Merle Curti

Merle Eugene Curti (September 15, 1897 – March 9, 1996) was a leading American historian, who taught many graduate students at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin, and was a leader in developing the fields of social history and intellectual history. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society (1948).

Quotes

"Intellectuals and Other People" (1954)

"Intellectuals and Other People", A paper read at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held in New York, December 29, 1954. Published in the American Historical Review 60, no. 2 (Feb., 1955): 259–282

• ...There was also a feeling among many clergymen that scholarship somehow threatens religion. Even Jonathan Edwards, himself a profound scholar, took the colleges to task for failing to inculcate piety. The persistence of such a view is seen in the sustained effort of the nineteenth-century academic orators to refute the charge that learning and religion are at necessary odds. No note is more often struck than this in the hundreds of commencement orations and other academic addresses that I have had the somewhat doubtful pleasure of reading.

• The culture hero of our business civilization was the self-made man, a man of action, not one of trained intellect.

• American respect for business, and the businessman's inadequate appreciation of the intellectual, have by tradition been pretty generally taken for granted. One historian has gone so far as to say that whenever business sits in the driver's seat, as it did in the 1920's and as it does today, the distrust of the intellectual is both epidemic and dominant.

• The ivory tower can become a pretty dull place, and rather unproductive, too.

• While appraising all aspects of the past, including myths, we must at the same time uphold the critical function that is the basis of all scholarship, indeed, of civilization itself. For this we also need to recognize clearly the sources of irrationality in history, in our culture, in ourselves.