Steven Marcus
Humanities from classics to cultural studies:
notes toward the history of an idea
Those intellectual pursuits and aca-
demic organizations that we think of
as constituting the humanities are to-
day undergoing a course of change that
is entirely in consonance with their
historia. The idea of the humanities, en
point of fact, ½rst appeared in the Unit-
ed States early in the twentieth century
and has altered greatly in meaning ever
desde, thanks to the intellectual, social,
cultural, and educational developments
that have taken place over the last hun-
dred years.
These alterations are to be understood,
in the ½rst instance, as parts of the evo-
lution of the American university and
Steven Marcus is George Delacorte Professor of
the Humanities, Emeritus, at Columbia Universi-
ty. A specialist in nineteenth-century literature and
crítica, he has published works such as “Dick-
ens: From Pickwick to Dombey” (1965), "El
Other Victorians” (1966), “Engels, Manchester,
and the Working Class” (1975), and “Freud and
the Culture of Psychoanalysis” (1984). Él era
also instrumental in founding the National Hu-
manities Center. Elected a Fellow of the American
Academy in 1974, Marcus currently serves as Edi-
tor of the American Academy.
© 2006 por la Academia Americana de las Artes
& Ciencias
college system beginning after the end
of the Civil War and accelerating steadi-
ly as the century ended. At the macro-
level of ideal-typical structure, that set
of institutions in its historical formation
borrowed something from each of the
three great European systems from
which it also departed. From the nine-
teenth-century German universities, él
adapted Humboldt’s animating concep-
tion of dedication to original research,
combined (often secondarily) with in-
estructura. From Oxford and Cambridge,
it secured the notion of the undergrad-
uate residential college, in which teach-
ing included, ideally, educating the so-
cial and elevating the moral character of
privileged young men, y donde, en un
community of learning, community of-
ten counted for as much as, if not more
than, aprendiendo. And from the universities
of France, the American institutions im-
ported the idea of training young, mid-
dle-class men to be of½cials of the state
and servants of society: in America, el
land-grant colleges, numerous state uni-
versidades, and even some normal schools
took over the functions that bore upon
the formation of middle- and upper-
middle-level elites at regional, estado, y,
occasionally, national levels.
This three-part system that began to
evolve in the latter half of the nineteenth
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Steven
marco
sobre el
humanidades
century combined in a spectrum of con-
½gurations a hierarchy of undergraduate
colegios, graduate research schools and
institutes, and technical training centers.
Its fully developed form, attained in the
second half of the twentieth century, es
most distinctly visible in the pyramidal
system of institutional distinctions and
interchanges that occur among the dif-
ferent elements of the California state
system of postsecondary education. En
the top are the eight or nine grand uni-
versity campuses–comprehensive re-
search universities–of which at least
two, Berkeley and ucla, are of the high-
est standing. Beneath them is the state
university (formerly the state college)
sistema, doing its own multifarious aca-
demic and cultural work, and sustaining
a variety of relations with both the great
campuses and the institutions of the
third level, the community colleges,
which exist throughout the state and
aspire to an astonishing range of func-
ciones.
A century or more ago, most institu-
tions of higher education rested on re-
ligious foundations, and they served,
among other things, to reproduce spe-
ci½c social and cultural governing
grupos. Pressure to change the inter-
nal structure of these institutions came
from multiple sources. Prominent
among them was the intractably grow-
ing importance of the natural sciences,
which were modifying the shape of
el mundo, intellectually and materially.
Spiritually as well, the natural sciences
represented a challenge: at worst, ellos
seemed morally subversive; a lo mejor,
morally indifferent. There was also the
increasingly secular character of Amer-
ican institutional, civic, and cultural
vida, fueled, en parte, by the pragmatic de-
mands of a boisterous economy and a
clamorous society. Además, allá
era, as a substantial corollary to such
practical alterations, an undeniable gen-
eral decline in the intellectual authority
of religion.
Al mismo tiempo, a widespread move-
ment away from the mandated study of
the classical languages and literatures
took place: ½rst, classics was no longer
a requirement for entrance into the more
established undergraduate colleges; como-
wise, required courses at the lower colle-
giate level in Greek and Latin began to
erode. En breve, the classics, junto con
the classicists, were losing their authori-
ty. Segundo, there was a similar decline in
the teaching of ‘moral philosophy.’ Tra-
ditionally, this course had been a cap-
stone requirement for graduating sen-
iors; it was also something of a tradition
that it was taught by the president of the
college, who had customarily, if not uni-
versally, been a clergyman. And third,
there was the growing consequence in
the last quarter of the century of a new
undergraduate curriculum: a course
of study based more on the idea of free
electives than on the notion of a pre-
scribed sequence of courses or even of
a distribution of courses among a group
of stipulated ½elds.
The result was a widely felt need for
some secular substitute for the religion-
based moral education that had hereto-
fore been a central ideological charge of
instituciones de educación superior. Fue
within this fraught context that the no-
tion of ‘the humanities’ ½rst began to
circulate within America’s institutions
de educación superior.
The humanities as we think of them
today–the formal, organized study of
language and literature, philosophy and
historia, art and music–did not exist in
the late nineteenth century. Por supuesto,
all of these subjects were taught at the
tiempo, but each was considered an inde-
pendent domain, properly organized as
16
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its own department of knowledge. Fue
in these years that the ½rst specialized
departments of philosophy and of reli-
gion appeared. Revealing how rapidly
the specialization of knowledge was tak-
ing place was the phenomenal growth
throughout the 1890s of new scienti½c
and professional organizations, con
new journals for newly organized stud-
es (with hitherto unheard-of nomen-
clatures), as well as the equally speedy
expansion of the newer social sciences,
which achieved autonomy during the
same decade (the ½rst department of an-
thropology in America was founded at
Columbia in 1896).
When the term humanities was used in
these years, as it occasionally was, it re-
ferred to the organized study of Greek
and Latin classics. But even here, spe-
cialization was the order of the day. Y-
der the influence of the dominant Ger-
man paradigm, classicists, especially the
younger members of the profession, ser-
gan to undertake new kinds of research,
observe new standards of scholarly ex-
actitude and expertness, and honor new-
ly ‘scienti½c’ goals and methods in the
study of philology.
Como resultado, some senior classicists be-
gan to think of themselves as members
of an embattled cultural patriciate–
which they in fact were. Distrustful of
democracy, resentful of scienti½c meth-
od, made anxious by the secular spirit
of a crescent modernity, indifferent or
hostile to the immigrant millions disem-
barking on what they regarded as right-
fully their native shores, they conceived
of themselves as the custodians of a civi-
lization under siege from alien, if not
extraterrestrial, forms of life.
In a period of headlong change, el
older classicists represented continuity,
for they were almost uniformly oriented
toward the past. Such a circumstance is
particularly salient if unremitting social
and cultural flux brings about not only
growth but also dislocation, fragmen-
tation, an increasingly rare½ed and ab-
struse intellectual division of labor, y
specialization without a palpable sense
of a conceptual whole. Hence there arose
a tendency to look to what was occasion-
ally called ‘the humanist tradition’ (con
virtually no one quite knowing what it
era) for cultural orientation and guid-
ance. The historical past of Greek, Ro-
hombre, and Renaissance ‘greats,’ the clas-
sical record of these men and their
deeds, seemed to embody a moral as
well as an intellectual set of assurances.
In the name of Culture, these older clas-
sicists promoted the humanist tradition
as an educational ideal of gentlemanli-
ness, a rather genial spirituality and anti-
materialism. But their influence was lim-
ited. Younger philologists, and most stu-
dents of philosophy, literature, Y arte,
pledged allegiance, not to a bygone ideal
of cultivation, but rather to the eminent-
ly modern ideals of science and system-
atic research.
Como consecuencia, few scholars were giv-
ing much thought to ‘the humanities’ as
the twentieth century began. The elev-
enth edition of the Encyclopedia Britanni-
ca (1910–1911), Por ejemplo, does not
contain any article on ‘the Humanities.’
There is, sin embargo, an entry on “Human-
ismo,” which it de½ned as a Renaissance
movement opposed to the “medieval
tradition of scholastic theology and phi-
losophy” and involved in the rediscovery
of the Greek and Latin classics. One will
also ½nd in the relevant tertiary litera-
ture of the period mentions of “Litterae
Humaniores,” the Oxford curriculum in
Latin and Greek literature and philoso-
phy. There are also stray references here
and there to the curious fact that at Scot-
tish universities the professorship of
Latin bore (and still bears) the title “Pro-
Humanities:
notes to-
ward the
history of
an idea
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Dædalus Spring 2006
17
Steven
marco
sobre el
humanidades
fessor of Humanity.” And enquiry in-
to dictionaries of the period yields the
½nding that they de½ned the plural form
of the noun humanity as “the generic
term for the classics.”
How uncertain and precarious was
the usage of the term humanities is evi-
dent in a passage from a Phi Beta Kappa
address, delivered at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1902:
The humanities . . . I suppose that these
words call up to the minds of many of us
who are not wholly unlettered, a thing in
some manner connected with the study
of the classics, a something opposed to
science and to the study of nature, a some-
thing very impractical and very desirable
to possess, you do not lose bread and but-
ter by it; a thing much talked of at com-
mencements, y, felizmente, for the most
part, forgotten meanwhile. En efecto, el
popular conception of the humanities is
. . . not so much a de½nite conception as an
ineffaceable impression that there really
are such tongues, and that it is a very dis-
agreeable thing to have much to do with
a ellos. The humanities! The very term is
redolent of times long gone and smacking
of generations before the last. Beside glit-
tering, new-minted epithets like “sociolo-
gy,” “criminology,” and “degeneracy,” the
very word “humanities” looks dim and
faded in this new century.
This is a telling passage–and it raises
an obvious question. How did ‘the hu-
manities’ lose its association with the
conservativism of old-fashioned classi-
cists, and become instead a comprehen-
sive term that described a group of aca-
demic disciplines distinguished in con-
tent and method from the physical, bio-
logical, and social sciences?
The change began early in the twenti-
eth century, when younger scholars of
classical literature, together with their
colleagues in philology, philosophy, lit-
erature, historia, arte, and music, began
to use the word humanities as a general
term to refer to what bound their inqui-
ries loosely together. Still, up until 1930,
the use of this term in this way was in-
termittent and inconsistent. A veces
it implied everything that was not a sci-
ence (but that understanding would ex-
clude a good deal of important humanis-
tic scholarship itself ), and sometimes it
meant any study that had no immediate
utility. Only gradually did it take on the
sense that we accept and assume today.
From the outset, the term was loosely
inclusive–as when, en 1919, the Ameri-
can Council of Learned Societies (acls)
included in its titular self-description the
words “devoted to humanistic ½elds.”
Four years later, the range of relevant
½elds was dramatically narrowed when
a number of disciplinary organizations
seceded from the acls in order to found
the separate and autonomous organiza-
ción, the Social Science Research Coun-
cil.
The term humanities effectively enters
the academic taxonomy only after 1930,
when at the University of Chicago a
general reorganization replaced the Fac-
ulties of Arts and Letters with the Divi-
sion of the Humanities. Similarmente, en
1936, Princeton initiated an undergradu-
ate interdisciplinary “Special Program
in the Humanities.” Meanwhile, en 1936
–1937, Columbia instituted the path-
breaking freshman sequence in the hu-
manities, a mandatory and interdepart-
mentally taught curriculum, which grew
out of its predecessor in contemporary
civilization and offered a reading list
of literary, philosophical, and religious
texts from Homer to Goethe. And at
Yale and Harvard, the humanities ap-
peared a few years later as one of the
subject groups in their distribution re-
quirements. These courses, sequences,
groupings of subjects, and registries of
18
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requirements (and there were similar
curricular arrangements being installed
at Stanford, berkeley, and then by both
simultaneous inspiration and rapid
percolation at many other institutions)
were the instructional infrastructure
of what was to become a new institu-
tional and intellectual context, linking
the work in languages and literature,
historia, philosophy, linguistics, religión,
art and music history, and the so-called
softer side of the social sciences. In oth-
er words, only in the 1930s and 1940s
does the idea of, as well as the term, ‘the
humanities’ begin to be deployed with
regular frequency and with the relative
speci½city of reference to the disciplines
that we apply it to today.
Does this history imply that the hu-
manities were, en general, a residual
and merely organizational (not to say
administrative) categoría? Does it imply
that the humanities were what were left
standing after the social sciences hived
themselves off and swarmed off to meet
their manifest destiny? Are the humani-
ties the funeral baked meats coldly fur-
nishing forth the marriage tables for
otro, more up-to-date intellectual un-
dertakings?
Well, yes and no. But mostly no.
What this history does show is that the
humanities are essentially a modern in-
vention, not the legacy of a longstand-
ing tradition. De este modo, when the authors of
General Education in a Free Society, a Har-
vard Red Book published in 1945, estafa-
½dently claimed, “Tradition points to
a separation of learning into the three
areas of natural science, social studies,
and the humanities,” they were talking
nonsense, for they were summoning
forth a tradition that did not exist before
la década de 1930.
Además, the tradition thus conjured
up proved to be relatively short-lived.
The war years had brought an influx
of European refugee scholars and such
paradigmatic achievements as Erich
Auerbach’s Mimesis–a magisterial syn-
thesis that made the modern idea of
the humanities plausible. Al mismo
tiempo, the experience of the war years
underlined the fragility of the human-
ist ideal. By the 1950s, scholars like Lio-
nel Trilling and journals like Partisan Re-
view had rallied to the defense of the hu-
manities, understood now as an imper-
iled but essential bulwark against bar-
barism.
As cultural studies began to emerge
in the 1960s and after as a broad, reshap-
ing tendency within the humanities, el
organizational model customarily pur-
sued was that of the interdisciplinary
programs of American studies, muchos
of which had gotten underway them-
selves in the late 1940s and 1950s. Semejante
innovations began frequently as move-
ments within disciplines and depart-
mentos. They then typically branched
out into interdepartmental explorations,
faculty seminars, interdisciplinary team-
taught seminars, and then largely under-
graduate courses of study. Including lit-
erature, historia, art history, law, sociolo-
gy, anthropology, and whatever else has
seemed appropriate, such programs have
regularly been the organizational para-
digm and umbrella for cultural studies.
The titles and interests of such programs
are now too numerous to list, pero ellos
include prominently African American
estudios, women’s studies, ethnic stud-
es, postcolonial studies, New Histori-
cist studies, and gay and lesbian studies.
Ellos son, as the saying goes, donde el
action has been, and it isn’t dif½cult to
see why–they are doing something in-
trinsically right, however much one may
want to hold concretely and speci½cally
in reserve.
Humanities:
notes to-
ward the
history of
an idea
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Dædalus Spring 2006
19
Steven
marco
sobre el
humanidades
Two large influences are present in
the family history of this latest develop-
mento. First is the untimely return of
Marxism, a particularly awkward mat-
ter in a post-Marxist world. The reaf-
½rmation of Marxism as a program in
the humanistic academy, when it is for
the historical moment dormant or in
an expired state almost everywhere else,
creates a dif½cult situation for its more
perceptive adherents (and tends as well
to make some of their avowed radicalism
appear quaint rather than subversive).
Además, the Marxian universalist
perspective does not accord comfortab-
ly with those anti-Enlightenment, anti-
Eurocentric, anti-American, and anti-
University sentiments that often seem
to drive certain of these recent academic
cultural subgroupings.
The second such flow of influence is
in some measure connected with the
½rst, though it is not immediately or
solely derived from it. I am referring to
the general notion of the cultural con-
struction of knowledge. This is a pow-
erful and useful conception both in
theory and application. It has itself a di-
versity of af½liative roots: it has origi-
nary leadings in certain Marxist dealings
with ideology, in cultural anthropology
as a whole, in a number of the larger mo-
tions of nineteenth-century historicist
modes of thought, and in the sociology
of knowledge. Precisely because it is so
strong an instrument of analysis, Tiene
to be employed with considerable tact
and urbanity–which, unfortunately, él
often is not. For it is only one moderate-
ly short intellectual step from the meas-
ured historical relativism of this per-
spective to the lamentable reductionism
of a considerable portion of identity pol-
itics, the assertion that one’s personal
or group situation–class, carrera, or gen-
der–determines the substance of one’s
thoughts and beliefs. And from this
point it is merely one step again to
the claim that ‘everything is political’
–that one’s position, ubicación, or site
determines all arguments and convic-
ciones, and that genuine contentious
discussion is, en efecto, pointless. O,
rotated to yet another side, the belief
that the political bearing of a work of
literature is the most important thing
about it, or that such a work is foremost
merely another text in some historical
negotiation over power, is equally ruin-
ous. Just as stifling is the construction-
ist argument in an extreme form–that
since all knowledge is socially or cul-
turally constructed, no transcontextu-
al validity is possible. That remark is
as axiomatic as the claims it condemns.
How damaging such arguments can be
are visible in certain quarters of some
American law schools.
Yet despite such serious drawbacks
and dubious intellectual groundings, I
believe we are undergoing another shift
in the internal con½guration of the dis-
ciplines that constitute the humanities.
Historia, cultura, literary analysis, y
other thick pursuits, now that grand the-
ory has receded, have been let in again
–through the back door, por así decirlo. Él
no lo hará, I suspect, be ultimately fatal
that the impulses that ½rst moved some
of the designers of these new initiatives
and programs were overtly political in
ways that allowed ideological leanings
and purposes to compromise the schol-
arly studies that they undertook. Qué
is important in this connection is that
a new range of topics and themes has
been legitimately started, that new cul-
tural and historical materials are being
brought forward for discussion and
análisis. To be sure, we are not out of
the ideological woods yet; some of the
more heated opposing groups are still
having it out, ensuring more unpleasant
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scenes and consequences. (Think of
what might happen in legal studies.)
But there is a sense abroad that the most
intense moments of acrimony may be
pasado, that some settling is taking place,
and that pitched battle has given way,
if not to peace, then to smaller guerilla
actions and even, here and there, a
armed, if exhausted, truce. Most of all,
there is a growing sense of need for new
intellectual departures and an intuition
as well that the connections and discon-
tinuities between generations of teach-
ers and scholars need attention and re-
pair, that we may have lost generations
of academics as well as of writers and
artists, and that this reckoning has yet
to be made.
We may hence in this spacious con-
text choose to regard what are known
as cultural studies largely as residues
of ideological movements, but residues
that have been progressively assimilated,
in the customary American way, into the
general intellectual life of the academy,
a life that is more than ever before inti-
mately bound up with changes in the
culture at large. O, alternatively, nosotros
may regard such developments as emer-
gent processes, carrying their history along
with them, to be sure, but resuming with
modi½ed perspectives certain projects
that have been suspended for a time–for
ejemplo, revisionary readings of the old
‘new critics’ and historians by some of
the younger cultural critics. These latest
scholars have less history behind them,
but considering the nature of much re-
cent history, that may not be an entire-
ly bad thing. Equally cogent, sin embargo,
is the sense they communicate of an
awareness of intellectual and discipli-
nary fragmentation of both perspective
and knowledge and of the need for new
shapes of intellectual integration.
My own intuition of the current situa-
tion is that we must take such projects as
Humanities:
notes to-
ward the
history of
an idea
they come, one by one. For the present,
it is suf½cient to commit oneself to the
notion that the intellectual excellence
of the individual scholar or program is
the basis for judgment. We must regard
cultural projects with overtly political
purposes or principally ideological ends
as suspicious, if not outrightly danger-
ous, objects. The inner recon½guration
of the humanistic disciplines of study
at the end of the twentieth century will
take place whether we want it to or not.
Our responsibility at this time, it seems
to me, is to make that transition to new
purposes and perspectives as honest and
abierto, as flexible and inclusive, as possi-
ble. If we turn ourselves to this work, nosotros
will be doing what it is appropriate for
scholars and critics at any time to do.
yo
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Dædalus Spring 2006