Scribble, Scribble, Scribble...*

Here’s a roundup of a few new publications of mine. The most recent, this weekend, is an op-ed in Le Monde about Donald Trump, the events in Los Angeles, and the military parade in Washington. In it, I point out that Trump has always been driven by the urge to project images of himself that are basically cartoonish adolescent fantasies: the larger-than-life tycoon, the suave playboy who can get any woman he wants… or the powerful political savior figure. I suggest that one of the historical figures he most resembles is Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, another democratically elected president who thought that winning the popular vote gave him the right to do whatever he wanted. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump” was probably too obvious a headline, but it’s the one I wanted.

A week and a half ago I had another op-ed, this one in The New York Times, on the subject of international enrollments at American universities. The general impetus for the piece came, of course, from the Trump administration’s various bullheaded moves against international students, especially at Harvard. More specifically, I was struck by the fact that two intellectuals from opposite ends of the political spectrum, the progressive historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and the conservative law professor Adrian Vermeule, argued on X, almost simultaneously, that the great expansion of international enrollments over the past few decades had come at the expense of American students. My immediate liberal reaction was to disagree, but the more I reflected on the issue, the more I thought they had a point. My essay in no way endorsed what the Trump administration has been doing, and it acknowledged the many benefits that international enrollments bring. Despite what some angry critics said, it in no way called for these enrollments to be ended. But it did plead for more attention to the tradeoffs involved.

The Times cut, for the sake of length, a section of the piece with some more personal reflections. In it, I noted that when I started in the History Ph.D. program at Princeton in 1985 (forty years ago—gah!), my cohort had just two international students out of seventeen. This past year, the entering cohort had ten out of twenty-one. Of my own first seventeen graduate advisees, only three were foreign. Of the eight most recent ones, four have come from abroad. These students have been terrific—an honor to advise. And it’s certainly a benefit to scholarship to put the resources of a wealthy American university at the disposal of the best students possible. The result has been some spectacularly good dissertations. But as a result of the shift, the competition has gotten stiffer for US applicants to our program, especially since most of the international applicants have done nothing but history since high school and have master’s degrees in the subject as well. The number of students whom we accept straight from an American BA has shrunk notably over the past few decades, and the number from liberal arts colleges and state universities even more so. The internationalization of history departments like mine has brought many very substantial benefits, Still, as we look to the future, and the possibility that international enrollments will grow even further, we should remember that despite the clear benefits, there is also a cost involved.

The third piece, in The New York Review of Books, is a long review of Sophia Rosenfeld’s brilliant new book The Age of Choice. Rosenfeld is that rarity among historians today—a thinker deeply familiar with contemporary philosophy and political theory who does not hesitate to use history to make normative arguments. She often engages with the work of Hannah Arendt, and, indeed, her work resembles Arendt’s in many respects. The new book is Rosenfeld’s most ambitious and important yet, a history of the theory and practice of “choice” over the past three centuries, with a particular focus on the way choice became, in her view, synonymous with freedom. It is wonderfully creative in its use of unusual source material (for instance, shopping advertisements and dance cards), and insightful in the way it centers women and gender in this key modern story (just think of the issue that has been most closely associated with “choice” in recent American history). In her conclusion, Rosenfeld puts in a plea for at least partially disassociating freedom from “value-neutral” choice and reinfusing it with a stronger moral content. In the review, I ask whether doing so would really be possible today, given the enormous disagreements over moral issues in our societies. But this question doesn’t take away from my appreciation of the book.

Finally, in the Spring issue of Liberties, I have a longish essay entitled “The Enlightenment, Then and Now.” It returns to some of the themes I’ve explored in recent academic articles, and in the lecture series I gave in Paris this spring, and that I hope to develop much more thoroughly in my current book project. But the main point I wanted to emphasize in this piece is that while our looming political darkness has understandably tempted many people to call for a “defense of the Enlightenment,” or a “return to the Enlightenment,” we should be careful. The Enlightenment was many things, not a single thing, and not all of it was admirable. Here’s what I think are the key sentences:

“We do not need to worship the Enlightenment as if it were a god we have failed. Most of the philosophes, despite their often-immense self-regard, would have been horrified at the idea. Condorcet, one of the last great Enlightenment writers, asserted that ‘it is easy to see how imperfect the analysis of men's intellectual and moral faculties still is,’ and predicted that his successors would move far beyond him. Thomas Jefferson memorably asked whether ‘one generation of men has a right to bind another?’ The question has implications for intellectual life as well as politics. We should be free to take from the Enlightenment what we find valuable and disregard the rest - to construct our own twenty-first-century Enlightenment rather than placing ourselves in thrall to an imagined eighteenth-century one.”

* From The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes: “The Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George III, permitted Mr. Gibbon to present him with the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. When the second volume of that work appeared, it was quite in order that it should be presented to His Royal Highness in like manner. The prince received the author with much good nature and affability, saying to him, as he laid the quarto on the table, ‘Another d-mn’d thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?’”