15: Journal of the History of Ideas
Interview with Dr. Warren Breckman, University of Pennsylvania, Co-executive Editor, October 2007
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
The subject of this installment of Periodical Radio is the Journal of the History of Ideas. This quarterly scholarly journal is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It is a forum for research in intellectual history. The journal defines intellectual history broadly, including the histories of philosophy, of literature and the arts, of the natural and social sciences, of religion, and of political thought. Each issue contains approximately eight research articles, plus a briefly annotated list of books received by the editors.
The Journal of the History of Ideas has arranged editing in a somewhat unusual way, having four Executive Editors. The are Anthony Grafton of Princeton, Martin J. Burke of the City University of New York, Ann E. Moyer of the University of Pennsylvania, and my guest, Dr. Warren Breckman. Dr. Breckman is associate professor of modern European intellectual and cultural history at the University of Pennsylvania.
Steve: Dr. Breckman, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Dr. Breckman: Thank you.
Steve: The Journal of the History of Ideas was founded by Arthur Lovejoy in 1940. Can you tell us about Dr. Lovejoy and his vision for the journal?
Dr. Breckman: Certainly. Arthur Lovejoy was an American who did most of his studies in America, but among other things, spent a considerable amount of time in Germany. In Germany he was exposed to the kind of grand tradition of the history of philosophy as practiced by the Germans. This was something that he brought back to America when he became professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. The idea of a history of ideas actually predates the journal. In roughly 1920, 1921 he created the History of Ideas Club, which brought together humanists, scientists, medical doctors, etc., all united really by a passion for the history of intellectual life. This was in some ways already a model for would later become the Journal of the History of Ideas. One of the really interesting things about the journal and its founding was that from the very beginning it was seen as thoroughly interdisciplinary. Lovejoy published a kind of manifesto in the first issue where he presents the history of ideas as almost a kind of synthetic discipline that can bind together the otherwise fragmented disciplines. So from its very inception, the journal has been seen as reaching across disciplines, looking at in some ways the foundational ideas of the disciplines themselves. It’s also been from its inception global in its reach, or at least in its ambition, and also global in its chronological reach. We publish articles from classic scholars on Greece and Rome, we publish things on China, India, etc., as well as Europe and America.
Steve: When I was perusing the journal, it seemed to me to be rather Eurocentric. Did I misread it? Is it still rather Eurocentric, and do you want to expand?
Dr. Breckman: As I said, in the manifesto that Lovejoy published in the first issue, he talked about a global history of ideas, and this has unfortunately to some extent a desire rather than a reality. We are really trying to correct this. The journal had been in the hands Donald Kelly, who’d been at Rochester, then moved to Rutgers. He did an absolutely wonderful job as editor. Four of us have taken over the journal, and we’ve had it now for just a little over two years. We are really committed to expanding its coverage, and doing that in a very aggressive way. One of the things that I think can accelerate that process is to bring people onto the editorial board, and that’s something that we’ve done already. So we’ve added a Chinese specialist, and we’ve got someone from Argentina who’s a Latin American scholar. We’ve added a colleague of mine at Penn who works on Southeast Asia. These are steps that can broadcast a message out to the larger academic community. Also by bringing people onto the editorial board we start to, in a sense, mobilize their networks. So hopefully that’s going to generate some sort of shift in the journal’s coverage, and to some extent it already has. For example, the editorial board member from Argentina has contributed a wonderful essay on a Brazilian thinker, Roberto Schwartz. Our Chinese intellectual historian is going to write a large review essay for us. Just yesterday I was looking at a very interesting article about a 20th century Chinese philosopher who actually did his Ph.D. at Columbia around 1910, and brought these American ideas back to his work in China, to try to update Confucianism. So hopefully that article will survive the review process and find its way into print. We are very committed to it, but it is in fact a slow process. There are some impediments that are beyond our control, I would say.
Steve: I think many people are a little bit confused, or have a murky idea, of just what a board of editors of a scholarly journal does. You’ve described how they actually do write some content for the journal. Could you expand a little bit for us, and explain the purpose and the function of the board of editors?
Dr. Breckman: Right. Well, I think that there are a couple of different key functions, maybe even three. One would be that they do provide us with a pool of available readers. We’ve got people in a wide range of fields, and therefore we’ve got some expertise we can draw upon. I want to return to that point. A second thing that they can do for us is simply advise us. We have an editorial meeting each year, and of course the editors, the actual four editors, are at the center of activity. But we are very interested in what our editorial board has to tell us. A third thing would be drumming up business, tapping their networks, and very importantly really emphasizing to our editorial board that we want them to have their ears open when they go to conferences. We want them to solicit things, we want them to charge up to the podium after a really great talk, and say, “We want your article." So those are the kinds of things the editorial board does for us. Now, circling back to that first point, which is that they can do a lot of the peer review reading for us. This is in fact shifting in our journal. It’s an interesting effect of the internet, in fact, because it used to be that a journal like the Journal of the History of Ideas would have thirty editors, and in the course of a year any one of those editors might have to read six or eight submissions and evaluate them for publication. What we’ve found is that through the internet, we can search out the best experts in the world on a specific subject, and approach these people through the internet and send them a submission, have an electronic file, and so forth. This has really produced wonderful results, because for one thing, if you approach an expert in a specific field, and say we’ve got an article right in your field, there’s a much greater chance that they’re going to accept the invitation to actually read the thing, because it’s in their interest. Secondly, we get excellent reports, really well informed reports. I’ve been an editorial board member, as well, and I do my best and everybody does their best. But the bottom line is, you often find yourself stretched way outside your real expertise. So we’ve found the internet has become a really useful tool for broadening our pool of available experts, and that has produced a little bit of a different dynamic with the editorial board.
Steve: Makes it more fluid?
Dr. Breckman: It makes it more fluid, the editorial board is utilized less. The bottom line is we utilize them less . . .
Steve: . . .for peer review. . .
Dr. Breckman: …for peer review. I mean, on the other side, we’re trying to actually utilize them more, by inviting them to actually contribute to the journal. Most of our editors have at some point published in the Journal of the History of Ideas, but what we’re looking for now are articles from our editors which wouldn’t necessarily go out to peer review, but would be commissioned articles, big synthetic articles about the state of a field, that kind of thing. That then becomes a way of reactivating the editorial board even as our practices in terms of peer review seem to be shifting through the internet.
Steve: Here at the College of Saint Rose, our faculty have been recently engaged in quite a lot of discussion regarding the meaning and value of interdisciplinary study. From your perspective, what’s the current state of interdisciplinary study in higher education?
Dr. Breckman: I think that interdisciplinarity is a very important value, you know, full stop. It’s an important value. I think there is a danger that people get rooted in a specific discipline with its own practices and its own set of priorities and its own way of seeing the world. Of course we all have to be specialists, and I think we all need to, in some ways, have an anchor in some specific field, and some specific set of practices. But I think our intellectual relevance diminishes the more anchored we are in our specific little academic world. So I think interdisciplinarity is a very important way of moving us out of that. One of the things I think is that interdisciplinarity is often defined selectively, depending on the academic and intellectual fashions of a certain time. For example, I would have to say as an intellectual historian long before I’d heard the word “interdiscipline”, I was interdisciplinary. I did a Bachelor of Arts where I did a double honors in History and English, and I felt that was interdisciplinary. Likewise, historians of ideas have often one foot in philosophy, one foot in history or art history, or what have you. But I think when people talk specifically about interdisciplinary studies, and the need for this, often it is driven by some more specific agenda where there is, in some ways, one kind of interdisciplinary study that is actually in mind, and other forms of interdisciplinary work get kind of overshadowed, if you see what I mean.
Steve: Sure.
Dr. Breckman: So I think it’s important to recognize we didn’t invent this in the last ten years, just because we’re talking about it, we didn’t invent it. Secondly, if we really value and interdisciplinary work, we have to recognize that it can take a lot of different forms, and unpredictable forms.
Steve: Do you think knowledge become too vast for anyone to truly master several disciplines?
Dr. Breckman: Um, I think it has become too vast. In my own work, my first book is on Karl Marx and the intellectual context of early nineteenth century Prussia. I’m now working on contemporary French thought, so 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s to the present. And even that move is considered a brave move. It’s a difficult move, and that’s even within the field of intellectual history. If you were really to try to, you know, let’s say really be serious about sociological method and study and also intellectual history, or you know, pick two quite disperse fields. This is a serious challenge. What I feel is that the world of knowledge has simply become too big. It became too big already 200 years ago. A figure like Goethe, the great German poet, looks pretty polymathic, but even he lamented the feeling of impossibility that the world of knowledge had just gone beyond anybody’s grasp. What I do feel though, is that we tend to be anchored firmly in some sort of intellectual landscape and set of practices or ways of viewing things, but that rather than that becoming in some ways a closed door, it can become an open window. I think we all need some kind of scaffolding or structure as we approach the world, as we approach complex bodies of knowledge. That scaffolding can be a flexible tool, or it could be a restriction, and I would like to believe it can be a flexible tool. I’ve found, for instance, intellectual history, and here I would very much agree with Arthur Lovejoy, I’ve found intellectual history to be a good tool for my own effort to grasp a lot material, a lot of phenomena that in some way escape my true expertise.
Steve: I’d like to ask a question that may be about a closed door. Does the system of tenure and promotion inhibit scholars in disciplines other than history and philosophy from submitting papers to the Journal of the History of Ideas?
Dr. Breckman: Well, I think that there are problems with the fact that disciplines tend to assign value to specific journals. I think that within the social sciences and humanities, probably economics is the most extreme. Any economist will say, here’s the list of the five best journals, and here’s number one, right through five, and there’s no question that number one is number one and number five is number five. If you want to submit a journal article, you start at number one and then you work your way down. In the humanities, this is just not the case. It would be very hard to say, in the historical field, Journal A is clearly the best and Journal C is ranked eighth. We just don’t think that way. But nonetheless, for example, if you’re an art historian seeking tenure, you want to publish in journals that will be clearly recognized by your senior colleagues as relevant journals in your field. So there is some restriction placed on people at that level.
Steve: As a result, do you get more papers from professors who are already tenured? Do you know?
Dr. Breckman: No, I would say we get--I think this is true of many of the journal editors I have talked with in the humanities would probably back this up--I would say the majority of our submissions actually come from younger scholars. I think it has to do with the fact that, if you are really far down the line, with a very rich publishing record, you generally don’t publish through the peer review process. You can be kept busy just fulfilling invited solicitations. Yes, we do get submissions from senior people, and from very prominent people, but I think that in some ways, for instance even speaking for myself at this point, the large percentage of my publishing is actually not through peer review any longer, it’s through invitations. Although, it’s always important to kind of keep your foot in the door with peer review publishing, as well. I think there’s a lot of incentive to keep doing it, even as you move into a later stage of career. But we get lots of submissions from assistant professors. We even get submissions from people who haven’t gotten their Ph.D.’s yet, and we periodically do publish pieces from people who haven’t finished the doctorate yet.
Steve: Well, that’s encouraging.
Dr. Breckman: Yes.
Steve: In many disciplines, published papers are often written by multiple authors. I notice in your journal virtually all the articles are by a single author. Why is that?
Dr. Breckman: It is the nature of a discipline like intellectual history. It’s pretty hard to divide the labor. It’s pretty hard to delegate. I have a research assistant, and I don’t know what to do with the person. Can I say to my undergraduate, could you please read this book by Hegel and report back to me? I mean, you know, I think as an intellectual historian, as a philosopher, as literary critic, you need to read these things, you need to let them gestate, you need to think synthetically, and associatively, and intuitively. It’s pretty hard to do that by committee or by delegation. So I think that’s really the reason.
Steve: Well, along those lines, it’s slightly unusual to have 4 executive editors. How do you divvy up the work?
Dr. Breckman: Right. The first thing I can say is I am absolutely grateful that there are four of us. I do tip my hat to my predecessor, Donald Kelly, and for that matter the other editors in the past. In some ways the number four is kind of an accident. There was a certain dynamic that developed in terms of the discussion of taking over the journal. We find that it’s a very effective thing. For one thing, we represent a range of fields. So my field is 19th and 20th Europe. Martin Burke, who teaches at the City University of New York is an Americanist, so he’s an expert on American culture and intellectual life, really from the colonial days to the present. Ann Moyer, who is my colleague at Penn, is a Renaissance historian. Then Anthony Grafton at Princeton is Renaissance and Early Modern scholar, and it is a godsend to have a number of people with a range of special knowledge, such that we can really handle pretty much anything that comes in, at least on the European side. If things are coming in on Asia or Latin American, then we are grateful to have our editorial board members. We divvy up the work in a very congenial way. Every submission that comes in gets read by two of us. So at our monthly editorial meeting, we take all the new submissions and we divide them up according to, as much as possible, according to our interests.
Steve: This is a face-to-face meeting?
Dr. Breckman: Yes, this is a face-to-face meeting. Our office is in Philadelphia, so we have our meetings in Philadelphia, and Princeton is only about 60 miles from Philadelphia, and Martin Burke, who teaches in NY, actually lives in Philadelphia, so it’s all very convenient. We divide up the papers so that every paper gets a reading by two of us. At the next meeting we compare notes and we decide if we want to proceed with an article or not. If we decide to proceed, then at that point it will go out to readers for the peer review process. About 70%, possibly even 80% of our submissions do not go out to readers. We actually have a pretty high bar right at the beginning. At that point we are very fortunate to have a superb managing editor, a full time managing editor, Robin Ladrach, who is really very, very competent, and is able then to, in a sense, steer the traffic from that point forward. Normally, if we read a submission, and we decide this is something that we want to proceed with, at our meeting we will have already made some suggestions about possible readers. So at that point the managing editor and our graduate assistant can then manage the correspondence, solicit the peer reviewer and make sure that he or she gets the piece, and kind of track the article from that point forward. At the other end of the process, the division is fairly flexible, in the sense that eventually the reports will come in, and we need to read the reports and decide how to proceed. To a certain extent, that work simply depends on who happens to drop by the office on a given day. You know, we all try to be in the office once a week, so inevitably on the editor’s desk there will be a couple of files with the reviews, the evaluations. Then there’s a decision made or at least a conversation opens between the editors as to whether we should be accepting the article outright, or requesting revisions, or perhaps rejecting the article based on the evaluations.
Steve: I’d like to change gears a little bit now and ask about the journal being published online. The Journal of the History of Ideas is available online in both JSTOR and in Project MUSE.
Dr. Breckman: Yeah.
Steve: Can you explain for our listeners the benefits of making your journal available through those venues?
Dr. Breckman: First off, having journals available through those venues really increases the availability to readers. The downside of all of this is that an undergraduate can go through a whole degree with scarcely setting foot in a library, which is a bit of a concern. But on the other hand, people are able to gain access to articles very, very readily. It has in fact become a major revenue source. Essentially, what’s happening to our journal, and I think it’s common to many, many journals, the number of subscribers we have to our print edition is going down. This is at one level a kind of worrying tendency, but it’s offset, at least at the financial level, by the fact that we’re getting more and more subscribers to the electronic. I think a lot of libraries find it advantageous to have the electronic. You know, they don’t have to worry about storage space, they don’t have to play steward to an ever increasing bulk of paper copies.
Steve: And we can make it available at 3 a.m. without us having to be here.
Dr. Breckman: Exactly! You know, there are all sorts enormous issues which are unresolved in terms of, for example, archiving these things. One of my colleagues in the Penn library has been put in charge of a task force at the University of Pennsylvania, just trying to explore the available technologies in terms of how do you really archive these digital records, such that they can be continually updated as the technologies change, that there are stable platforms that are nonetheless infinitely malleable as technology changes. That’s a problem for the technicians, it’s not something I could even begin to contribute to. But of course there are some longer range issues that have to be dealt with, even as we all are taking this full plunge into digitalization.
Steve: Yes, indeed. That is a big issue for librarians. It’s a very common topic of conversations at our conferences and in other venues. Do you think the journal will be published in print into the foreseeable future, or do you think perhaps during your time of being editor it will become online only?
Dr. Breckman: Well, we speculated about that. I think that there will come a time when we do not produce a paper copy, but certainly not in the foreseeable future, in the sense that we’re not talking concretely about this. But I think that no pun intended, but the writing is on the wall, or on the digital wall. I think journals will go increasingly to strictly online platforms. I think that insofar as anyone, say older than 30, grew up with books and paper and material objects, there is a lot of ambivalence about contemplating that scenario.
Steve: But the younger generation growing up reading things from the screen may not feel that way, right?
Dr. Breckman: That may be the case. They already in some ways don’t have a primary identification with paper copy. At least often when I talk to students, there doesn’t seem to be that same attachment to books, even if they like to read. I think that we older, slightly, I’m in my mid-40’s, you know, I’ve been a kind of a maniac book collector since I was a kid, it means an enormous amount to me. I remember for instance when I published my first article, having that print copy, that kind of magical transformation of your words onto the page. There it is, this product, and you know somehow it has its own life, and so forth. It’s saddens me to think that that will not be the case at some point in the future. One other concern about this that I have is I worry that it will have some negative impact on the quality of journals. I know that there are some online journals, there are of course journals at this point that don’t have a paper version, and I was talking to an editor of one of these, and he was saying, “We really don’t do any copy editing.” And I can see where, in some ways, the thing feels both more ephemeral and more changeable. But if you’re producing a paper copy and this thing is going to go into the library and at the end of the year be bound into a hardback volume and so forth, you’re kind of making this object for the ages.
Steve: Right.
Dr. Breckman: Right. There’s a craft, and there’s care, and there’s a slightly artisanal dimension to it. We labor over the copy editing, and send queries back to the author. We want to produce a pristine object, and I do worry that with this move to digital, that everybody in a sense sees it as I say, it’s ephemeral, and it’s changeable. So if there’s a mistake, you could always correct the mistake. But nobody ever corrects the mistakes, so they just go off into digital heaven.
Steve: Well Dr. Breckman, these are all very interesting topics, and I could talk to you about them for a great deal longer, but our half hour is up.
Dr. Breckman: That was quick.
Steve: It was. It was very interesting, I enjoyed speaking with you.
Dr. Breckman: Well, it was a great pleasure.
Note: The audio file for this interview was edited for length, to fit our 30 minute time limit. This transcript includes passages edited from the audio.