This course explores the relations within and between two sets of professional communities and with very general forms of argument about public (and, I suspect, many private) affairs.

The professional communities that interest me are -- on the one side -- those of historians and -- on the other -- those of planners and policy analysts in their several varieties. The first set is largely concerned with the construction and distribution of images of the past; the second with the construction and assessment of images of the future.

These distinctive orientations to the past and to the future do not, however, completely describe the practices of these communities. Historians often (and perhaps necessarily) construct futures; planners and policy analysts engage in the planning and assessment of pasts.

I propose to explore with you the ways in which pasts and futures are engaged in each of the communities, to compare constructive practices, and to assess the record and prospects of inter-communal conversations.

The professionals -- whether as "practitioners" or as "scholars" -- do not, of course, peculiarly own the past or the future. Largely outside the disciplines of the professional communities, virtually every participant in public policy and planning disputes argues in a way that crosses back and forth across the shifting temporal boundary between the factual worlds of the past and the potential worlds (sans fact) of the future. What, I would like you to wonder with me, do we know of the discursive forms and practices of these arguments? Can we distinguish between "good" and "bad" public conversations about the relations between the past and the future?

The abstract quality in this phrasing will, I hope, fade in the first few weeks of the semester as we read and talk together and as you respond to the issues I have posed in a series of short papers. We will also select a small set of policy and planning disputes for close examination, allowing you in a term paper to ground the abstractions in a critical empirical inquiry. The number and character of the disputes will depend upon your interests. I propose, however, the following set of candidates:

1. Across the globe, critics of development patterns are concerned that the ecosystems upon which settlements depend may not be "sustainable" and that settlements themselves are at serious risk of an environmental "collapse."

   "Sustainability" is a complex notion that requires a history to map the capacity and robustness of an ecosystem and a future scenario that distinguishes between intractable limits and passing crises of adaptation. How are the judgments required to assess sustainability expressed in disciplinary and general public arguments?

2. Discussions of communication and informations systems have for a very long time been marked by evocations of a "revolution" that is -- sometimes -- already upon us if we only have eyes to see; at other times, waiting for us in the wings. How does this revolutionary image organize the relations between the past and future? How, particularly, is it engaged in current discussions of information superhighways?

3. Across the globe, the role of sub-national political entities is the subject of a peculiarly tangled political debate. In some settings, strengthening local "autonomy" or "community" is seen as a prerequisite for social and economic development; in others, political "fragmentation" or "tribalism" is rued as a great obstacle to social change. Critics on the left and the right converge on common policies though they disagree dramatically in their goals. The long- standing arguments over the roles of national governments in shaping the urban pattern have been transformed by the emergence of new transnational, multinational and international institutions and relations so that familiar issues are now confusing and old alliances disrupted.

In this mess, what sort of images of the past and of the future will illuminate the policy arguments?

None of these issues, you will observe, takes the form of a discrete choice facing a particular decision-taker who must decide soon whether to do A or B and wants quickly to reconstruct a past in order to improve the quality of a future. (Historians are often rightly suspicious of that sort of request for instant knowledge on demand.) In contrast, each of these sets of issues can only be intelligently addressed after a process in which they take-on a more tractable form than I have provided: pasts and futures designed and redesigned in concert.

Course Description

I expect the members of the class to take considerable responsibility for the organization of the syllabus. At our first session, I will ask each of you to announce the area in which you plan to work. I'll then divide the class into teams. Each team will be responsible for one session in the middle of the semester: prescribing a brief reading assignment for the whole class and then leading discussion on the ways in which the construction of pasts and futures may be cogently related in the domains you have selected.

The paper may take one of several different forms:

1. You may shape the issue and then construct and justify a past that bears upon current policy and planning discussions.

2. You may provide a critical account of the way that pasts and futures are constructed within a policy or planning debate.

3. You may prepare a proposal for a television series, museum exhibition, public discussion program or school curriculum that would enhance the intelligent uses of the past.

The paper should not exceed 7500 words in length.

The last third of the semester will be devoted to an expanded consideration of the methodological, political, and sociological issues raised in the introductory unit. There are several topics that particularly interest me: the role of narration in policy analysis and planning, systems modeling, the measurement of change, and reading unfamiliar discursive frames. I would, however, like this part of the course to serve you as you work on your individual papers. I will ask everyone, therefore, to propose an agenda for the final weeks of the semester.

I have prescribed topics and readings for the first unit. It sets out a way of looking at the professional ideologies and practices, communal dynamics, political arrangements and methodological choices that shape the linked construction of pasts and futures. The readings often emphasize US policy arguments, the historical community in the United States, and the practice of US history. That focus should not, however, constrain your choice of paper topics.

Please also be sure you have an e-mail address so that I can form a class distribution list.

Reading Assignments

Week 1. Introduction
Imagine that you wanted to look back over last year's struggle in order to inform your approach to "health reform" in the next two years. How would you design the historical inquiry?

• Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 1-96.

1. Prepare a brief (c. 500 word) critique of the design of the "lesson making" effort.



2. I am using Oakeshott in order to capture a polar tendency in the community of historians. He proposes a distinction between a "practical" and an "historical" past. I'd like you to assess both the credibility and the cogency of the distinction. Consider two sets of journals:
   
   1. The American Historical Review (AHR) and the Journal of American History (JAH)
   2. The Public Historian (PH) and the Journal of Policy History
   
   
3. Skim the articles in an annual volume of one journal in each group with an eye to Oakeshott's distinction. Is there a difference in orientations between the two journals? Choose an article that appears to you to capture each of the modes of constructing the past and reproduce (in sufficient copies to serve everyone in the class) a paragraph that expresses that mode. Don't, however, label the paragraph so that we can't tell how you have interpreted its representation of the past. (Remember: Oakeshott acknowledges most complex texts are hybrids.)

Finally: be prepared the discuss the implications of Oakeshott's distinction for the conception of political power and public policy making. Some of you might be interested in the warm but critical appreciation of Oakeshott in Benjamin Barber, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 152-176.

• John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, updated paperback edition, 1989)

The essential idea I want to deal with in this week and the one to follow is the notion that professional historians are joined in an epistemic community or a cluster of overlapping communities -- for the moment, I don't want to worry about the distinction. I particularly want to focus on the processes of socialization and discipline as they bear upon "practical" inquiry

Skim the Higham volume with an eye to describing those processes.

When you think you have a sense of the community, turn to "The Practice of American History: A Special Issue," JAH 81:3 (December, 1994). Read the introductory article by David Thelen and any others that interest you. What sort of image of the community emerges from this issue? Does the Oakeshott distinction illuminate its social dynamics?

• William E. Leuchtenburg, "The Historian and the Public Realm," AHR 97 (1992), 1-18.
• John Higham, "The Future of American History," JAH 80:4 (March, 1994), 1289-1309.
• Casey Blake and Christopher Phelps, "History as Social Criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch," JAH 80:4 (March, 1994) 1310-1332.

What do these three pieces tell you about the processes of socialization and discipline? Do Leuchtenberg, Higham and Lasch accept Oakeshott's distinction? What is it that both attracts and repels Leuchtenburg in the public realm? How does he manage those competing impulses? How did Lasch? Does the practical orientation require a focus on politics and the nation-state?

• Seymour Mandelbaum, "The Past in Service to the Future," Journal of Social History 11 (1977), 193-205 or in David B. Mock, ed., History and Public Policy (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing, 1991), 39-53.
• "Historians and Planners: The Construction of Pasts and Futures," Journal of the American Planning Association 51 (1985) 185-188.
• Hugh Davis Graham, "The Stunted Career of Policy History: A Critique and an Agenda," and the "Roundtable," PH 15:2 Spring, 1993), 15-37, and 15:4 (Fall, 1993), 50-81.

Having read these programmatic essays focused in on the practices of historians, turn to the policy narratives in the Mock collection and in Richard E. Neusdadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: The Free Press, 1986). Read enough to begin describing the other side of the relationship between communities. How do planners, policy analysts and "decision makers" use the past? Is it useful to distinguish between those who "take" decisions and those who "make" them? How does the notion of a "decision" or a "policy" influence the conception of the past? (Compare Neustadt and May's conception of politics and Oakeshott's.)

• David A. Hollinger, "How Wide the Circle of the 'We"? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos since World War II," AHR 98 (1993), 317-337.
• Phillip Bonner, "New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South Africa, 1977-1994," JAH 81:3 (December, 1994), 977-985, and in the same issue, Michael Cassity, "History and the Public Purpose," 969-976.

The common reading assignment is slim because I principally want you to devote your week to the conception of a term paper topic. Please circulate a brief description of your choice via e-mail.

How does the use of history to form publics differ from its role in shaping discrete decisions? How do the institutional forms for the distribution of historical images serve various audiences?

• National Standards for United States History: Exploring the American Experience (Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, 1994)

Most of the resources that sustain the community of historians originate with the profession's role in the education of children. What are the implications of this role? How do curricula and pedagogic methods respond to conceptions of the past and the uses of historical knowledge?

Each team should send me an e-mail message prescribing an assignment for its assigned session. I'll prepare a set of assignments for the balance of the month. I suggest that you limit your reading assignments to 75 pages.