2018 Spring General Meeting
Todd H. Weir

The selection for the 2017 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is Todd H Weir, for his book Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: the Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Dr. Weir’s book is a subtle, extensively researched study of a complicated set of historical and philosophical questions. What is secularism, as distinct from secularization? When does a world-view become a form of faith rather than an array of opinions? Is atheism a kind of creed?

The work explores these issues in a particular context, that of Prussia, and especially Berlin, in the nineteenth century. It is ‘modest’, as its author says, in its detailed concentration on ‘somewhat marginal social movements’, like Free Thought, Free Religion, Ethical Culture and Monism, and ‘ambitious’ in its demonstration of secularism’s hitherto neglected role in Germany history, traversing the revolutions of 1848, the establishment of the unified nation, and the Second Reich.

The word ‘confession’ is ordinarily used to identify a declared and organized religious grouping. The three recognized confessions of nineteenth century Germany were Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. Dr. Weir takes secularism, in its many different shapes and forms, as a notional fourth type, providing ‘an angle of observation’ that allows him to look without simplification at the ‘dynamics of dissent’. ‘Confessional dissent was necessarily political’, Professor Weir says, and shows that anticlericalism was ‘a force not just against but also within the religious sphere’. Attacks on Catholicism were sometimes pro-Protestant and sometimes more broadly anti-Christian; and Hitler could borrow the language of secularism to make the National Socialists sound more orthodox than the Pope: ‘If the word of the Lord is authoritative, then we are the best’. Dr. Weir does not argue that atheism is a creed, but he does suggest that Free Thought and other movements have often occupied the social and political positions of a religion. This is why he is able to write of a ‘lasting confessionalization of German politics’.

Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth Century Germany makes a large contribution to our understanding of an important and difficult period in recent history.

Todd H. Weir is an associate professor, History of Christianity and Modern Culture, at the University of Groningen. He received his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Modern European History at Columbia University.

The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded annually to the author whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history. Established by a former student of Jacques Barzun, the prize honors this historian and cultural critic who was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984.

The selection committee consisted of Michael Wood (chair), Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University; Robert B. Pippin, Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago; and Frank H. Stewart, Professor Emeritus, Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

2005 award presented in April 2007

Jacob Soll

The American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded to Jacob Soll for his book, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism, published by University of Michigan Press in 2005. It is a superb example of contemporary book history, printing history and influence. In this book Jacob Soll follows the typographical fortunes and receptions of the French translation of Machiavelli's The Prince and its various and changing meanings into the Enlightenment. In the course of his researches, especially on erudite textual criticism, he makes valuable contributions both to the history of reading as a social and political practice and as a modern medium of subversive as well as absolutist political thought.

Jacob Soll received his Diplôme d'Études Approfondies from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1993. He began his doctoral research in Paris, but eventually moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge University, where he finished his Ph.D. in 1998. In 1997, while completing his doctorate, he began lecturing in the history department at Princeton University. He moved to Rutgers University in 1999, where he is currently an associate professor of history.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of chairman Donald R. Kelley, James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University, Glen W. Bowersock, Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University.

2006 award presented in April 2007

Fritz Stern

The American Philosophical Society’s Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded to Fritz Stern in recognition of his book Five Germanys I Have Known, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006. “We all seek traces of a tangible past,” Fritz Stern writes in Five Germanys I Have Known, “and we try to fill them with life.” This sentence describes the aspirations both of personal memory and of professional history, and in this incomparable book Stern brings them magisterially together. Because he is such a gifted and disciplined historian, his very memories acquire the quality of evidence, carefully weighed and sifted, never over-interpreted. And because the central thread of memories in the book is his own – from the destruction of the world of European Jewry to the reunification of Germany – history here takes on a discreetly compelling personal accent. When Stern tells us that “the German roads to perdition...were neither accidental nor inevitable,” and that he finally feels, returning as an honored son to his German birthplace now become a part of Poland, that he has been given back a part of his past, we know we are reading not only an elegant memoir and not only a distinguished work of history, but a unique evocation of a haunted and haunting culture, an intimate analysis of that enduring Germany that has so altered our world.

One of America's best known historians, Fritz Stern is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where he has taught since receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1953. The author of books such as The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the German Ideology (1961), The Responsibility of Power (1967) and Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder and the Building of the German Empire (1977), Dr. Stern also served on the editorial board of Foreign Affairs for many years. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1988.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of chairman Donald R. Kelley, James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University.

2007 award presented in November 2008

Thomas E. Burman

The American Philosophical Society awarded the 2008 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History to Dr. Thomas E. Burman for his book, Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560. The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Thomas E. Burman is Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1991. He received his Ph.D. in medieval studies from the University of Toronto in 1991. In 1995 he received a research grant from the Society.

Exceedingly original in its deployment of source material, its analyses and its conclusions, Thomas Burman’s Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560 is a major contribution that is changing the way medieval and Renaissance history of Muslim-Christian relations is written. A learned and revisionist study of the knowledge of the Qur’an in the West in the later Middle Ages, it has its origins in the Latin translations found primarily in early printed books. Whereas past historians have leaned heavily on polemical treatises against Islam written by Christian scholars, Burman’s largely un-mined sources tell a different story: that the reading of the Qur’an in Western Europe was highly complex, with scholars of the period immersed in a wide range of grammatical, lexical and interpretive problems presented by the text. Burman considers these subjects in the historical and comparative context of Christian-Muslim relations and cultures and modern Qur’anic scholarship. The result is a hands-on picture of how Europeans read the sacred text of Islam.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of chairman Donald R. Kelley, James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2008 award presented in November 2009

Dianne Sachko Macleod

The American Philosophical Society awarded the 2008 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History to Dianne Sachko Macleod for her book, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects - American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 (University of California Press, 2008).

The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Dianne Sachko Macleod earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkely in 1981. That same year she joined the faculty of Art History at the University of California, Davis, where she has recently become Professor Emerita.  Her other works include Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (1996) and (co-edited with Julie F. Codell) Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (1998).

Dianne Sachko Macleod’s Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects - American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 is a scholarly and beautifully illustrated study of 19th-century wealthy American women collectors and their role in shaping the cultural taste of their age and afterwards in painting and the fine arts, with full emphasis on their post-Bellum political involvements, the "gendering" of the modern museum, and the strategies of hiding and later exhibiting their acquisitions. The book is particularly original in its sympathetic and detailed expression of the range of collectors under consideration beyond the familiar and famous horizons.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2009 award presented in November 2010

Daniel Hobbins

The American Philosophical Society awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize for the best book in cultural history published in 2009 to Professor Daniel Hobbins in recognition of his book Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning. The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Daniel Hobbins earned his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University on Notre Dame. He researches and teaches the history of medieval Europe from 500-1500 at the Ohio State University, where he is an associate professor.  His specific interests include the cultural and intellectual history of northwestern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with special emphasis on universities, written culture, the Hundred Years' War, Joan of Arc, and, as evidenced by this latest work, Jean Gerson.

Dr. Hobbins' book takes a look at one of the most powerful theologians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Jean Gerson.  Gerson, who lived from 1363 to 1429, was an impressive player in Western Europe during a time of war, plague, and schism.  His life and work, as seen through a theological lens, have not harmonized with the modern understanding of this era, leaving a puzzle for historians.  Dr. Hobbins attempts to fill this gap in knowledge by arguing for a new understanding of Gerson as a scholar taking advantage of this period of rapid expansion in written culture.  More broadly, Dr. Hobbins casts Gerson as a mirror of the complex cultural and intellectual shifts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  Gerson contrasts with earlier theologians due to his more humanist approach to reading and authorship; indeed, his attempts to reach a broader public with publications in both Latin and French garnered him an international audience.  However, the book avoids painting a triumphalist picture of this transitional period, not dissimilar to our own.  Instead, Dr. Hobbins portrays Gerson as the embodiment of a period of creative and dynamic growth which necessitated and eventually produced new technologies of the written word.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2010 award presented in April 2012

Peter E. Gordon

The American Philosophical Society awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize for the best book in cultural history published in 2010 to Professor Peter E. Gordon in recognition of his book Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Peter Gordon received his Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Harvard College Professor, the Amabel B. James Professor of History, and co-founder and co-chair of the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History at Harvard University. His first book, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, Between Judaism and German Philosophy (2003), won several awards, including the Salo W. Baron Prize from the Academy for Jewish Research for Best First Book, the Goldstein-Goren Prize for Best Book in Jewish Philosophy, and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for Best Book in Intellectual History. Specializing in modern European Intellectual History from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, he works chiefly on themes in Continental philosophy and social thought in Germany and France in the modern period.

Dr. Gordon’s book is an in-depth study of the famous 1929 public debate between two major philosophers of the past century – Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger – that took place in Davos, Switzerland. Their confrontation over the mission of philosophy in the wake of Kant, neo-Kantianism, Husserl, and the crisis of European thought after World War I acquired an allegorical significance over the years, as if it marked an ultimate and irreparable rupture in 20th century Continental thought. Cassirer represented an anthropological turn to culture and "symbolic forms," while Heidegger argued for a post-metaphysical existential phenomenology – and this debate about what it means to be human has proceeded along these lines down to the present day. Peter Gordon has provided us with rich historical detail and skillful analysis of all that surrounded this debate.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2011 award presented in November 2012

Barbara Ann Naddeo

The American Philosophical Society awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize for the best book in cultural history published in 2011 to Professor Barbara Ann Naddeo in recognition of her book Vico and Naples – The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory. The award was presented by Keith Thomson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Barbara Ann Naddeo is currently an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Master’s Degree Program in History at the City College of New York and The Graduate Center. She specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe, especially Italy. In particular, she is interested in the advent of the metropolis and its significance for the social sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Vico and Naples is an intellectual portrait of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) that reveals the politics and motivations of one of Europe’s first scientists of society. According to the commonplaces of the literature on the Neapolitan, Vico was a solitary figure who, at a remove from the political life of his larger community, steeped himself in the recondite debates of classical scholarship to produce his magnum opus, the New Science. Naddeo shows, however, that at the outset of his career Vico was deeply engaged in the often-tumultuous life of his great city and that his experiences of civic crises shaped his inquiry into the origins and development of human society.

Barbara Ann Naddeo’s fine study of Vico’s social ideas, unlike virtually all other works, concentrates not just on speculation about his formal ideas but on the cultural context, showing that his book, New Science, moves beyond his earliest work by establishing that his social theories “constitute a discrete field of knowledge” that expands the western intellectual tradition.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.