Carl L. Becker

(b Leipzig, 17 July 1804; d there, 26 Oct 1877). German organist and bibliographer. The first organ professor of the Leipzig Conservatory, he amassed an important collection of early music and musical literature; Bach was a special interest.

American historian Carl Lotus Becker (1873-1945) was a proponent of the doctrine of historical relativism. He is best known for his book "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers."

Carl Becker was born on a farm near Waterloo, lowa, on Sept. 7, 1873. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1896, where he had studied history with Frederick Jackson Turner, and stayed on for 2 years of graduate work, followed by a year at Columbia University with H. L. Osgood and J. H. Robinson. He took his doctorate under Turner in 1907; in his thesis, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 (1909), he contended that the American Revolution was fundamentally a conflict over "who should rule at home."

In 1901 he married Maude Hepworth Ranney, a widow with a young daughter, and they had one son. Becker taught at Pennsylvania State College, Dartmouth, and Minnesota, and spent 14 years at the University of Kansas before he was appointed professor of modern history at Cornell University in 1917. His career was thereafter identified with Cornell.

In The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922), Becker examined the central ideas of the Declaration, particularly the notion of natural rights, treating them as neither true nor false in any absolute sense but as prevailing assumptions of the age to be judged in terms of their functional effectiveness. The concept of a "climate of opinion, " a phrase borrowed from A. N. Whitehead, Becker made famous in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932). Here Becker advanced the paradox that the philosophes who had undermined the traditional intellectual world in the name of science were themselves dominated by a nonscientific faith in a rational universal order (a secular version of the Heavenly City). This thesis has been severely criticized, but the book remains a monument to Becker's literary artistry, a tour de force of high aphoristic with, written in a spirit of masterful detachment.

As early as 1910 Becker had rejected the claim that the writing of history involved the recovery of discrete facts which were waiting to be discovered; the "facts" of history, he noted, were present images and must necessarily partake of present experience to have meaning. This was a favorite Becker theme, most memorably formulated in "Everyman His Own Historian, " Becker's presidential address to the American Historical Association (1931); in it he argued the subjectivity and relativity of historical knowledge, considering historians as "story-tellers … to whom in successive ages has been entrusted the keeping of the useful myths."

With the rise of 20th-century totalitarianism Becker found himself somewhat in the dilemma of those philosophes he had so keenly dissected; for if history verged on being transitory propaganda and if objective values were not to be sought for, then what basis was there for a morally grounded defense of democracy? Deeply committed to democracy, Becker now concluded that democratic values were indeed "Some Generalities that Still Glitter" (published in 1940) and that they had "a life of their own apart from any particular social system or type of civilization." In the war years he revised his pragmatic relativism so as to give some positive answer to the question, "What Is Still Living in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?" (published in 1943).

Becker died in Ithaca, N.Y., on April 10, 1945.

Further Reading

A rounded portrait of Becker as man, teacher, philosopher, and historian is provided by Charlotte Watkins Smith, Carl Becker: On History and the Climate of Opinion (1956). Raymond O. Rockwood, ed., Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited (1958), brings together criticisms and recollections by a number of historians, including distinguished former students who knew Becker well. Becker's ideas and his significance in the history of American thought are treated in detail in Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (1958), and Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History (1961).

For other people named Carl Becker, see Carl Becker.

Carl Lotus Becker (1873–1945) was an American historian. He was born in Waterloo, Black Hawk County, Iowa. He studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Frederick Jackson Turner was his doctoral advisor there. Becker got his Ph.D. in 1907.

Contents 1 Academic Career 2 Works 3 Quotes 4 References 5 External links

Academic Career

He was John Wendell Anderson Professor of History in the Department of History at Cornell University from 1917 to 1941.

He is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. His assertion—that philosophies in the "Age of Reason" relied far more upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit—has been influential, but has also been much attacked. Interest in the book is partly explained by this passage (p. 47):

In the thirteenth century the key words would no doubt be God, sin, grace, salvation, heaven and the like; in the nineteenth century, matter, fact, matter-of-fact, evolution, progress; in the twentieth century, relativity, process, adjustment, function, complex. In the eighteenth century the words without which no enlightened person could reach a restful conclusion were nature, natural law, first cause, reason, sentiment, humanity, perfectibility […].

This isolation of vocabularies of the epoch chimes with much later work, even if the rest of the book is essayistic in approach. Johnson Kent Wright writes

Becker wrote as a principled liberal […]. Yet in some respects The Heavenly City presents an almost uncanny anticipation of the "postmodern" reading of the eighteenth century.

—"The Pre-Postmodernism of Carl Becker", p. 162, in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment (2001), Daniel Gordon editor

Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House.

Works

• Political Parties in the Province of New York from 1766-75 (1908)
• The Beginnings of the American People (1915)
• The Eve of the Revolution (1918)
• The Declaration of Independence—A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922, 1942)
• Our Great Experiment in Democracy (1924)
• The Spirit of '76 (with G.M. Clark and W.E. Dodd) (1926)
• Modern History (1931)
• The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932)
• Every Man His Own Historian (1935)
• Progress and Power (1936)
• Story of Civilization (with Frederic Duncalf) (1938)
• Modern Democracy (1941)
• New Liberties for Old (1941)
• Cornell University: Founders and the Founding (1943)
• How New Will the Better World Be?—A Discussion of Post-War Reconstruction (1944)
• Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life (1945)
• Freedom of Speech and Press

Quotes

• "History is the memory of things said and done."
• "The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it."
• "Freedom and responsibility." This saying, from a 1943 lecture, has been frequently misquoted.^[1] When Cornell memorialized Becker by naming a residential college in his honor, the university commissioned a large stone placard to be affixed to the building's entryway reading "FREEDOM WITH RESPONSIBILITY".^[1]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} http://www.metaezra.com/archive/2008/09/carl_becker_is_rolling_in_his.shtml

• Carl Becker: On History & the Climate of Opinion (1956) Charlotte W. Smith
• The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (1958) Cushing Strout
• Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History (1961) Burleigh T. Wilkins

External links

• Historiographical Blurb and JSTOR listing [1]
• Works by Carl Lotus Becker at Project Gutenberg

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