The Pre-Postmodernism of Carl Becker

Becker wrote The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, it was delivered first as the Storrs Lectures at the Yale School of Law in April 1931 and published the following year, at the peak of a distinguished career. Formed under Frederick Jackson Turner at Wisconsin and James Harvey Robinson at Columbia, he proved to be the most versatile of the Progressive historians, equally at home in American and European historiography. Adapting Richard Rorty's celebrated phrase, then, Becker might properly be seen as a 'pre-postmodern North Atlantic bourgeois liberal'. If The Heavenly City strikes us, in certain respects, as an uncanny premonition of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment, the reasons for it are perfectly intelligible. Becker's philosophical roots lay squarely in the tradition of American pragmatism, which has enjoyed so remarkable a renaissance at the end of the twentieth century; and he suffered just the kind of political disenchantment that seems to have been a central prompting for the postmodern turn.