Academic Publishing's Poor Stepchildren

Edited collections are one of the poor stepchildren of academic publishing. They are reviewed less frequently than monographs and are harder to access electronically than journals. Very occasionally, an edited collection will achieve canonical status—usually by signaling and advancing an important theoretical or methodological shift (Lynn Hunt’s The New Cultural History is one great example). More often they sink without a trace. Over the course of my career, I have co-edited two collections of essays myself (most recently with my colleague Yair Mintzker) and have written over two dozen pieces for other ones. Sometimes these were spin-offs of work I developed more thoroughly in my own books, so if they sank without a trace (as they sometimes did), I didn’t mind. In other cases, it was more distressing to watch the last small bubbles burst on the surface and disappear.

So here are two recent, very worthwhile collections that I contributed to, and two more that are forthcoming:

In 2021, David Motadel put together an ambitious volume entitled Revolutionary World: Global Upheaval in the Modern Age. It’s an attempt to look at modern revolutions from the perspective of the new global history. Each chapter examines a wave of revolutions, from the late eighteenth century through 1848 to the early twentieth century, decolonization, the Arab Spring and beyond, asking how the different events were connected, and how they fit within various global transformations. Contributors include Christopher Clark, Erez Mandela, Quentin Deluermoz and Odd Arne Westad. My own essay, not surprisingly, is on the Age of Revolution from c. 1775 to c. 1825. In it, I proposed a general model for understanding how revolutions in one locality can spark revolutions in others.

This year, my Princeton colleagues Paul Starr and Julian Zelizer published a collection which, for obvious reasons, is very special to me: Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours. It is based on a conference that took place at Princeton in the fall of 2019 and examines my father’s legacy from both sociological and historical perspectives. That is to say, it asks how well his theories about such large subjects as ideology, post-industrial society and capitalism have stood up over the years, while also analyzing the role they played in his own day. Some of the essays are quite critical of him, but I found this surprisingly pleasing. It is a compliment to have people still arguing with a thesis, sixty years after it first appeared. My own contribution takes the form of a two-part memoir, looking at my father both as a Jewish thinker and as one of the leading “New York Intellectuals,” but in both cases written in a very personal vein.

In January, I have two more pieces appearing. The first is a bit of a departure for me. It is an essay on “American Exceptionalism” in a volume edited by my Princeton colleagues Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer (bis!) entitled Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. This one will get more attention than most edited collections. It’s being published by Basic Books, the contributors include some very prominent historians of the United States, and the volume itself doesn’t exactly disguise its political stance, or which “lies” are going to be debunked. Don’t expect favorable treatment in the Claremont Review of Books! My own essay first tries to show the absurdity of national “exceptionalism” as a category, and then looks at the surprisingly strange history of the term “American exceptionalism” itself.

Finally, I have an essay appearing in the second volume of the massive new series The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars, heroically edited by Bruno Colson and Alexander Mikaberidze. When complete, the three volumes will bring together close to 90 separate essays covering virtually every aspect of the wars, from strategy and tactics to culture and memory. My own essay is on the question of whether these wars can be seen as a ”total war.” When I first ventured into this territory in my 2007 book The First Total War, I provoked a little controversy, some very sharp criticism, and also took part in some productive debates (at least I thought so!). This new essay looks back on the issue, tries to clarify some of my arguments, and also offers response to some of my critics.