EUROPEAN/AMERICAN RELATIONS: WHO LEADS?
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pline: realistically, the only alternative they had to digesting it was throw–
ing the social science up in disgust, but how many have the courage to
do so after years of graduate school? To be an intellectual under the cir–
cumstances of anomic, perplexing, fluid American society requires an
acute intelligence, a powerful imagination, and an ability to disregard
inherited wisdom. What distinguishes the human brain from computers,
on the one hand, and laboratory animals, on the other, is the ability to
resist the flow of information from the outside at will, and to generate
information inside-what we may call imagination or creativity. Rats are
much better learners, on average, than human beings, and for this reason
much closer to computers than we are. And it is important to remember
that great creative geniuses such as Einstein and Michael Faraday in sci–
ence, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Dickens in literature were indifferent stu–
dents. But, when inherited wisdom, a set of learned maxims, defines
one's identity as a sociologist, historian, or economist, and one's social
position, one is likely to have a vested interest in it and be unable to
unlearn what one is taught. I once suggested to an eminent neuroscien–
tist, comparing his discipline to mine, that the trouble with social scien–
tists is that they have acquired a place on the campus without first going
through the trouble of developing a hippocampus.
The comforts of the academy had rather deleterious effects on Amer–
ican would-be intellectuals: since for a hundred years they competed
only among themselves, the acquisition of general education
(or
"cul–
ture" as it was called in the olden days) has become unnecessary for
them. The universities, therefore, have made American literati literally
illiterate. An American historian can go through life knowing no Euro–
pean history, a historian of the Russian Revolution never having read
Tocqueville's
Old Regime.
Many sociologists and political scientists
consider interest in history a crime, and economists seem to doubt its
very reality and certainly do not know what it is good for, except to
offer a living to economic historians. The knowledge of languages is
rare, even among those who do "comparative" work. Many senior pro–
fessors in the most distinguished universities do not read books, only
articles in professional journals, as a matter of principle. And America
leaves the interpretation and articulation of its culture to this group!
The perspective of the social sciences, limited from the outset by the
careerist preoccupations of its founders and the nature of their chosen
identity, is necessarily becoming more limited as the level of general lit–
eracy among them sinks . Indeed, they must resort to the "sympathetic
fallacy," of which David Landes accllses economists and economic his–
torians-taking what they know for what there is. This explains, among
