On Liberty
Robert Boyers, professor of English at Skidmore College and author of The Dictator’s Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists (Columbia University Press, 2005):
There are as many plausible answers to this month’s question as there are academics to offer a response. But many of us don’t really know what has had a profound and long-term influence on our thinking. We suppose that the legitimate contenders are works by Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, Harold — or Allan! — Bloom, and others like them whose theories are routinely invoked in a very wide range of books and essays. But what is very much à la mode at one moment will soon seem to most of us merely provocative or predictable as newly scandalous or ostensibly pathbreaking works emerge.
And that is why I believe the most influential book in my discipline is still, or ought still to be, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859). Of course it is taught in a great many courses, as in my own senior-level course in Victorian literature, though also and perhaps more often in political theory, philosophy, and liberal studies. But more important by far is the fact that scholars and thinkers continue to be moved by the book, to write and argue about it, to claim it as support for their own views on a great many matters. Liberal intellectuals, like occasional smart conservatives, contend that Mill understood modernity better than any of his contemporaries and provided a foundation for contemporary efforts to think freshly about issues that matter, from the rights of women to the stultifying effects of Christian dogma on the life of the mind.
The respect for diversity, complication, and contradiction we do our best to teach to students finds its classic expression in Mill’s book, and Mill’s insistence that we try at least to throw ourselves “into the mental position of those who think differently” from us is at the root of our efforts to sustain — against very heavy odds — what we like to call “liberal education.”
The Sacred Canopy
William E. Deal, associate professor of the history of religion at Case Western Reserve University and author, with Timothy K. Beal, of Theory for Religious Studies (Routledge, 2004):
I hesitate to claim to know the most influential book in the academic study of religion, but I can proclaim the importance of a book that I find compelling enough to return to time and again, and one that I always have my students read in courses dealing with methods and theories in religious studies: Peter L. Berger’s The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967). Berger was one of the first religion scholars to consider how reality is shaped through social construction and how religion affects the formation of worldviews. While many subsequent studies challenge Berger’s claims or expand on the implications of social construction for the study of religion, The Sacred Canopy remains a succinct and accessible introduction to such issues.
Berger’s approach is important because it has helped redirect earlier methods in religious studies that focused on texts and institutions alone. Instead, Berger casts such prior methods for the study of religion as isolated from social context, and he demands that we address the implications of religious language and practice within culture and society.
Because of Berger’s influence, questions about the hierarchies inherent in religious discourse and the relationship between sociopolitical agendas and religious language have become standard scholarly concerns. While The Sacred Canopy was first published nearly 40 years ago, its methods and inquiries have become familiar to many religion students and scholars.
In the end, there can be no “most influential book” as texts frame questions differently, and academic inquiry shifts with each generation. Still, The Sacred Canopy raises fundamental issues in the academic study of religion, and no serious student can afford to ignore Berger’s cogent study.
The Destruction of the European Jews
Deborah E. Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies and director of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, and author of History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving (Ecco, 2005):
While there have been a myriad of books on the history of the Holocaust, one book has shaped the field: Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). The book, Hilberg’s prize-winning Columbia Ph.D. thesis, did not find an easy path into print. Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, and even Yad Vashem declined to publish it. According to Hilberg, Hannah Arendt, whose banality of evil theory had been criticized by Hilberg, urged Princeton to reject the book because it was not an important enough contribution to the field.
The book, an overarching and in-depth systematic study of the destruction process, did not meet with a universally sympathetic reaction despite its fastidious and heavily documented analysis. Hilberg relied almost completely on German documents and not only ignored the victims’ perspectives but was quite critical of Jewish behavior. Hilberg argued that the Jewish response to the Holocaust was marked by a passivity characteristic of how Jews have reacted to persecution for centuries.
The critics have mellowed, and generations of historians recognize that the book remains a masterpiece and has been the primary influence in our understanding of the relationship between Nazi ideology and the bureaucracy of the destruction process. It may have its shortcomings, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that it has shaped the field. Every historian who writes in a methodical, unsentimental fashion about this massive event and who takes us further in understanding the different aspects of the destruction process is, whether they acknowledge it or not, following Hilberg’s lead.
Wealth of Nations
Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and author of Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of Mexican Amate Painters (University of Michigan Press, 2005):
Economists don’t read many books these days, at least not for their research. But my discipline still has a most influential book, and that is Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith’s book signaled the end of mercantilism and charted the course of classical liberalism through 1914. It continues to exercise influence on the economics profession, not to mention sociology and political science. Many of the major trends of the last 30 years can be found in Adam Smith:
- Modern macroeconomics now emphasizes economic growth instead of business cycles. The idea of increasing returns is back in vogue.
- “Behavioral” economics is the rage in microeconomics. We now treat human beings as error-prone and emotion-ridden, as did Smith.
- Agency theory: Borrowers don’t always pay back their loans. Workers will shirk. Joseph Stiglitz has worked through these issues, but his core results can be found in Wealth of Nations.
- The role of prices in coordinating economic behavior. Might Smith’s discussion of the grain trade be the most important passage penned in economics?
A second choice would be John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Then I would opt for Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), which defined the policy agenda of the Chicago School and inspired market-oriented reforms around the world.
The Idea of History
Jean H. Baker, professor of history at Goucher College and author of Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (Hill and Wang, 2005):
There is room for generational disagreement in determining the most influential book in the discipline of history. But this point only validates my selection.
My choice is R.G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History. Published posthumously in 1946 after the British philosopher and historian’s death in 1943, the book presented a new approach to the study of the past. Taking issue with his predecessors, Collingwood argued that history, which he defined as “a kind of research and inquiry for human self-knowledge,” is re-enacted in the mind of historian. History is an interpretation — not, as previous generations believed, a matter of collecting facts in order to create the past, in the words of a famous German historian, “as it actually was.” Nor is it simply a matter of “scissoring and pasting”; that is, repeating statements from earlier histories. Instead, historians should proceed by asking questions according to their time, place, and even personality. They should study problems, not periods, and expect their answers to be superseded. Their conclusions are thus an interim report.
What Collingwood delivered to modern historians was a sense of relativism, an understanding that historians select their facts but never make them up as fiction writers do. And certainly all versions of history are not equally meritorious. Today these views, especially on the interactions of the historian’s mind with the evidence of the past, are so influential that, like the air we breathe, they go largely and ungratefully unnoticed.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 14, Page B4
