way that
Polish activists were going around to the various courts and were trying to make themselves visible. But, you know, the difference in a lot of these cases is that they feel like they're the ones who want to be seen but they can't get the attention you know over
Whereas in the United States or in the Ottoman Empire, everybody's watching. You know, you get this sense like everybody's paying very close attention. So the Eastern question and the American question, some version of them are very prominent in the 19th century. of them are metaconsciousness, you know, kind of razors, if you will. And I see this as a... an interesting phenomenon that emerges, not just among theorists and thinkers, but among a lot of...
everyday people as a result of this published opinion phenomenon to which you refer or the international public sphere. And I think it's something that... has an interesting trajectory into the 21st century in my view, but that's maybe neither here nor there. The question is... You're totally speaking my language. I mean, this is kind of how I... The more I think about it, it informs so much of what...
how I do think about this period. I mean, something, a couple of projects I'm working on now, one is back to that movement question, and another one is on travel writing as social science. And the point is not the substance of the travel writing, but of what does it mean for everyday people? people to be reading all these works that are thinking social scientifically like in the 1830s and 40s like what does it mean to encounter
structures of society and functions. And I don't know. I don't know what to do with it, but it's a consciousness question. And I mean, they've only, you know, I have one paper that I gave on this that. I was trying to make the case that there's something new in the world, consciousness-wise, but it's a slippery little thing to pin down. But I do think there's something there, and I think actually the international matters to this as well.
exactly the way you're saying. I think, I remember when I read in Jürgen Osterhamel's book, which I love that book, Transformation of the World, but I think I remember reading, there's a chapter on newspapers, and it's not until... I think it might be the 1870s or something that most people in the world... read daily newspapers. I just think there's something to consciousness about that too, on how news travels and how you experience in the world when it's that.
I mean, we live in an age now where it's simultaneous and we're refreshing all the time, but just a daily newspaper where you can get news from around the world. That's what it is. News from around the world because of telegraph lines, right? So news from around the world on a daily basis. That seems... Of course that has to have an impact on everything, it seems like. I don't know.
Anyway, that does make me think of it, because I think in some ways, like living through the internet era, you know, I think that's why there's so much great work out of print now is because people are probably a little bit more sensitive to... to what what what is distinctive what's different now and i i wonder like when you were working on it and thinking about on the project was there any kind of back and forth about um like we don't have x question formulations but do we have other
structuring devices that help you think about how culture works or how... Political thought gets kind of hampered or social thought gets hampered by a thing. I mean, like, for example, trolls, I thought a lot about trolling trolls. That's, you know, I think there are a lot of 19th century versions of that. And I probably didn't think of them quite that way. They were just like outrageous.
figures until I had the... I mean, I think of Carlisle as a troll. I think he just wants to get in and stir the pot and say the outrageous thing to make it sayable. Right. And if you make it say it all, then, you know, this is a whole Overton window will start shifting. But I think I think there's something to that. But did you have did you have moments like that where you thought, ah, we don't have X formulations, but we have this or because we have this, I can see that.
If I could even jump in here and when you're answering this, Holly, could you also maybe incorporate into your remarks this? There's two really different trajectories. coming out of this age of questions, right? And you talk about the emancipatory one, and then you talk about a much, much more horrific one of the final solution a bit. I don't mean to hijack the question, Leslie, but it seemed to me in this this matter of trolls and maybe. OK, maybe I'm.
The thing that's in the back of my mind is I want to ask about good faith. You know, we've had we've heard people say, you know, the American system is not designed to like it relies upon people acting in good faith in order to function. And and that may be illusory in this moment. So sorry. So back to Leslie's question of. No, I think that's great. And I like it with the directory because you can also think about.
an informed electorate, you know, it's a big 19th century term, what do we do with misinformed? I mean, misinformation is not really, it's not that it doesn't exist, but it's not as much, it's not really a category of analysis, I don't think, in the 19th century. People are not educated or not informed, but misinformed is like a whole new thing, it seems like. Yeah, this matter of good faith is quite interesting, and it goes to another phenomena that emerged.
out of the age of questions that has sort of stayed with me. And that is towards the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, you get people talking about automatism. Like that they feel like they don't have control and that actually nobody has control. That there is some, you know, increasing numbers of people start to talk about how.
You know, like these matters are sorting themselves out on their own terms, you know, like that there's, you know, no one is exercising intervention on them. And I'm. might have like a specific passage on this, which I find, or I think I removed the mark, but there was a quote from one of the figures in the book who's saying, you know, like, how does it happen? Just nobody's doing it. And I think one thing that we're seeing now is this.
Also, something somewhat similar with people reacting to technocracy and to the notion that stuff happens, but... Nobody in particular did it. And technocracy and some versions of technocracy were was a response to charismatic governance, you know, a way to say, OK, let's have rule by law. That's one version of it. Of course, they're also. So much more sinister versions of technocracy, as we've seen.
of the Elon Musk 1.0 version. But one of the dreams of technocracy is to sap the power of ideology and hyper charismatic governance that was the highlight of the 1930s, for example. And to say, okay, now we're going to sort of govern. you know, but with bureaucracies and behind, you know, like without sort of charismatic figures. And I think one thing that this produced is a sense that...
You don't know how things are happening exactly. And also an increasing sense that you don't have control over how they happen. And then a question of whether anyone has control over how they happen. And this produces, I think, something like a sense that whatever is happening is going to happen regardless of what we do. So, you know, like cynicism has no bottom.
Like, you can be as cynical as you like. Whatever structures are in place are going to, you know, continue doing what they're doing, regardless of what you do in this world. So Slavoj Žižek has... this thing that democracy is like, you know, pressing the closed door button in an elevator. You can press it as much as you want, but the door is going to close in its own time.
And so I think the attitude towards democracy in its technocratic form, and some would say also in its neoliberal form, is that there's nothing you can do to rattle it. Any form of, you know, like cynicism vis-a-vis, you know, a system such as this can't alter it. And so the tendency then is to see what we're seeing.
now as just a continuation of the same thing, of a different person or a different set of people on the one hand, but also then... you know, some kind of revival of the notion of charismatic leadership as a counter to this sense of automatism, you know, that an excitement about, oh. You know, like, say what you like. At least I know who's doing what's happening right now. Because, you know, like, as Erica was saying before, Trump verb, Trump verb, you know, like.
There is someone who is doing those things, and you have a clear sense of how things are happening as a result. And this... taps into a desire to be consciously aware of what's happening and why things are happening. And it taps into something, a period that we're coming out of where people... I think increasingly felt like they didn't know how things were happening or why things were happening or how they could affect them personally or what affected them.
And so maybe my question would be like, is there still some transformative potential to consciousness? Like, what would we have to become conscious of? in order to transform the situation as exists now. And what would that take? Or, you know, like, has consciousness run a particular course out of the 19th century? And now consciousness is not so much the way things happen. So, for example... you know, like in public health or in other areas, oftentimes...
The conception is if you wait for someone to become conscious of the reasons why they should do X or Y, it's too late. In marketing, also, the digital nudge, you know, the sense that it's exactly the consciousness that you have to get around. And you have to hack to get under to the, you know, the behaviorist version of the self. And that's the area in which you can have the most impact, both with political messaging, with marketing.
with public health, you know, like all kinds of spheres where consciousness is kind of the problem, not the solution. And would this be a good time to reintroduce consciousness? and its transformative potential. And, you know, that might be something where the matter of good faith could enter in because good faith requires consciousness. It requires a sense of what you're doing and why you're doing it. But I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.
Yeah, well, we've now moved from 19th century history to some sort of metaphilosophical universe in which I do not feel equipped. Because I feel like bad faith actually has a consciousness, too. No? So, I mean, consciousness maybe is not the solution only. I don't know. And I'm struck by, you know.
how different this digital era is when you bring up marketing and nudges and the attention economy, all these sorts of things that the 19th century didn't have to think about. And so the constraints on... on thought consciousness and action are so they're at such a different level i think than what even though it felt quite innovative and new and the daily newspaper and news from everywhere it felt like a really big innovation maybe in the 19th century
This is so many sort of levels beyond that. Yeah, I don't really, I mean, I don't know what it would take. I do feel like I'm alarmed at the, you know. sort of the democracy index where you have people who Not only do we disagree about what it means, but we don't really even care if it comes or goes. I mean, you sometimes see those polls that, I forget there's a group in the UK that does this, and then there's the Bright Line Watch, which is more about erosion and creeping autocracy.
But when you sometimes see those opinion polls about people thinking like, what does democracy do for me anyway? This might be a version, Holly, of what you're saying of who's doing what to whom kind of and having the charisma. Knowing it's like this one man has single-handedly removed $60 million from this university. He himself is doing this. He himself is eliminating it.
Yeah, like what we have now is kind of a combination of the worst features of a dark technocracy and a dark charismatic politics, maybe. That's very interesting because it is, you know, like one thing that sets the United States version arguably off against others now is this combination with big tech. And that's, you know, like, that's a particularly strange bedfellows on some level.
But I think you're right to point to the contrast and absolutely right to talk about how bad faith in particular is, you know, and I think cynicism speaks to this because the cynicism is the presumption. of always bad faith cynicism sees nothing but bad faith you know like all the way down And so, you know, like, I think this might be one of the endpoints of the desire for consciousness is the notion that like, what does it mean to be super conscious? It means to be super cynical. Yeah, I know.
So much that I can see the ruse behind it and I'm not buying it. Yeah. Yeah. And this is also the 19th century does something to get us here. in many respects, insofar as, you know, like a lot of the ideas that come out of the 19th century, like what one becomes aware of is a negative condition. And then, you know, like the negative condition one...
construed as contained and solvable is all of a sudden, you know, just one part of, you know, like another and yet another and yet another. And so... pretty soon you're not just cynical, you know, you're not just thinking there was bad faith on one part, but the bad faith kind of saturates the whole realm. And, you know, like maybe then the question...
is, you know, like, how would one make the difference or see a difference? And I think historiography plays a role in this because I think historiography has started... You know, like to see bad faith, especially in the reformers that you talk about. for example, like not not even in the conservatives, but like especially in the reformers. And yeah, going back to sort of the Enlightenment project. Right. I mean, that's probably right. That is the it's the progressive.
we need to worry about more than the reactionaries. Yeah, and I would be, you know, like, does that, you know, how do you see something like that historiographical tendency affecting... you know, like democratic potential, if at all. That's a good question. I mean, I do, because I find that that becomes a pretty...
appealing pose for young people, I think. You know, so like you see it among students probably, I'm sure you do too, that pose of, oh, you're saying this, but I see behind it and it's really no different than this. And I think that... I mean, I'm torn because I think it often like that sort of substantively and intellectually that gesture, not the gesture, the substance of it is often making a very good point about they're saying this.
But they actually mean this. That is a helpful gesture. We do need to have that kind of skepticism and scrutiny. And yet the gesture itself, so not the substance of it, but the gesture of everything means nothing. you know, progress is actually reaction. And, you know, what is probably, I mean, I think that that can become nihilistic, actually. And so I worry about that. as a gesture rather than like the content, if that makes sense. And I'm wondering.
Totally. And I'm wondering what that means historiographically or what we can do historiographically to think that a bit differently without rejecting some of the insights that come out of this. But you use the phrase... And I found myself thinking often, you know, because part of what I was doing in this. book is showing some of the similarities of structure across radically different political
positions. And so when you see, you know, something like the emancipationist and the genocidal have some structural similarities, you're looking at samenesses. You're looking at, you know, like you're... You're seeing something that has, you know, a structural similarity, but content differences. And I was thinking, this is a... Not a book that I would want to write now, because I feel like...
We are too good at seeing similarities across contexts and too good at the, you know, like we've gotten too good. And maybe part of this tendency to. upscale or you know like transnationalize or whatever our thinking It mimics some of the way that the contemporary world works, but it doesn't necessarily give us the capacity to make informed.
you know, interventions in the realm of difference. And I think it's, you know, now the challenge might be to recognize when, you know, differences and maybe we could start with things like. generalizations like i heard someone say recently yeah we're all robots anyway so nothing you know like why not ai you know um and so this
We are all robots phrase. I felt like, you know, there is something to that. You know, like we are we are manipulable. We are manipulated. We do things that are counter to our conscious will. in predictable ways. But we are not always that, and we are not only that. And this, you know, kind of not always and not only feel like... you know, some wedge that we could take into, you know, the generalizations that say this is all the same. So like in talking about how...
Let's say the Habsburg Empire is the same as the Russian Empire. Not always, not only. Or to say it's important to make...
differences, you know, like, and it's not that one is categorically good or categorically bad, but not everything is the same. And there can be structural similarities that are different from contents. I also find like... I mean, this is sort of maybe kind of weak or overly earnest, but I find like my pose with that, my response to students who have that, you know, everything is...
like sort of like corrosive lens that everything is is bad and whatever is um is to have a little like epistemic humility i mean it's kind of you know I feel like they go halfway to this in that they want to be very judgy of the past, even things that are posing as progressive in the past. And I really don't like when you say that. I'm like, well, they're progressive in their own era. But then they don't actually... They don't actually bring that gaze back on themselves.
And I think that's kind of the logical extension of if we're going to judge people for being products of their time, we have to accept that we are as well. And we don't often like that gesture, right? I mean, sometimes we have a kind of... you know, there's a Talos that we are the Talos and people are not like us because they get things wrong that we have figured out and gotten right. And maybe that the getting that right is your whatever your pet.
issue is, but maybe that getting it right is that I know better than everyone and I can see the fakeness of everything, the falseness, the falsity and everything. But I think sometimes that gesture about our own moment.
as being a moment in history that we can't really step outside of, but that we know what we hope. I mean, actually, we don't know this anymore. It's not the end. I mean, I hope there's a future that goes on and on. That's... increasingly i guess uh more in doubt than it has been um but you know do you know what i mean i mean i think that that helps a little bit with with the kind of i don't know some of that of that that take on the past that i find a little bit
a little bit glim, I guess. Yeah, well, or I would also, you know, it's hard to imagine, you know, like, if, you know, there could be some... reckoning with the failings of past attempts, but on what basis does one make the next attempt? And on what basis does one think that the next attempt will matter?
Yeah, it could be different in meaningful ways. Yes. And so what I'm more concerned with is the, you know, the cynicism about the past eating up the future, because it makes it very difficult to imagine a future that is any different. from the past. And so it's the bite that that cynicism takes. out of the future by anticipating that any attempt to undertake transformative change will end in failure and worse.
Yeah, I think it's really, there's something about our historical consciousness that matters for the purpose of thinking a future. No, I think that that's actually really a profound point because it's also, if even the people who we were led to believe were the progressive or good people also got it wrong, then not just maybe...
You can't do anything, but maybe the things that you do are also history-bound in ways that you will be judged. So maybe the epistemic humility about ourselves is the wrong gesture. It's hard to know what the right gesture is. I was thinking about Hannah Arendt, and she has this... notion in one of her texts about, you know, that in Marxism, you know, when you're building something, you use nails to build the table that is socialism, right? But if the table is never built,
And let's face it, nothing is ever finished in this world. You know, you never sit back and say, well, that we've got our table now, except Stalin did this with the woman question. And, you know, like. So you never have the finished table. precisely because times change the goals and etc. But then what happens to the nails that went into building some part of this table that will never be finished?
And so it's the thinking of, you know, like, what are these nails to us now? Is any nail that went into building an unfinished or imperfect project a throwaway item? You know, or how do we make sense of them? And I don't think we necessarily have to, you know, lionize them or talk about them in a heroic vein. But that doesn't... You know, like I think when I think of how to do this, I think we have to come up with some kind of attitude towards these nails.
But, you know, it may be purposed as useful tools in the future. Yeah. Or something, you know, like, I don't know if the metaphor is apt, but, you know, like, given that a project that you undertake can never truly be finished. You know, like what is the thing that, like the reason why you would start a project in the first place and out of what material and with what tools?
does one make the project of the future and knowing full well that it too will not come to its full fruition and it too will have its ironic failures and it too will not turn out the way you intended. And I think this matter is something that we can be conscious of, but not necessarily be debilitated by. Thank you so much.
I feel like I should intervene here for our dear audience. I promised our scholars that I wouldn't keep them more than an hour. And we've gone over that because in good faith, I've been so fascinated by... by what you have to say. And I do think these latter points are so useful just in terms of the...
the ongoingness of civilization if we play our cards right. If we get to the end, something has gone very, very wrong. And if we apply that to how we think about these... you know, questions that need a solution and to find, you know, if we get to the end point, something has gone wrong and it is deeply undramatic and un...
romantic and maybe not attention-grabbing to acknowledge that, oh gosh, now I'm sounding like a very conservative in the 18th century sense of plea for incrementalism, but oh, maybe that isn't... the best point to leave it on. I do want to share just one moment, if I could, about this. What do we do with the bits of the past or bits of attempts to build something good that didn't?
succeed i know for me in recent years um or what i'll try and if i could make just two short points as we wrap up if you don't mind um in 2000 After 2016 and the presidential election, I started assigning this small essay called On the Falsehood of Democracy, which was written in the 1880s. by an advisor to Tsar Alexander III. He was the son of a Tsar who had been assassinated, very reactionary. And it is on the falsehoods of democracy. It's a system that...
will never work. You have people, their time horizons are too short. They're self-interested. To appeal to the masses, one resorts to sound bites that are stupid and don't capture the complexity of issues. you etc etc etc democracy is not a good way to run things and i assigned this to students and i had a student raise his hand and say Yeah, it's absolutely right. It's a good idea in theory, but it just can't work in practice. And I looked at that student and I said, how dare you?
I am a child of the Cold War, and I was raised to say that exact thing about socialism. And, you know, will I have any robust defenders of democratic practice in my American life? classroom. And I've been thinking about that ever since. And one thing going back to recognizing that I am a child of the Cold War, raised in this binary of capitalism versus socialism.
Of late, I've been going back farther and farther into texts where, you know, Aristotle in politics is talking about how you can't have a good society if you have a gutted out middle class, you know, and he's not even. such a huge he sees some real undersides of democracy too but you need a middle class and so long before the socialists of the 19th century people are talking about socioeconomic
issues in how to order politics. And, you know, we all know this, but it seems like it's a truism that maybe has been lost in American discourse. I'll just leave it at that. And let me just thank you so much. Maybe I'll, would anyone like a final word? Because you certainly have so much more to say about these. From questions to problems to issues to crises from the 19th century to the 21st century, I am so grateful for...
The amazing books you've written and the work you've done, I encourage everyone to go and pick up Leslie Butler's Consistent Democracy and Holly Case's The Age of Questions. And I thank you for your time. Thank you, Erika. That was a lot of fun. Good to talk to you. Thanks so much. Great to talk to you, Leslie. Thanks, Erika. Thank you so much. Okay. And thanks to our NewBooks Network audience and HistoryXSilo. Bye-bye.