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Capitalism, Culture and Catastrophe: Lawrence Levine and the Opening of Cultural History
Jean-Christophe Agnew
Those having lamps will pass them on to others.
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| Although I never had the good fortune to be Lawrence W. Levine's student, I have taken away so much from his work over the years that it feels as if I had been. I think of myself as one of the many anonymous graduates of the correspondence school that Levine, unbeknownst to himself, has conducted over the past several decades with readers of his work. By "correspondence" I mean to suggest the lively internal dialogue—the questions, ripostes, and epiphanies—that all great historical writing and thinking stimulates in the reader. "Writing," Levine has said (quoting the eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne), "is but a different name for conversation," and everything that he has written in his long and rich career has honored this conviction. Personable and direct, Lawrence Levine's prose—his essays above all—invite the reader to join the discussion that is American history and to appreciate its many rhythms and accents.1 |
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But at a deeper level, "correspondence" also means for me the resonances or resemblances that one detects between the rich and robust cultural worlds that Levine has brought to light and the more elusive forms of popular consciousness that remain only dimly visible in the scattered archive of American cultural history. When I have looked at the past and when I have taught it, I have done so with lenses ground and shaped by what Lawrence Levine has written. |
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In keeping with Levine's intellectual and personal temperament, those lenses are appropriately panoramic, encompassing, and inclusive. The reach of Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977) was and remains breathtaking. The perspective of Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988) and of the essays collected in The Unpredictable Past (1993) is similarly broad, and so—in spirit and scope—is his history cum manifesto, The Opening of the American Mind (1996). True, had it not been for Allan Bloom's best-selling screed on popular culture a decade earlier, one could scarcely imagine Levine's having reached for a phrase such as the "American mind." Too Hegelian by half. And yet he has never shied away from the singularity, if not the exceptionalism, of American culture; culture, that is, in the lower case, the popular case, the folkloric case.2 |
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Or the hard case. Consider, for example, Levine's first book, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan, the Last Decade, 1915–1925 (1965). Could there have been a less auspicious example of the open-minded American than the figure of William Jennings Bryan sloping toward the Scopes "monkey" trial? Not only had Bryan's Progressivism been summarily dismissed by Richard Hofstadter, Levine's dissertation adviser, but Bryan's piety had been mocked for ten long years in the various productions of Inherit the Wind that appeared on Broadway, on film, and—in 1965—on television's Hallmark Hall of Fame. Where others had found in the late Bryan a mind shuttered against modernity, however, Levine discovered Bryan's boundless and unshakable confidence in the judgment of ordinary men and women. Defender looked beyond or behind Bryan's moral absolutism to find the democratic faith—at once political and pious—that had underwritten the Great Commoner's life project. Those were the "enduring threads," as he put it, that ran "throughout Bryan's career."3 |
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