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14. Ibid., pp. 600–601.

15. Ibid., p. 601.

16. Ibid., pp. 602–3.

17. Ibid., pp. 603–4.

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23. Ibid., pp. ix–x.

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30. See Fluck, Winfried and Sollors, Werner, “Three Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity,” in Winfried Fluck, ed., American Studies in the Teaching of EnglishGoogle Scholar, Materialien 9, John F. Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin (Berlin: 1976), pp. 137–50.

31. See Goetzmann, , “Americanist's Dream,” pp. 206–7.Google Scholar

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34. See, for example, Habermas, Jürgen, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurtam-Main: Suhrkamp, 1968)Google Scholar, translated as Knowledge and Interests (New York: Beacon Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Apel, Karl-Otto et al. , Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1971)Google Scholar; and Habermas, Jürgen and Luhmann, Niklas, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1971).Google Scholar

35. For a recent example, see Bailis, Stanley's essay “The Social Sciences in American Studies: An Integrative Conception,” American Quarterly, 26 (1974), 202–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which will be discussed below.

36. Wise, Gene, “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies,” in Salzman, Jack, ed. Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Vol. 4 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1979), pp. 519, 543, 528.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., pp. 520–21.

38. Ibid., p. 527.

39. Ibid., p. 528. Italics added. See also Mechling, Jay, “If They Can Build a Square Tomato: Notes Toward a Holistic Approach to Regional Studies,”Google Scholar in Salzman, , Prospects, Vol. 4Google Scholar (note 36 above), which was conceived as a “kind of operationalization of Wise's axioms” (p. 74, note 2).

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41. Ibid., pp. 528, 542.

42. Ibid., pp. 542–43.

43. Ibid., p. 542. The focus of his article is obscured by an unspecified use of terms like “method,” “principles,” “explanations,” “praxis,” etc.; concepts and propositions fundamental to his arguments like “experience,” “reflexive,” “dialogueoriented scholarship,” or “radical” are left unexplained; Wise's metaphors occasionally are inadequate, for instance, those concerning the “field axiom” (pp. 534–35) or the “cultural journey” (p. 542); there also seems to be a contradiction between his claim to work in the vein of a critical, “reflexive” tradition of sociology—practiced by a collection of rather different scholars — and his easygoing distinction between “experience” and “handling experience” in matters of “cultural studies.”

44. Ibid., p. 534, cf. the whole sentence. Many of Wise's ideas become clearer when read with his book American Historical Explanations (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1973)Google Scholar in mind. It will be discussed at length near the end of my essay, but I think that Wise's essay is not a meaningful further step in the direction of constructing a “working sociology of historical knowledge” (p. 174).

45. Sklar, , “American Studies” (note 5 above), p. 597.Google Scholar

46. See Fluck, Winfried, “‘A Whole Cultural History’: Zu einigen neueren Versuchen kulturwissenschaftlicher Synthese,” Amerikastudiew/American Studies, 20, No. 2 (1975), 337–53.Google Scholar

47. Sklar, , “American Studies,” p. 601.Google Scholar

48. Sklar, Robert, “Cultural History and American Studies: Past, Present, and Future,” American Studies International, 10, No. 1 (Autumn), 6.Google Scholar

49. The close affinity between the “myth approach” in American Studies and the “value approach” in (post)Parsonian sociology is discussed in Fred Matthews's review of Lipset, S. M., Revolution and Counter Revolution (1970)Google Scholar in Canadian Review of American Studies, 3 (Fall 1972), 112–21.Google Scholar

50. “Whole cultural history” has been replaced as the systematic focus by “study of non-elites,” “a systematic grasp on the organizing principles of American culture and society.” See Sklar, , “Problem,” (note 20 above); pp. 247, 257.Google Scholar

51. Sklar, , “American Studies,” pp. 599–600Google Scholar (comparison of Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen).

52. Ibid., p. 599.

53. Sklar, , “Cultural History,” p. 5.Google Scholar

54. Sklar, , “Problem,” p. 257.Google Scholar

55. Mechling, , Merideth, , and Wilson, , “American Culture Studies,” p. 365.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., p. 367.

57. Ibid., pp. 366ff.

58. Ibid., pp. 372, 379–80, 366, 389.

59. Sklar, , “Problem,” pp. 260–62.Google Scholar

60. See especially Sklar's more subtle statement in “Problem,” p. 251Google Scholar: “This tendency to excess in the claims for new methodologies obscures the way new techniques and insights in historical and cultural studies unite with the old to expand and deepen our knowledge of the past — unlike the more complete paradigm changes in the natural and physical sciences that Thomas Kuhn describes.”

61. Kuklick, Bruce, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 24 (1972), 435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62. Ibid.

63. Smith, Henry Nash, “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” American Quarterly, 9 (1957), 197–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar, slightly revised in Kwiat, Joseph J. and Turpie, Mary C., eds., Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), pp. 3–15.Google Scholar

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65. See the more general critique of Radical American Studies by Hansen, Olaf, “American Studies” (note 4 above), pp. 164–69.Google Scholar

66. See, for example, Friedensohn, Doris et al. , eds., Connections 2: Towards a Vision of Education as Transformative Action (National Connections 2, American Studies Collective), 1 (Spring 1974) and 2 (Autumn 1975).Google Scholar

67. Mechling, , Merideth, , and Wilson, , “American Culture Studies,”Google Scholarpassim; Mertz, Robert J. and Marsden, Michael, “American Culture Studies: A Discipline in Search of Itself,” Journal of Popular Culture, 9 (1975), 465Google Scholar; or Brown, Linda Keller, “American Studies at Douglass College: One Vision of Interdisciplinarity,”.American Quarterly, 27 (1975), 342–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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69. Ibid., pp. 221–24. See especially his “note of qualification,” p. 224Google Scholar. Cecil F. Tate's “structuralist” “interdisciplinary method for a total vision of man” raises similar questions; it will be treated in a different context. Tate, Cecil F., The Search for a Method in American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973).Google Scholar

70. Mertz, and Marsden, , “American Culture Studies,” p. 469.Google Scholar

71. Ibid., pp. 462, 464, 466, 468–69.

72. See Bagley, Carol L., “Can Popular Culture Save American Studies?” in Brown, Ray B. and Ambrosetti, Ronald J., eds., Popular Culture and Curricula (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), pp. 19, 17, 18.Google Scholar

73. For the complexity of the problem involved, see, for example, Chmaj, Betty E., ed., American Women and American Studies (Pittsburgh: Know, 1971)Google Scholar; idem, ed., Image, Myth and Beyond: American Women and American Studies, Vol. 2 (Pittsburgh: Know, 1972)Google Scholar; and Baxter, Annette K., “Women's Studies and American Studies: The Uses of the Interdisciplinary” (review essay), American Quarterly, 26 (1974), 433–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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76. Ibid., p. 303: “It is among the arts that the shapes of an emerging world culture can be seen most clearly.”

77. Ibid., pp. 300, 299.

78. Ibid., pp. 302, 300, 305, 306, 308.

79. Ibid., pp. 302–3.

80. Ibid., pp. 303–6.

81. Ibid., p. 306.

82. Ibid., pp. 306–7.

83. Ibid., p. 308.

84. Ibid.

85. See, for example, the arguments and references in Blauner, Robert, “Black Culture: Myth or Reality?” in Whitten, Norman E. and Szwed, John F., eds., Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1970), pp. 347–66.Google Scholar

86. Chisolm, , “Cosmotopian Possibilities” (note 75 above), p. 309Google Scholar. See his references to Kroeber on p. 304.

87. Ibid., pp. 310, 309.

88. Ibid., p. 312.

89. See Ward, John William, “History and the Concept of Culture,” Red, White and Blue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 5, 9Google Scholar, and note Ward's final sentence on p. 17.

90. Chisolm, , “Cosmotopian Possibilities” (note 75 above), p. 313.Google Scholar

91. Ibid., p. 311, and see p. 302.

92. Trachtenberg, Alan, “Myth, History, and Literature in Virgin Land” in Salzman, Jack, ed., Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Vol. 3 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), pp. 127–29Google Scholar. See also Marks, Barry, “The Concept of Myth in Virgin Land” American Quarterly, 5 (1963), 71–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

93. Trachtenberg, Alan, “The American Way of Life,” The Nation, 07 19, 1965, pp. 42–45Google Scholar, and idem, “The Relevance of the Historian,” Carlton Miscellany, 11, No. 3 (1970), 104–10.Google Scholar

94. Trachtenberg, , “American Way of Life,” pp. 44–45Google Scholar, and “Relevance of the Historian,” p. 110Google Scholar. For the “radical” meaning of “organic unity” and “wholeness” in cultural history, see the work of F. O. Matthiessen, for example, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. xv–xvi, 133–75Google Scholar. See also Smith, H. N., Virgin Land, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 259.Google Scholar

95. Trachtenberg, , “American Way of Life,” p. 44Google Scholar. Trachtenberg usually is regarded as a representative of the “myth-symbol school” and at the same time as its most formidable critic. See Kuklick, , “Myth and Symbol” (note 61 above), p. 445Google Scholar; Wise, Gene, American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1973), p. 352Google Scholar; and Marx, Leo, “American Studies: Defense of an Unscientific Method,” New Literary History, 1 (1969–1970), p. 84, note 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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97. Ibid., pp. 435, 437.

98. Ibid., p. 443.

99. Ibid., pp. 443–50.

100. Ibid., pp. 437, 440, note 21, and pp. 440–48.

101. Ibid., pp. 440, 446–47, 450.

102. Cawelti, John G., “Myth, Symbol, and Formula,” Journal of Popular Culture, 8 (1974–1975), 1, 3; pp. 1–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar are virtually identical with part of Chapter 1 of Cawelti's book Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 27–33Google Scholar. He replaces “poetic structures” with “literary structures” (p. 29). Kuklick's critique is treated more extensively (pp. 33–34).

103. Cawelti, , Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, p. 22Google Scholar, and idem, “Myth, Symbol, and Formula,” p. 1Google Scholar, and see p. 4. Cf. idem, “The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature,” Journal of Popular Culture, 3 (1969–1970), 383, 388, 390.Google Scholar

104. Cawelti, , “Myth, Symbol, and Formula,” pp. 4, 6–7Google Scholar. See idem, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, p. 33Google Scholar. Cawelti's redefinition of the relation between “high culture” and “popular culture” can also be found in Cawelti, John G., “Notes Toward an Aesthetic of Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture, 5 (1971–1972), 255–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in idem, “Popular Culture Programs,” in Browne and Ambrosetti, Popular Culture and Curricula (note 72 above), pp. 24–26.Google Scholar

105. Cawelti, , “Myth, Symbol, and Formula,” p. 7.Google Scholar

106. Ibid., pp. 4–5.

107. Cawelti, , “Popular Culture Programs,” pp. 24–25Google Scholar, and idem, “Concept of Formula, p. 385, and see p. 388Google Scholar

108. See Cawelti, , “Concept of Formula,” p. 390Google Scholar, and idem, “Myth, Symbol, and Formula,” pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

109. Cawelti, , Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, pp. 35–36, 298–99Google Scholar. Cawelti mentions (p. 300) Slotkin, Richard's Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, as exploring the “process of interplay between formulas as expressions of myths and in some instances themselves becoming myths.” As far as the theoretical aspect of Slotkin's book is concerned, his reflections on “myth” and the historical role of the “myth critic” and his critique of the origins and contemporary functions of the “myth of America” do not succeed in clarifying the ideological and social implications of a historical criticism of the dialectic of culture (Slotkin, , Regeneration, pp. 5–6, 9, 14–15, 18–20Google Scholar, etc., and see Smith, H. N.'s review in Comparative Literature, 26 [1974], 74–77Google Scholar). The old problems of the so-called mythsymbol school reappear in a new form (see, for example, the key role attributed to the work of “high” literature, p. 518): “Although one may be entirely sympathetic, under present circumstances, with Slotkin's evident desire to expose the falsity of the more pious arguments on behalf of American uniqueness, the fact remains that the idea of America as the exceptionally violent society is but the reverse side of that old irrepressible fantasy.” Leo Marx, “Notes on American Exceptionalism and the Future of American Studies,” typescript, Bicentennial American Studies Conference, Salzburg, Austria, 1975, p. 2.

110. Tate, Cecil F., The Search for a Method in American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973), pp. 4, 127.Google Scholar

111. Ibid., p. 127.

112. Ibid., p. 148.

113. Ibid., p. 5.

114. Ibid., pp. 105, 6, and see p. 5.

115. Ibid., pp. 6, 128. Tate explicitly criticizes Sklar's proposals in “American Studies and the Realities of America” (note 5 above).

116. Ibid., pp. 129, 116–26, 133.

117. Ibid., p. 133.

118. Ibid., p. 132.

119. Ibid.

120. Ibid., pp. 134–35, 145.

121. Ibid., pp. 145, 135, and see p. 142: “It becomes even more strikingly evident that some of the work of Pearce, Smith, Ward, and Lewis is structural in spirit even if not in intent.”

122. Ibid., p. 148.

123. Ibid., p. 146–47.

124. Ibid., pp. 6–11, 14–16. Compare Tate on “ideology,” p. 20 n.

125. Ibid., pp. 19–24.

126. Ibid., pp. 148–49. For general discussions of the relevance of “structuralism” to American Studies, see the following bibliographic essays in American Quarterly, 30 (1978)Google Scholar: John Blair, G., “Structuralism, American Studies, and the Humanities”Google Scholar (pp. 261–81), and David Pace, “Structuralism in History and the Social Sciences” (pp. 282–97).

127. See Sklar, , “Problem” (note 20 above), pp. 259–60Google Scholar. See also his review of Stott, William, Documentary Expression in Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar in Reviews in American History, 3 (1975), 302.Google Scholar

128. See Smith, , “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” (note 63 above), pp. 10 ffGoogle Scholar., and Marx, , “American Studies” (note 95 above), pp. 76 ffGoogle Scholar. Compare Hansen, “American Studies” (note 4 above), pp. 143–46, 149–51Google Scholar. For a different treatment of the same problem, see Spiller, Robert E., The Third Dimension: Studies in Literary History (New York: Macmillan, 1965), esp. pp. vii, 199–216.Google Scholar

129. Trachtenberg, , “American Way of Life” (note 93 above), pp. 42, 45.Google Scholar

130. See, for example, Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973)Google Scholar; Wallace, Anthony F. C., Culture and Personality, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1970)Google Scholar; Hymes, Dell, ed., Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1972)Google Scholar; Berkhofer, Robert F., A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1969)Google Scholar (see below); and the extensive debate about Afro-American “culture.” An attempt to use some of these insights in the context of American Studies is Daniel Walker Howe's essay “American Victorianism as a Culture,” American Quarterly, 27 (1975), 507–32Google Scholar. For discussion of R. Redfield, V. Turner, and C. Geertz, see Beeman, Richard R., “The New Social History and the Search for ‘Community’ in Colonial America,” American Quarterly, 29 (1977), 422–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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132. Trachtenberg, Alan, ed., Critics of Culture, Literature, and Society in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976), pp. 3–13Google Scholar, and his more general and theoretical unpublished lecture “Critics of Culture, 1910–1930: Introduction” (1974), pp. 1–21; Susman, Warren I., “The Useless Past: American Intellectuals and the Frontier Thesis, 1910–1930,” Bucknell Review, 11 (03 1963), 1–20Google Scholar; and idem, “History and the American Intellectual: Uses of a Usable Past,” American Quarterly, 16 (1964), 243–63Google Scholar. See also Ruland, Richard, The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, and Morris, Wesley, Toward a New Historicism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), esp. Part I.Google Scholar

133. Susman, , “The Thirties,” p. 181 and note 9.Google Scholar

134. Susman, , “Introduction,” pp. 2, 5, 8–9, 15, 19, 23Google Scholar, and idem, “The Thirties,” pp. 184, 187 ff.Google Scholar

135. Susman, , “Introduction,” p. 2.Google Scholar

136. Susman, , “The Thirties,” pp. 199–200.Google Scholar

137. Ibid., p. 205.

138. Ibid., pp. 210 ff.

139. Susman, , “Introduction,” pp. 2–3.Google Scholar

140. Susman, , “History and the American Intellectual,” p. 243.Google Scholar

141. Ibid., pp. 243, 259.

142. Ibid., pp. 260 ff.

143. Ibid. pp. 247, 256–57. How easily Susman's theoretical notions and his “revisionist” interpretation of the 1930s can be turned into a new “orthodoxy” may be seen in the book by his student Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)Google Scholar, and, to some extent, in Stott, William, Documentary Expression in Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. Both of them use Susman's interpretive dialectic and his main theses but transform them into a new, wholly consistent and homogeneous picture of the decade, which, particularly in Pells's case, occasionally drastically misreads the work of the 1930s and eliminates most of their productive tensions and contradictions. See Stott, , Documentary Expression, pp. 103, 134–35, 143–44, 261, 266Google Scholar; and Pells, , Radical Dreams, pp. 2–3Google Scholar and passim. Another version of the “revisionist” interpretation of the 1930s is Nye, Russel B., “The Thirties: The Framework of Belief,” Centennial Review, 19, No. 2 (1975), 37–58Google Scholar. See also Dubofsky, Melvyn, “Not So ‘Turbulent Years’: Another Look at the American 1930's,” Amerikastudien/American Studies, 24, No. 1 (1979), 5–20.Google Scholar

144. Trachtenberg, Alan, “Critics of Culture, 1910–1930,”Google Scholar unpublished lecture, esp. pp. 1–2, 6–10, 13, 19–20.

145. Ibid. pp. 18–19, 8. Trachtenberg's more recent work further develops his notion of historical cultural criticism. See, for example, Trachtenberg, Alan, “Man and Tradition: Land and Landscape,”Google Scholar review of Williams, R., The Country and the City, Yale Review, 64 (Summer 1974), 610–21Google Scholar, and idem, “Ever: The Human Document,” America and Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904–1940 (New York: Aperture, 1977), pp. 118–37Google Scholar. In this context, it would be very illuminating to compare Trachtenberg's reflections with Bercovitch's magisterial, complex, but in its cultural and theoretical implications and conclusions questionable analysis of the evolution of the “American self” and the “rhetoric of the American jeremiad,” the “myth of America,” the “hegemony” of its “wholly middle-class culture,” its “cultural” and “ideological consensus,” and the virtual impossibility of “radicalism” in American history: Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, and idem, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).Google Scholar

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147. See especially Higham, John, History, Professional Scholarship in America(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973; orig. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 229 ffGoogle Scholar. (American Studies), and essays 1, 2, 3, 8, and 9 in idem, Writing American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, on American Studies, pp. 28, 67–72, 165, and his “American Studies” essay “American Intellectual History: A Critical Appraisal,” American Quarterly, 13 (1961), 219–33Google Scholar. See also Skotheim, R. A., American Intellectual Histories and Historians (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 286–87.Google Scholar

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149. Berkhofer, Robert F., “Clio and the Culture Concept: Some Impressions of a Changing Relationship in American Historiography,” in Schneider, Louis and Bonjeau, Charles M., eds., The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 77–100, esp. 78Google Scholar, first published in Social Science Quarterly, 53 (1972), 297–320.Google Scholar

150. Ibid., pp. 78–79.

151. Ibid., pp. 81, 85–86, 89.

152. Ibid., p. 79.

153. Ibid., p. 85.

154. Ibid., p. 79.

155. Ibid., p. 82.

156. Ware, Caroline F., ed., The Cultural Approach to History (New York, 1940), pp. 12–14Google Scholar, and see her remarks on pp. 19, 73, 199–201, 225–26. For a contemporary review of the book, see Brinton, Crane in Journal of the History of Ideas, 3 (1942), 228–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The role of the “culture concept” in the “crisis” of sociology during the 1930s is discussed by Lynd, Robert S., Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1939), Chaps. 2, 3, and 6.Google Scholar

157. I discuss the tradition and the problems of a “radical cultural history” of the 1930s and early 1940s (F. O. Matthiessen, C. Ware, and others) and their relation to the early work of the so-called myth-symbol critics in American Studies (H. N. Smith, L. Marx, and so forth) in the context of the development of literary and cultural criticism and of historiography during the postwar decade in another essay.

158. Ware, , Cultural Approach, p. 13.Google Scholar

159. Ibid., pp. 200–201.

160. He does not, for example, account for the “lag in usage” of the culture concept during the 1940s and early 1950s. Berkhofer, , “Clio” (note 149 above), p. 82.Google Scholar

161. Ibid., pp. 97 ff. Louis Schneider is mistaken in reading Berkhofer's essay as a plea for abolishing the culture concept in historiography altogether (p. 129), a mistake repeated by Sklar in “Problem” (note 20 above), p. 259.Google Scholar

162. Berkhofer, , “Clio,” p. 99.Google Scholar

163. Ibid., pp. 98, 90.

164. Ibid., p. 99. See Wise, Gene, “Political ‘Reality’ in Recent American Scholarship: Progressives Versus Symbolists,” American Quarterly, 19 (1967), 302–28, esp. pp. 322–24, 327–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

165. Berkhofer, , “Clio,” p. 98.Google Scholar

166. Ibid., p. 99.

167. Berkhofer, Robert F., A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (note 130 above), p. 6.Google Scholar See also the Introduction for his use of the term “behavioral analysis.”

168. Ibid., esp. Chaps. 2–4.

169. Berkhofer, Robert F., “The New or the Old Social History?”Google Scholar review of Berthoff, Rowland, An Unsettled People, Reviews in American History, 1 (1973), 28.Google Scholar

170. Berkhofer, , A Behavioral Approach, pp. 293, 310.Google Scholar Berkhofer's model is, of course, far more complex and discriminating than the quotations show (see Chaps. 8–13), but I do not find his combination of “general system theory” and “eclectic explanation” convincing (pp. 169 ff., 190, 204 ff., 293, 310 ff.).Google Scholar Berkhofer's recent effort to overcome the “loss” of “any overall approach to the framework of American history” by suggesting an overall “organizational synthesis in American history,” applying developments in organizational sociology to history, seem to me to sharpen his theoretical dilemma: He shows that “almost any realm of social life can be treated through organizational analysis, and earlier as well as later periods are equally amenable to such analysis” (see his interpretation of the various “phases” or “periods” of American history), but in spite of a powerful display of sociological terms and distinctions it never becomes clear what the real objectives of this “organizational synthesis” in American historiography are supposed to be (besides being a new “synthesis” and formally “bridging,” “linking the new and the old histories,” or “the social sciences and history”); the concrete results, or insights, developed in Berkhofer's article remain poor, or commonplace; and many of the crucial problems and approaches in recent American historiography are reversed, distorted, or reduced to external “factors” or “constraints.” Berkhofer, Robert F., “The Organizational Interpretation of American History: A New Synthesis,” in Salzman, Jack, ed., Prospects 4 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1979) pp. 611–29, esp. pp. 611–13, 615, 617–18, 622–27.Google Scholar

171. See Berkhofer, , A Behavioral Approach, Chaps. 5–7, esp. pp. 83 ff., 96, 117, 135 ff., 143–44, 159 ff., 167–68.Google Scholar

172. Ibid., p. 4.

173. For instance, the current demand for a neue Sozialgeschichte in West Germany is a result of developments historically, socially, politically, and academically very different from those of the debate about the “new social history” in the United States. See, for example, Schulze, Winfried, Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaft, Einführung in die Probleme der Kooperation beider Wissenschaften (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1974)Google Scholar, and Kocka, Jürgen, Sozialgeschichte: Begriff—Entwicklung-Probleme (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977)Google Scholar, and see idem, “Theoretical Approaches to the Social and Economic History of Modern Germany: Some Recent Trends, Concepts, and Problems in Western and Eastern Germany,” Journal of Modern History, 47 (1975), 101–19.Google Scholar

174. Samuel P. Hays's description of the state of social history in 1971 reads like a summary of the “crisis” of American Studies: “A Systematic Social History,” in Billias, George A. and Grob, Gerald N., eds., American History: Retrospect and Prospect (New York: Free Press, 1971), pp. 315–16.Google Scholar Even Herbert C. Gutman in his sophisticated work refers the reader again and again to the same quotations by Sidney Mintz, Richard Price, Clifford Geertz, or E. P. Thompson about the relationships between “culture,” “society,” and “history” without seriously allowing for the difference in origin and in objectives that characterizes the works of these authors. Fox-Genovese, Elisabeth and Genovese, Eugene, “The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxian Perspective,” Journal of Social History, 10 (Winter 1976), 205–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cf. the whole issue.

175. Hays, , “Systematic Social History,” p. 316.Google Scholar Cf. particularly these essays: Krieger, Leonard, “The Autonomy of Intellectual History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 34 (1973), 491–516CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Hayden, “The Task of the Intellectual Historial,” TheMonist, 53 (1969), 606–30Google Scholar; Gilbert, Felix, “Intellectual History: Its Aims and Methods,” in Gilbert, F. and Graubard, S. R., eds., Historical Studies Today (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), pp. 141–58Google Scholar; and Higham, John, Writing American History, esp. pp. 3–24.Google Scholar See also the important new volume Higham, John and Conkin, Paul K., eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, for the relationship of intellectual and the new social history, especially the essays by L. Veysey, G. Wood, T. Bender, R. Welter, and T. Haskell, for reassessments of aspects of the American Studies movement: pp. 21, 23, 29, 54, 68, 85–87, 119, 141–42.

176. For the historical problematic of the “divergent unity,” see Higham, John's Presidential Address, “Hanging Together: Divergent Unities in American History,” Journal of American History, 61 (1974–1975), p. 5–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, for a challenging attempt to envision a systematic fusion of the “old” intellectual history and the new social history in a “new intellectual history,” Wise, Gene, “The Contemporary Crisis in Intellectual History Studies,” Clio, 5 (1975), 55–71.Google Scholar

177. The Hobsbawm quotation is from his essay “From Social History to the History of Society,” in Gilbert, and Granbard, , Historical Studies Today, pp. 1–26.Google Scholar

178. Habermas, Jürgen, “Geschichte und Evolution,” Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 200–259, esp. pp. 201, 203–4, 213–215, 218, 244 ff., 249.Google Scholar

179. See White, Hayden V., Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); esp. pp. ix–xiiGoogle Scholar, and “Introduction: The Poetics of History,” pp. 1–42Google Scholar; idem, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory, 5 (1966), 111–34Google Scholar; idem, “Literary History: The Point of It all,” New Literary History, 2 (1970–1971), 173–85Google Scholar; idem, “The Culture of Criticism,” in Hassan, Ihab, ed., Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), pp. 55–69Google Scholar; idem, “The Structure of Historical Narrative,” Clio, 1 (1971–1972), 5–20Google Scholar; idem, “Foucault Decoded: Notes from the Underground,” History and Theory, 12 (1973), 23–54Google Scholar; idem, “Interpretation in History,” TVew Literary History, 4 (1973–1974), 281–314Google Scholar; idem, “The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History,” Clio, 3 (1973–1974), 35–53Google Scholar; idem, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” Clio, 3 (1973–1974), 277–303Google Scholar; and idem, “The Problem of Change in Literary History,” New Literary History, 7 (1975–1976), 97–111.Google Scholar White's essays are now collected in White, Hayden V., Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

180. See, for example, Graffs, Gerald critical essay “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough,” Tri-quarterly, 26 (1973), 383–417.Google Scholar Graff has further developed his critique in his provocative essay “The Politics of Anti-realism,” in Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 63–101.Google Scholar

181. The almost complete “shift of attention away from literary criticism, and in a larger sense from the whole realm of liteature” in intellectual history (in a most comprehensive sense) has been noticed by John Higham in his Introduction to New Directions in American Intellectual History, p. xvii.Google Scholar As far as recent developments in German literary criticism are concerned, several books and essays by Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, Manfred Naumann, and Robert Weimann have been translated into English (see New Literary History or Clio). For a number of important historical essays, see especially Weimann, , Literaturgeschichte und Mythologie (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1971).Google Scholar

182. In the context of American Studies a critical article by R. Gordon Kelly, “Literature and the Historian,” American Quarterly, 26 (1974), 141–59, is a valuable starting point in reassessing the “study of literature conceived in historical terms,” using recent works of sociology and anthropology on “cultural knowledge,” even though I do not find his theoretical conclusions and his “case study” convincing.

183. White, , “Problem of Change in Literary History,” pp. 97 ff., 108 ff.Google Scholar

184. See, for example, Kuhn, Thomas S., “Comment,” Comparative Studies in Society andHistory, 11 (1969), 403–12, esp. pp. 410–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and idem, “The Relationship between History and History of Science,” Daedalus, 100 (1971), 271–304, esp. pp. 292–93.Google Scholar

185. Kuhn's most important later statements can be found in Kuhn, Thomas S., “Postscript,” The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 174–210Google Scholar; idem, “Notes on Lakatos,” in Buck, B. C. and Cohen, R. S., eds., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1971), pp. 137–46Google Scholar; idem, “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?” and “Reflections on My Critics,” in Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 1–23, 231–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” in Suppe, Frederick, ed., The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 459–517.Google Scholar

186. See Toulmin, Stephen, Human Understanding, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Mittelstrass, Jürgen, “Prolegomena zu einer konstruktiven Theorie der Wissenschaftsgeschichte,” Die Möglichkeit von Wissenschaft (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 106–44Google Scholar; and Böhler, Dietrich, “Paradigmawechsel in analytischer Wissenschaftstheorie? Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche und Wissenschaftstheoretische Aufgaben der Philosophie,” Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, 3 (1972), 219–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

187. See Hollinger, David A., “T. S. Kuhn's Theory of Science and Its Implications for History,” American Historical Review, 78 (1973), 370–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Higham, and Conkin, , eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (note 175 above)Google Scholar, essays by Hollinger, D., Haskell, T., and Bender, T.; Wallace, Anthony F. C., “Paradigmatic Processes in Culture Change,” American Anthropologist, 74 (06 1972), 467–78Google Scholar, reprinted with alterations in Wallace, 's important book Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), pp. 477–85Google Scholar; Wolin, Sheldon, “Paradigms and Political Theories,” in King, Preston and Parekh, B. C., eds., Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Professor Michael Oakeshott on the Occasion of His Retirement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 125–52Google Scholar; Martins, Hermino, “The Kuhnian ‘Revolution’ and Its Implications for Sociology,” in Nossiter, T. J., Hanson, A. H., and Rokkan, Stein, eds., Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences: Essays in Memory of Peter Nettle (London: Humanities, 1972), pp. 13–58Google Scholar (see also Friedrichs, Robert W., A Sociology of Sociology [New York: Free Press, 1970])Google Scholar; Steinmann, Martin Jr., “Cumulation, Revolution, and Progress,” New Literary History, 5 (1973–1974), 477–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar (and note Mandelbaum, M.'s comment, pp. 616–17)Google Scholar; Bleich, David, “The Subjective Paradigm in Science, Psychology, and Criticism,” New Literary History, 7 (1975–1976), 313–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Holland, Norman N., “The New Paradigm: Subjective or Transactive?”Google ScholarIbid., pp. 335–46.

188. Wise, , American Historical Explanations (note 44 above), p. vii.Google Scholar

189. Ibid., pp. vii ff., 46 ff., 123 ff., 128 ff.

190. See, for example, Ibid., p. 131.

191. Ibid., pp. 41–43, and see Chap. 2. See also my critique of Wise's more recent article “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies,” note 43 above.

192. Ibid., pp. ix, 146. For Wise's relationship to Burke, Kenneth, see especially pp. 141 ff.Google Scholar

193. Ibid., p. 152.

194. Ibid., Chap. 4, 6–9. The different “paradigmatic” status of the three “explanation-forms” is discussed on pp. 128–29.Google Scholar

195. Ibid., p. 51.

196. Ibid., pp. 234–35.

197. Ibid., p. 180.

198. Ibid., pp. 159, 174–75, 180. Italics in original.

199. Ibid., p. 174.

200. See Ibid., p. 153.

201. Ibid., pp. 123 ff., 141 ff., 152. Wise himself emphasizes thathis account of the “paradigms” and “explanation-forms” cannot be more than a “suggestion.” See pp. 181 ff., 237 ff., 303 ff.Google Scholar

202. Ibid., p. 305. See Wise, , “Contemporary Crisis” (note 176 above), pp. 68–69.Google Scholar The “paradigmatic” role of Perry Miller's work for “intellectual history” (qua “consensus history”) was asserted long ago by Higham in Writing American History (note 147 above), p. 66.Google Scholar

203. Wise, , American Historical Explanations (note 44 above), p. 129.Google Scholar

204. Ibid.

205. See, for example, Ibid., p. 288.

206. Ibid., pp. 343 ff., 93, 102–3.

207. See Berkhofer, R.'s review of Berthoff's An Unsettled People (note 169 above), pp. 24–25.Google Scholar

208. Wise, , American Historical Explorations (note 44 above), pp. xiii, 134–39, 315–43.Google Scholar See also Wise, 's essay “Implicit Irony in Recent American Historiography: Perry Miller's New England Mind,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), 579–600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

209. See Wise, , “Contemporary Crisis,” pp. 68–69.Google Scholar

210. Wise, , American Historical Explanations, p. 305.Google Scholar

211. Ibid., pp. 192–93, 248 ff.

212. Ibid., p. 304, and see pp. 91 ff., 102, 109, 129, 228–29, 246, 302 ff.

213. Ibid., p. 102 and see Chap. 5, esp. pp. 115, 119–29.

214. Ibid., p. 129.

215. For the development of Smith's and Marx's ideas, see their dissertations at Harvard: Smith, Henry Nash, “American Emotional and Imaginative Attitudes Towards the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains 1803–1850,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1940Google Scholar, and Marx, Leo, “Hawthorne and Emerson: Studies in the Impact of the Machine Technology upon the American Writer,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1950Google Scholar; and their contributions in Sweezy, Paul M. and Huberman, Leo, eds., F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), pp. 37–43 and 55–60.Google Scholar Leo Marx's relation to Marxist tradition is most clearly defined in his essays “Notes on the Culture of the New Capitalism,” Monthly Review, 11 (1959), 111–16Google Scholar; “The Long Revolution and the British Left,” Commentary, 32 (12 1961), 517–23Google Scholar; and “Notes on Revolutionary Pastoralism in America: Susan Sontag's Trip to Hanoi,” Tri-quarterly, 1972, Nos. 23–24, pp. 552–75.Google Scholar I treat these problems more extensively in my essay mentioned in note 157 above.