College and Research Libraries


Book Reviews 
Bender, Thomas. Intellect and Public Life: 

Essays on the Social History of Academic 
Intellectuals in the United States. Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 
1993. 179p. alk. paper $31.95 (ISBN 
0-8018-4433-9). 
"This is the history of human institu-

tions: first the forests, after that the huts, 
then the village, next the cities, and fi-
nally, the academies." So Vico wrote; 
Thomas Bender here gathers eight es-
says (four previously unpublished) that 
extend the story to the modem research 
university, providing a valuable back-
ground to the current debate on the use-
fulness (or harmfulness) of academic 
inquiry to public life. 

Though written over more than a de-
cade for a wide variety of audiences, the 
essays constitute a coherent project with 
two aims: First, to revise what Bender 
calls the "triumphalist" history of the 
rise of the research university and its 
associated professional disciplines. Sec-
ond, by examining the careers of a num-
ber of twentieth-century scholars who 
challenged both the hegemony of the 
disciplines and their isolation from the 
broader culture, to suggest that, indeed, 
the figure of the public intellectual is due 
for a revival. 

The book's first part, "Nineteenth 
Century of Origins of Academic Cul-
ture," treats a broad range of figures 
from a number of perspectives. From the 
eighteenth century until around 1840, 
American intellectual life was domi-
nated by urban elites whose primary 
orientation and loyalty were to place and 
class. In museums, lyceums, societies of 
useful knowledge, and a whole range of 
institutions not academic in the modern 
sense, this life was dominated by the 
principles of mutual instruction, pleasure, 
and civic improvement. Though elite, it 

446 

was inclusive: members of the learned 
professions, men of affairs public and 
private, and even tradesmen partici-
pated. Franklin and the many institu-
tions with which he was associated may 
be taken as paradigms, and the pattern 
was repeated in smaller centers away 
from the Atlantic seaboard. 

By 1840, under a host of pressures, 
among them the enormous growth and 
increasing diversity of the urban popu-
lation and the spread of Jacksonian no-
tions of democracy, this system began to 
break down. Its amateurish standards 
did not provide adequate validation to 
the work of those who saw themselves 
as intellectuals, nor was it successful in 
finding a broader audience. Attempts to 
re-center public culture were diverse: 
figures like Henry Ward Beecher, Walt 
Whitman, and for that matter, P. T. Bar-
num, sought to create a community of 
discourse where force of personality, not 
of argument, created authority. H. P. Tap-
pan proposed the creation of a new kind 
of urban university that would provide 
intellectual certification and leadership 
to a wide variety of more popular insti-
tutions. None of these attempts resulted 
in a stable forum for the conduct of social 
inquiry. 

It was only with the formation of pro-
fessional societies such as the American 
Historical Association and the American 
Economic Association, "communities 
without location," as Bender styles them, 
within the new graduate schools of the 
1880s that the situation stabilized. The 
new academics' loyalties were to the dis-
ciplinary communities that validated 
their work, not to the places where they 
performed it. Discourse was ordered, 
professional status secured, at the costs 
of intellectual overspecialization and of 
alienation from the life of the communi-



ties in which the new academics worked. 
Bender cites the founding president of 
Johns Hopkins, Daniel Coit Gilman, de-
scribing the university as a place to with-
draw from urban life into "the repose 
necessary for scholarship." 

The Kuhnian overtones of this largely 
convincing account, with its stresses on 
discontinuities, paradigm shifting, and 
validation are evident. Two points de-
serve emphasis: Bender's model is not 
evolutionary; Hopkins did not descend 
from Harvard. The earlier university 
was enmeshed in a completely different 
system of cultural production. And 
Bender stresses that there was nothing 
inevitable about the eventual outcome. 
Research universities seem natural to 
those of us who teach and work in them, 
but other alternatives were equally 
possible, and, to Bender, in many re-
spects preferable. 

Part II, "Twentieth Century Patterns," 
details some of the difficulties of the pro-
fessionalization of intellect. The focus is 
on New York, and on social scientists: 
E.R.A. Seligman, a member of the first 
generation of professional social scien-
tists and eventually editor of the monu-
mental Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences; 
educationist and philosopher John 
Dewey; and Charles Beard, constitu-
tional historian, municipal activist, and 
academic rebel. Because of his exem-
plary status as public intellectual, critic 
Lionel Trilling comes in for extensive 
and melancholy treatment. Less well-in-
tegrated into the themes of the book is a 
thinnish sketch of the Greenwich Village 
intellectuals associated with, among 
others, the magazine Seven Arts. Readers 
will be better served consulting Bender's 
recent New York Intellect for a picture of 
them. 

If Seligman was the consummate aca-
demic professional (not high praise in 
Bender's terms), Beard and Dewey ulti-
mately rebelled against the sterile stand-
ards of neutral expertise, quantifiable 
research topics, and the pretense of 
political independence that, for Selig-
man, embodied the virtues of the new 
social sciences. Bender makes a good 
case that these were simply the tools by 

Book Reviews 447 

which social scientists were able to es-
tablish their claim to be consulted by 
those in power. 

In the third, concluding, section, 
Bender acknowledges the nostalgic re-
publicanism of his account of the growth 
of the academy. In fact, at the founding 
moment of American graduate educa-
tion, the social sciences were conceived 
of as the means to rationalize civic life. It 
was only with the spread of higher edu-
cation that, instead of training public 
leaders like Woodrow Wilson and 
Theodore Roosevelt, academics began 
simply to clone themselves. But even at 
that early moment, the ideal of civic life 
was based, ultimately, on Florentine 
civic humanism, that is, on an historical 
model that could not, and cannot, 
simply be re-created. 

For Bender, the work of John Dewey 
represents a possible resolution of the 
split (an issue raised by Hannah Arendt) 
between academic and political truth. 
The former is transcendental and un-
changing, while the latter is necessarily 
of lesser order, contingent and mutable. 
Dewey essentially abandoned the Kan-
tian epistemological project and, in the 
historical process, sought publicly to 
make ever better, more secure, and more 
broadly shared truths. It is to this fun-
damentally democratic process that 
Bender urges academics to contribute. 

Although Bender, along with Richard 
Rorty and others, severely censures the 
academy for its hermetic self-absorp-
tion, there are signs that the situation 
may already be changing. Not only 
freakish figures like Camille Paglia (now 
writing a sex advice column for the 
glossy satirical magazine Spy) are in-
volved. Writers like Henry Louis Gates, 
Jr., appear in The New Yorker, where 
Bender's New York University (NYU) 
colleague Louis Menand is on leave as a 
consulting editor; and the recent an-
thology Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Mes-
sages from the American Universities 
(Penguin, 1993) shows that more aca-
demics are responding to the wake-up 
call sounded here. 

This is a rich and engaging book. Per-
haps its most serious weakness is that 



448 College & Research Libraries 

Bender nowhere systematically analyzes 
what he means by the public and the 
public sphere. Recent controversies over 
multiculturalism together with contem-
porary advances in the technologies of 
communication and persuasion make 
this a vexed matter indeed. Fortunately, 
the present work serves as a sort of 
parergon to Bender's more extensive ex-
amination of this question, shortly to be 
published under the title History and 
Public Culture.-David S. Sullivan, Stan-
ford University, Stanford, California. 

Sieber, Joan E., ed. Sharing Social Science 
Data: Advantages and Challenges. New-
bury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991. 168p. $46 
(ISBN 0-8039-4082-3). 
This concise and straightforward col-

lection of essays, written by leading 
authorities who create, document, dis-
seminate, and use social science data, 
builds on the earlier, seminal report of 
the Committee on National Statistics of 
the National Research Council, Sharing 
Research Data (National Academy Press, 
1985). Subsequent conferences focusing 
on social science data sponsored by the 
National Science Foundation (NSF) and 
the American Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science in 1988 and 1989 
inspired much of the work in this volume. 

Major archives that organize and dis-
seminate social science research data 
have existed since the 1940s, gaining in 
strength during the 1960s when the In-
teruniversity Consortium of Political 
and Social Research (ICPSR) was 
founded at the University of Michigan. 
However, promotion of data sharing has 
intensified since the mid-1980s, by 
which time most funding agencies, in-
cluding the NSF, systematically required 
investigators to deposit their primary 
data at a public archive within one year 
of project completion. The NSF require-
ment now even extends to data gathered 
by graduate students on NSF-funded fel-
lowships. New policies intended to ad-
vance open scientific research coincided 
with more widespread access to comput-
ers, facilitating data collection, analysis, 
and distribution. The convergence of 
these trends has brought social science 

September 1993 

data increasingly into the mainstream of 
scholarly research. Readers familiar 
with the Research Libraries Group's 
1989 assessment of information needs in 
the social sciences will find that Sharing 
Social Science Data reinforces and illumi-
nates many of its findings. 

Editor Joan E. Sieber, who is professor 
of psychology at the University of Cal-
ifornia, Hayward, has assembled a coher-
ent and compelling case for data sharing, 
concentrating on the need for archived 
data for current research interests. The first 
part of Sharing Social Science Data uses 
three carefully selected case studies to il-
lustrate how different disciplinary trends 
and methodological perspectives in-
fluence scholarly research, drawing on 
investigations in demography, anthro-
pology, and criminal justice. These ex-
amples document the complex issues in 
contemporary social science research 
and are worthy of close consideration. 

V. Jeffery Evans describes a number of 
innovative hybrid projects that blend 
demographic constructs with various 
behavioral and social science methods of 
data collection, resulting in multilevel 
research designs that answer multidisci-
plinary questions. The strengths and 
weaknesses of data sharing in anthro-
pology are ably presented by Douglas R. 
White. White writes: 

Data sharing occurs in anthropology 
when there are shared theoretical, 
methodological, and data collection 
paradigms such as in archaeology 
and physical anthropology, and in 
areas of sociocultural or develop-
ment anthropology ... 
He demonstrates how comparative 

data sets from diverse disciplines like 
environmental science, historical demo-
graphy, and development studies permit 
anthropologists to test hypotheses about 
human populations in new ways. From 
his perspective further progress hinges 
on standardizing documentation, fully 
implementing a computer workstation 
COJ;lcept that "combines advanced meth-
odologies with ease and reliability in data 
management," and maintaining mecha-
nisms for cost-effective, international dis-
semination of information.