The “New Political History” and U.S. Intellectual History

(Today's guest post is from Mike O'Connor. It's weird for me to call Mike a guest since he helped found this blog and S-USIH. I'm glad he came out of retirement for this one.)

The introduction to Governing America: The Revival of Political History, the most recent book from Julian Zelizer, raises some really interesting issues that both highlight and challenge what we have been doing here at S-USIH. In his short introductory piece, Zelizer argues convincingly that political history is enjoying a resurgence. This might not seem controversial to anyone who has noted, for example, the outsize influence of Robert Caro’s LBJ biographies, or the many interesting and important studies of postwar conservatism that have come out in the last several years. But Zelizer is saying something more than that the subject of American politics is enjoying a cyclical resurgence, or that some talented writers have captured the attention of the historical profession and general public. Instead, he is arguing that political history has regained its relevance because it has actually changed.

The implication here is, of course, that in decades past, the field “as it had been practiced by legendary figures such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Richard Hofstadter” had itself to blame for its decline in importance and prestige. Beginning in the sixties, attacks on political history came from every direction: New Left scholars challenged the presumption of consensus that it had explicitly or implicitly advanced, social and cultural historians focused on conceptions of politics—race, gender, class and identity—that were not captured by treatments of the actions of elected officials, and French scholarship, in the form of the Annales school, shifted historical attention away from “the specific actions of political leaders at given points in time” and toward major shifts in “ideational and institutional structures.” Political history, still wedded to its traditional “great man” narratives, sunk into irrelevance.

But, Zelizer argues, political history “slowly, almost imperceptibly” adapted to the new intellectual terrain. Political scientists working in the field of American Political Development emphasized how the growth of institutions posed “structural constraints” on elected officials. Social scientists also emphasized the power of institutions to retard political change. Many social and cultural historians, “feeing that the field of American history had become too specialized and fragmented,” returned to political history in search of an intellectual center of gravity for American history itself.

Zelizer argues that the field has been enjoying a resurgence “since the early 1990s.” The American political history that has “returned to the forefront of the profession,” however, is “not the same political history of the past.” These practitioners have “punctured the myth” of consensus “in any period,” while emphasizing the importance of social movements. Those who have continued to study political leaders have done so from a new perspective, “situating them within particular institutional contexts,” emphasizing what they were and were not able to do within those structures, and “broaden[ing] the range” of those who might be considered worthy of study in the first place.

The arguments I have summarized here take up only half of the short introduction to the book, which is a collection of essays. Though occupying only four pages, the ideas introduced there made a huge impression on me, for two reasons. The first relates to political history itself: though I had never really thought about, or perhaps even been aware of, a resurgence in American political history, once Zelizer spelled it out I could immediately confirm this development from my own reading and experience. The second reason concerned S-USIH, for I could see a parallel between what we are doing here and the new political history.

As Zelizer describes it, the new political history specifically takes into account the advances and criticisms offered by social history in the last several decades. What is also apparent on my reading, however, is that historians working in that vein also tacitly and respectfully decided that this particular intervention has gone as far as it should. We can turn to a particularly important work of recent political history for a succinct statement of this point. In the introduction to The Rise of American Democracy (tellingly subtitled “Jefferson to Lincoln”), Sean Wilentz defends his decision to focus on political elites. Arguing that previous studies have “generally submerged the history of politics in the history of social change,” Wilentz characterized his book as one that would “reaffirm the importance of political events.” He went farther, I suspect, than Zelizer might, in “insisting on what ought to be a truism: that some people have more influence on history than others.” Of course, this statement is a truism, and suggesting otherwise invokes the boogeyman of a social historian who will not assent to the obvious. Yet readers of Wilentz’s somewhat snarky dismissal of social history might be surprised that the rest of his book contains treatments of social movements—such as the Democratic-Republican societies, the Working Men’s movement and abolitionism—in what is certainly a political history. Moreover, Wilentz’s first book, Chants Democratic, itself works in the tradition of social history. Thus I see Wilentz’s cantankerousness as belied by his actual work: even a somewhat hostile critic of social history recognizes its necessity in a political narrative. This would confirm Zelizer’s point.

A less churlish example comes from Meg Jacobs’ Pocketbook Politics. In her introduction, Jacobs positions her political history less as a rejection of social history than as an incorporation of it into a larger narrative. She notes that policymakers in large administrative states are dependent upon citizens to legitimate their authority; at the same time, however, “popular movements have succeeded in effecting [sic] change only to the extent that they win support at elite levels.” Thus it would seem that neither the history of elected officials nor that of social movements tells a complete story. Jacobs carefully limits her observations to her own project, saying that the “book encourages a new way of studying state power by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking.” Yet one might fairly generalize all of these observations to conclude that the more recent political history turns on the assumption that a complete account of political developments must incorporate both social and policy history.

Having said all that, then, the question for us is, “What about intellectual history? Does it have a place in the new political history?” Put another way, does the new political history represent only the incorporation of social history, or is the latter simply a placeholder, representing the need to expand political history beyond its traditional boundaries? I must admit that for the historians I have cited, the former answer appears to be the case. Additionally, while many of my favorite recent works of political history, for example, Nixonland or Stayin’ Alive, clearly operate within the paradigm of the new political history, I would not say that they are particularly concerned with intellectual history.

But I would argue that the spirit of Zelizer’s characterization (independently of what Zelizer himself might happen to think) would in fact require that effective political history would sometimes be required to take note of intellectual history. I take the initial point of departure not to be that social history is necessary to an account of American politics, but that the actions of politicians do not exhaust the narrative. If the latter is the case, then, depending on the nature of a given project, any kind of history might be necessary in order to fully explain the political history of a given period, issue, figure or movement. As an obvious example, making sense of the Revolutionary Era and founding period seems difficult without acknowledging the importance of ideas to the overall narrative.

Indeed, the desire to incorporate intellectual history into political history has been a motivating force in the past and future projects of many who have been active in the founding and leadership of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, such as Andrew Hartman, Ray Haberski, Lisa Szefel, Ben Alpers, David Sehat, and, well, me. And many more who have actively commented or guest-posted on the blog, or participated in the conference, are working in a similar vein. There appears to be a strong overlap between the new political history and the intellectual space being carved out here at S-USIH.

But because of Julian Zelizer’s short introduction, I see this common interest much differently than I have in the past. Because so many people at S-USIH share this focus on political history, I had assumed for years that there was something inherently political about the current moment in intellectual history. I could see no reason why that might be true, but all of my experience seemed to confirm it. Now I believe it to be far more likely that S-USIH was being carried by a tide that was sweeping the profession more broadly. And, more importantly, I believe that interested intellectual historians will find a receptive audience within the new political history.

WikiLeaks and Historians: Some Thoughts

WikiLeaks has become something of a political and cultural obsession in recent weeks. Billions of bits have been spilt on its meaning for secrecy and security, for journalism, and for the future of information.*  Less attention has been given to its meaning for historians, let alone intellectual historians.  Generally, non-historians have tended to glibly remark that the document dumps will, of course, be great for us.  We historians ourselves, however, seem more divided on the issue.  What follows are a few very raw and random thoughts on what WikiLeaks might mean for us.  I hope they mark the beginning of a conversation about WikiLeaks on USIH.

How can we contribute historically to the discussion of WikiLeaks itself?

Some historians have weighed in on the ethical and political significance of WikiLeaks.  Sean Wilentz, for example, has tried to draw a disanalogy between WikiLeaks and what is still the gold standards for leaked classified documents, the Pentagon Papers: 

It's not as if we're still up against the Vietnam War; and everybody has a right -- no a duty, to play Daniel Ellsberg.  But this is extremely dangerous, given the imperatives of diplomacy. Is there some profound deception of the American people and the world going on which, as with Ellsberg, requires an insider to, in effect, blow the whistle? I don't get that sense. I get the sense that there are people out there, like the WikiLeaks people, who have a simpleminded idea of secrecy and transparency, who are simply offended by any state actions that are cloaked.

I think historians can add significantly to the conversation about WikiLeaks by thinking carefully about such historical analogies....though I'm prone to disagree a bit with Wilentz both about WikiLeaks motivations and about the state of the world today. Unlike Ellsberg, who was a pretty classic whistleblower, dealing in information that he himself had helped produce, WikiLeaks presents itself as a kind of new form of journalism.** They are a platform of sorts for potential whistleblowers and other leakers from all imaginable organizations and states.  And whatever else one may think of WikiLeaks, the charge of simple indiscriminateness is not entirely fair: they've released a very small set of the material they've collected and have expressed a concern with protecting vulnerable personnel.  Their vetting of their material may be inadequate, but they are not behaving as an organization (if that's what we should call them) who embody such a simpleminded idea of secrecy and transparency.

How will the WikiLeaks document dumps contribute to the practice of history?

Some historians, like Timothy Garton Ash, have responded to the WikiLeaks documents in the way most non-historians have predicted that we would, seeing them as a great gift that will, at the very least, speed up historians' understanding of the recent past.  In a December 1 NPR interview, Garton Ash welcomed the US diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks:

It's very, very rich material. The only other time you have that opportunity is when a state collapses, like communist East Germany or Nazi Germany. Then historians get to see all this stuff. But it's incredibly unusual and strange for it to happen with a functioning superpower. 

But in a December 5 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the political scientist Daniel Drezner argues that their effects will be negative in the longterm for political scientists and diplomatic historians, as governments (and, one might add though Drezner doesn't, corporations which WikiLeaks is also apparently tracking) become much more stingy with their information.

In a sense, I think both of these views miss the real story here:  the very possibility of WikiLeaks suggests that we are in a new age of information. That's hardly a surprising view...and yet as our information age rolls into different areas of our life, we are continually surprised.  Even nearly a decade after digital files killed CD sales, the movie and tv industries were still apparently shocked when streaming video began to cut into DVD sales and rentals.

As a number of the participants in a recent discussion on WikiLeaks at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society pointed out, WikiLeaks may well be the Napster of the new age of political information.  Just as the recording industry mistakenly believed Napster itself to be the problem when that file-sharing service first appeared, it's easy to misperceive WikiLeaks itself (or even Julian Assange, who while a founder of WikiLeaks is not even WikiLeaks itself) as the issue.  The real issue here is what 21st-century information technologies do to 20th-century secrecy regimes.  And if the story of digital audio file trading is any indication, what will likely succeed WikiLeaks is a much more anarchic set of players who really will try to make all information available to everyone (something that WikiLeaks has not, in fact, attempted to do).  

And while I have little doubt that states and other entities invested in secrecy will take new steps to limit the spread of information, there's great truth in Stewart Brand's dictum that "information wants to be free."  It's certainly true that the US government's post-9/11 emphasis on information sharing made it much easier for someone like Bradley Manning to gain access to what eventually became the WikiLeaks documents.  But the deeper technological and social forces here go far beyond such political decisions.

This new world of information raises an additional challenge for historians (one that historians of the 20th century already deal with in a more limited form): a crushing increase in the shear volume of information available.  Of course, digital technologies also give us new tools to process this information....and that opens up a whole separate area of discussion.

How might intellectual historians understand the "WikiLeaks Manifesto"?

Two 2006 essays by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have been circulating to much discussion on the internet.  Entitled "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy and Governance," they are available in a .pdf here. Although sometimes referred to as the WikiLeaks Manifesto, these represent the thinking of only the most prominent person involved with WikiLeaks...and his thinking may have changed in the four years since they were written.  

Nevertheless, there are ideas here. And intellectual historians presumably have something to add to the conversation about them....as well as to the meta-conversation about them, which seems to me often to be treating them as the pseudo-thoughts of a kind of cyber-bomb thrower, turning Assange into a sort of Unibomber of information.   

_________________________________________________

* On this last issue especially, I recommend this very interesting podcast discussion from Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society hosted by Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig.

** Ellsberg for his part has been among the staunchest defenders of WikiLeaks, pointing out that “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time” and urging a boycott of Amazon.com following that company's decision to knock WikiLeaks off its hosting service at the urging of Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT).

WikiLeaks and Historians: Some Thoughts

WikiLeaks has become something of a political and cultural obsession in recent weeks. Billions of bits have been spilt on its meaning for secrecy and security, for journalism, and for the future of information.*  Less attention has been given to its meaning for historians, let alone intellectual historians.  Generally, non-historians have tended to glibly remark that the document dumps will, of course, be great for us.  We historians ourselves, however, seem more divided on the issue.  What follows are a few very raw and random thoughts on what WikiLeaks might mean for us.  I hope they mark the beginning of a conversation about WikiLeaks on USIH.

How can we contribute historically to the discussion of WikiLeaks itself?

Some historians have weighed in on the ethical and political significance of WikiLeaks.  Sean Wilentz, for example, has tried to draw a disanalogy between WikiLeaks and what is still the gold standards for leaked classified documents, the Pentagon Papers: 

It's not as if we're still up against the Vietnam War; and everybody has a right -- no a duty, to play Daniel Ellsberg.  But this is extremely dangerous, given the imperatives of diplomacy. Is there some profound deception of the American people and the world going on which, as with Ellsberg, requires an insider to, in effect, blow the whistle? I don't get that sense. I get the sense that there are people out there, like the WikiLeaks people, who have a simpleminded idea of secrecy and transparency, who are simply offended by any state actions that are cloaked.

I think historians can add significantly to the conversation about WikiLeaks by thinking carefully about such historical analogies....though I'm prone to disagree a bit with Wilentz both about WikiLeaks motivations and about the state of the world today. Unlike Ellsberg, who was a pretty classic whistleblower, dealing in information that he himself had helped produce, WikiLeaks presents itself as a kind of new form of journalism.** They are a platform of sorts for potential whistleblowers and other leakers from all imaginable organizations and states.  And whatever else one may think of WikiLeaks, the charge of simple indiscriminateness is not entirely fair: they've released a very small set of the material they've collected and have expressed a concern with protecting vulnerable personnel.  Their vetting of their material may be inadequate, but they are not behaving as an organization (if that's what we should call them) who embody such a simpleminded idea of secrecy and transparency.

How will the WikiLeaks document dumps contribute to the practice of history?

Some historians, like Timothy Garton Ash, have responded to the WikiLeaks documents in the way most non-historians have predicted that we would, seeing them as a great gift that will, at the very least, speed up historians' understanding of the recent past.  In a December 1 NPR interview, Garton Ash welcomed the US diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks:

It's very, very rich material. The only other time you have that opportunity is when a state collapses, like communist East Germany or Nazi Germany. Then historians get to see all this stuff. But it's incredibly unusual and strange for it to happen with a functioning superpower. 

But in a December 5 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the political scientist Daniel Drezner argues that their effects will be negative in the longterm for political scientists and diplomatic historians, as governments (and, one might add though Drezner doesn't, corporations which WikiLeaks is also apparently tracking) become much more stingy with their information.

In a sense, I think both of these views miss the real story here:  the very possibility of WikiLeaks suggests that we are in a new age of information. That's hardly a surprising view...and yet as our information age rolls into different areas of our life, we are continually surprised.  Even nearly a decade after digital files killed CD sales, the movie and tv industries were still apparently shocked when streaming video began to cut into DVD sales and rentals.

As a number of the participants in a recent discussion on WikiLeaks at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society pointed out, WikiLeaks may well be the Napster of the new age of political information.  Just as the recording industry mistakenly believed Napster itself to be the problem when that file-sharing service first appeared, it's easy to misperceive WikiLeaks itself (or even Julian Assange, who while a founder of WikiLeaks is not even WikiLeaks itself) as the issue.  The real issue here is what 21st-century information technologies do to 20th-century secrecy regimes.  And if the story of digital audio file trading is any indication, what will likely succeed WikiLeaks is a much more anarchic set of players who really will try to make all information available to everyone (something that WikiLeaks has not, in fact, attempted to do).  

And while I have little doubt that states and other entities invested in secrecy will take new steps to limit the spread of information, there's great truth in Stewart Brand's dictum that "information wants to be free."  It's certainly true that the US government's post-9/11 emphasis on information sharing made it much easier for someone like Bradley Manning to gain access to what eventually became the WikiLeaks documents.  But the deeper technological and social forces here go far beyond such political decisions.

This new world of information raises an additional challenge for historians (one that historians of the 20th century already deal with in a more limited form): a crushing increase in the shear volume of information available.  Of course, digital technologies also give us new tools to process this information....and that opens up a whole separate area of discussion.

How might intellectual historians understand the "WikiLeaks Manifesto"?

Two 2006 essays by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have been circulating to much discussion on the internet.  Entitled "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy and Governance," they are available in a .pdf here. Although sometimes referred to as the WikiLeaks Manifesto, these represent the thinking of only the most prominent person involved with WikiLeaks...and his thinking may have changed in the four years since they were written.  

Nevertheless, there are ideas here. And intellectual historians presumably have something to add to the conversation about them....as well as to the meta-conversation about them, which seems to me often to be treating them as the pseudo-thoughts of a kind of cyber-bomb thrower, turning Assange into a sort of Unibomber of information.   

_________________________________________________

* On this last issue especially, I recommend this very interesting podcast discussion from Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society hosted by Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig.

** Ellsberg for his part has been among the staunchest defenders of WikiLeaks, pointing out that “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time” and urging a boycott of Amazon.com following that company's decision to knock WikiLeaks off its hosting service at the urging of Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT).

The Sixties Counterculture and Intellectual History, or Something is Happening Here, But You Don't Know What It Is

We've been devoting a lot of space around here lately to the Seventies...and rightly so. That decade has recently received an enormous amount of richly deserved historiographical attention and a growing list of excellent works on it is reaching print.

The historiography of the 1960s is a good deal more developed. But there are still major gaps in the literature. And one of them that I find most frustrating involves the counterculture.

I'm currently teaching an undergraduate seminar on the U.S. in the Sixties. This is the second time I've offered this course. And while there's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to secondary works on the New Left, the Great Society, and even conservatism, I've had a terrible time finding the right thing to use to teach the counterculture.

Last year, I used Alice Echols's biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise. This is a fine book, but ultimately two weeks on Janis Joplin is really too much.

This year I'm using a combination of primary source readings, music, and film, as well as Natalya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope. Like Echols, Zimmerman focuses on music in San Francisco in the late '60s. Though a less good book than the Echols, in certain ways it is better in the undergraduate classroom: it is shorter, it covers more ground by focusing on a variety of musicians, and it has a stronger argument, albeit one that is a tad simplistic. But it's not very satisfying as an account of the San Francisco scene...let alone the larger counterculture.

Why is there not a stronger, general book on the intellectual and cultural history of the counterculture?*

The counterculture seems to me to have a number of historiographical strikes against it:

First, the counterculture has more enemies than friends...even on the left. Leading figures in the New Left, especially folks associated with the early New Left, often held the counterculture in contempt. And these folks--I'm thinking e.g. of Todd Gitlin--helped frame the historiography of the Sixties. Of course conservatives--and conservative liberals like Joan Didion--have treated the counterculture with an almost apocalyptic sense of horror.

Second, unlike Sixties conservatism (which led to the political successes of the right in later decades) or even the New Left, the counterculture seems to have producd a series of cultural and intellectual dead ends. It was not only quickly commodified. In retrospect it seems to have been always already commodified. Its most obvious cultural legacies--e.g. the rise of seventies New Age thought; jam bands--often make it harder for academics to take it seriously.

Third, the most obviously significant cultural achievements of the counterculture were in the area of music, a subject that most (though by no means all) US historians generally write and think poorly about.

Fourth, chemically altered states of consciousness played an obviously major role in the sixties counterculture and are another area that is difficult to write well about historically.

Of course, I may be missing something here. Perhaps the book I have in mind has, in fact, been written. And if it has, I'm sure it will be revealed (to my eternal embarrassment) in comments.

_____________________________________________________

* There are obviously many fine works of history on particular aspects of the counterculture, from Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to Sean Wilentz's Dylan in America.

The Sixties Counterculture and Intellectual History, or Something is Happening Here, But You Don't Know What It Is

We've been devoting a lot of space around here lately to the Seventies...and rightly so. That decade has recently received an enormous amount of richly deserved historiographical attention and a growing list of excellent works on it is reaching print.

The historiography of the 1960s is a good deal more developed. But there are still major gaps in the literature. And one of them that I find most frustrating involves the counterculture.

I'm currently teaching an undergraduate seminar on the U.S. in the Sixties. This is the second time I've offered this course. And while there's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to secondary works on the New Left, the Great Society, and even conservatism, I've had a terrible time finding the right thing to use to teach the counterculture.

Last year, I used Alice Echols's biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise. This is a fine book, but ultimately two weeks on Janis Joplin is really too much.

This year I'm using a combination of primary source readings, music, and film, as well as Natalya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope. Like Echols, Zimmerman focuses on music in San Francisco in the late '60s. Though a less good book than the Echols, in certain ways it is better in the undergraduate classroom: it is shorter, it covers more ground by focusing on a variety of musicians, and it has a stronger argument, albeit one that is a tad simplistic. But it's not very satisfying as an account of the San Francisco scene...let alone the larger counterculture.

Why is there not a stronger, general book on the intellectual and cultural history of the counterculture?*

The counterculture seems to me to have a number of historiographical strikes against it:

First, the counterculture has more enemies than friends...even on the left. Leading figures in the New Left, especially folks associated with the early New Left, often held the counterculture in contempt. And these folks--I'm thinking e.g. of Todd Gitlin--helped frame the historiography of the Sixties. Of course conservatives--and conservative liberals like Joan Didion--have treated the counterculture with an almost apocalyptic sense of horror.

Second, unlike Sixties conservatism (which led to the political successes of the right in later decades) or even the New Left, the counterculture seems to have producd a series of cultural and intellectual dead ends. It was not only quickly commodified. In retrospect it seems to have been always already commodified. Its most obvious cultural legacies--e.g. the rise of seventies New Age thought; jam bands--often make it harder for academics to take it seriously.

Third, the most obviously significant cultural achievements of the counterculture were in the area of music, a subject that most (though by no means all) US historians generally write and think poorly about.

Fourth, chemically altered states of consciousness played an obviously major role in the sixties counterculture and are another area that is difficult to write well about historically.

Of course, I may be missing something here. Perhaps the book I have in mind has, in fact, been written. And if it has, I'm sure it will be revealed (to my eternal embarrassment) in comments.

_____________________________________________________

* There are obviously many fine works of history on particular aspects of the counterculture, from Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to Sean Wilentz's Dylan in America.

history, interdisciplinarity and politics in the new republic

In the July 1 issue of The New Republic, that magazine’s crotchety Zionist neocon editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, took a pot shot at the history profession. His real target was President Obama’s woeful (in Peretz’s view) understanding of Middle Eastern history, as evidenced by his then-recent Cairo speech. But in order to clearly articulate the mistaken paradigm in which he sees Obama thinking, Peretz registered a rather damning criticism of academic history itself.

[H]istory these days is no longer a discipline inclined to defend the truthfulness of its claims or the reasonableness of its arguments or the plausibility of its conclusions. More and more, history has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful or what we used to think of as fact. In this intellectual competition, the losers almost always win, or, at least, they win the “moral argument.” Not in real history, mind you, but in many a Western professor’s classroom.

Peretz’s caricature of history, however, is belied by the writing of two historians in his very own magazine. The issue in which appeared his diatribe also featured a Gordon Wood review of Eric Slauter’s The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution, which Wood describes as “the first full-scale effort by a literary scholar to bring the special tools of his discipline to bear on the Constitution and its cultural origins.”

Wood’s reaction to this project is ambivalent, and often his moderate, restrained criticisms suggest that he is bending over backward not to impose historical standards on this non-historical project. He notes early on that the book finds “[t]he historian’s conception of causality…often bent out of shape,” but seems to register this observation as evidence of a difference between disciplines rather than something far more serious. Considering, for example, Slauter’s read on the sexual imagery of U.S. Constitution-building (e.g., the “erection” of a new government and the “impotence” of the Articles of Confederation), Wood notes only that “playing with images in this helter-skelter manner is bound to make the historian very uneasy” and that “[r]eaders will have to decide for themselves how much of these titillating connections they are willing to accept.” In another passage, Wood politely argues that Slauter elsewhere “pushes his literary techniques much too far, at least for this historian.” After considering some of the concluding chapters that he deems more successful, Wood can only muster the faint praise that Slauter has taken on “a laudable goal,” that the book shows “can sometimes be achieved.”

I will follow Wood’s own example by allowing the reader to decide for him/herself whether the historian’s measured criticism belies a more critical private take on Slauter’s book. But the more interesting point, I think, is that raised by Wood’s consistent invocation of his orientation as an historian as the reason for his occasional discomfort with the book. This line of reasoning suggests a kind of disciplinary relativism in which Slauter’s narrative might be compelling to literary critics, but not to historians. It therefore simultaneously refutes Peretz’s characterization and supports it. On the one hand, by suggesting that some claims that might fly in the English department would not be accepted among historians, Wood positions history as the more rigorous, even more objective, discipline. On the other, he pointedly characterizes his historical standards as merely different from, rather than better than, the literary ones implicitly invoked by Slauter. His larger understanding consequently seems to support Peretz’s characterization of historians as weavers of narratives rather than seekers of truth.

Of interest to me here is not the perennial battle between relativism and objectivity in the humanities. Instead, it is that very prominent historians are taking strong positions regarding the practice of history, and whether non-historians are capable of doing it well. Another compelling example of this trend did not take long to announce itself. In the very next issue of the same magazine (July 15), over a quarter of the issue’s pages were given over to a single essay by Sean Wilentz, one that excoriates a series of scholars for, essentially, writing history without being historians. Though neither article says so specifically, they both suggest (to varying degrees) an implicit pushback against the trend toward interdisciplinarity, on the grounds that disciplines (or, at least, the specific discipline of history) provide methodological standards that are uniquely appropriate for their subject matter. Abandon these standards, they seem to argue, and one is unlikely to find work of great value.

Wilentz’s specific topic here is the life of Abraham Lincoln, various aspects of which are covered in the seven books considered in his essay. Wilentz begins by recounting a speech that Lincoln gave when he was still a Whig, before the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1854. In this speech (which, in its original form, took two days to deliver!), Lincoln attacked the Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce for being insufficiently dedicated to the cause of slavery. Pierce, according to Lincoln, despised the Fugitive Slave Law, which Honest Abe proceeded to defend while characterizing Pierce as a metaphorical “mulatto” for his contradictory positions. Wilentz does not introduce this story, he claims, to “debunk Lincoln’s reputation for probity and sagacity.” Indeed, the historian rejects both “the defamatory image of Lincoln as a conventional white racist” and “the awestruck hagiographies that have become ubiquitous in this anniversary year.” Instead, Wilentz claims that his “simpler and larger” argument “is that Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician.”

Such a claim hardly seems controversial, but Wilentz suggests it is lost on “some current writers” who “imagine” that Lincoln’s “every utterance” represents “a foray into moral philosophy or social theory.” Moreover, Lincoln’s speech, with its “casual racism” had little to do with “the major preoccupations of so much of today’s academic scholarship”: race and gender. Instead, the speech in question sought to accomplish several different political goals that would aid the ultimately unsuccessful Whig candidate (General Winfield Scott) against Pierce. Though this particular speech did not represent Lincoln’s “finest political hour,” Wilentz uses it as his opening example to forcefully argue that understanding the sixteenth president on his own terms requires that we represent him first and foremost as someone devoted to furthering specific political goals that included winning elections, maintaining power and governing an unruly electorate. Those who see him as racist or emancipator, philosopher or party hack, simply get him wrong.

Though these views of Lincoln differ significantly one from another, Wilentz seems to suggest that their misattribution stems from a common motivation: a lack of respect for politicians, who are viewed to be, by their very nature, “cautious and unreliable figures who must be forced by unruly events—and by outsiders—into making major reforms.” Under this interpretation:

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement had to compel the southern wheeler-dealer Lyndon B. Johnson to support civil rights and voting rights for blacks. Thus John L. Lewis and the left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations had to push a reluctant Franklin Delano Roosevelt into making and then enlarging the New Deal. And thus Frederick Douglass and the runaway slaves, not Abraham Lincoln, deserve the real credit for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Wilentz believes that this frame imposes preconceptions on those who write about history, and that it consequently tends to limit one’s ability to offer a sound assessment of the past. Those who cannot admire politicians cannot believe that politicians act admirably; consequently, when they do, they are acting in some capacity other than that of a political figure. In the case of Lincoln, this line of interpretation leads to a narrative in which Lincoln underwent a midlife epiphany regarding the injustice of slavery, after which the scales fell from his eyes and he ceased to allow political concerns to limit his moral disapprobation.

Wilentz argues that the frame itself is incorrect and distorting, and, consequently, so are any conclusions that follow from it. Wilentz blames this tendency to misread Lincoln on, overall, two different factors: one political and one intellectual. The political one is an age-old “hostility of some Americans toward partisan competition and political government,” which found its strongest expression in the late nineteenth century Mugwumps. Wilentz argues that this desire to view the actions of one’s heroes as above the political fray, “shows that Mugwumpery has

evolved, paradoxically, into a set of propositions and assumptions congenial to the contemporary American academic Left.” It is difficult to avoid the thought that Wilentz’s ire stems from the embrace by that same group of a more contemporary figure, one who consistently articulates a vision of an America that is far more united than divided, and who prefers the uplifting speech to the grubby political horse-trade. Wilentz, as is well-known, strongly supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in last year’s Democratic primaries, and did not stop criticizing him even after Clinton (now, of course, Obama’s Secretary of State) conceded the race. (Wilentz himself responded to that charge rather angrily in his response to criticisms of the article: “I wrote a 25,000 word essay about Abraham Lincoln, not Barack Obama.”) Since there is no shortage of opinions on the influence of Wilentz’s politics on his scholarship, I instead want to turn to an implicit claim of Wilentz’s piece: that those who do not specialize in political history cannot successfully write about political figures.

The bulk of the article is given over to Wilentz’s treatment of seven books that represent different approaches to Lincoln himself. Taken as a whole, these books represent “an entirely new fashion in the historiography of Lincoln” in which is “diminishe[d] the importance of party politics and government in his career.” Instead, what makes Lincoln a truly great figure is his “literary sophistication and his empathetic powers.” Wilentz traces the vogue for this interpretive angle to Garry Wills’s 1993 Lincoln at Gettysburg; while magnanimously conceding that the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “has its merits,” he argues that because “Wills is more interested in doctrine and culture than in politics, his book elides the basic fact that the speech had…no immediately discernible political effect whatsoever.” In the wake of this treatment, more recent scholarship gives us a “politics that has been cleansed and redeemed, which is to say a politics that is unreal—a politics constructed out of words, just words.” Now Lincoln, writes Wilentz, “belongs to the English department.”

In the treatments that follow, Wilentz takes issue with every book that he mentions, almost all for exhibiting one (or both) of two seemingly interrelated flaws: treating Lincoln as something other than a politician, and failing to meet the historian’s standard of evidence. “Most historians would think twice,” for example, “about relying as much as” does Michael Burlingame in his Jungian biography of Lincoln “on second- and even third-hand testimony.” Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, is one of the few to consider the “mulatto” speech with which Wilentz introduces his article. But because Kaplan is interested in a different aspect of the speech than is Wilentz, his analysis is inadequate. By tracing the origin of a literary trope that Lincoln used in that speech, Kaplan concludes that Lincoln’s racialist patterns of thought were typical of the time. For Wilentz, though, this analysis misses the point. “So the actual subject of Franklin Pierce and the speech’s actual politics have receded into a thicket or words and Lincoln’s misappropriated metaphors and the discursive practices of the 1850s.” Indeed, if there is a third theme here, it is Wilentz’s hostility toward literary criticism. He notes that the Library of America’s Lincoln Anthology, edited by Harold Holzer, fails to include a significant number of historians in its survey of the reactions of “great writers” to Lincoln. “[T]he exclusion…of these authors…who have actually known the most about the man and his times is stunning…As the practice of writing about Lincoln by non-historians continues…it will come as no surprise that English professors are at the head of the line, given the recent trend for literary critics to write about any subject they please, and in a tone of serene authority.”

All of these strains come together in a lengthy attack on Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the co-editor of Lincoln on Race and Slavery. (For reasons that are not explained, the other editor of this book, Donald Yacovone, is essentially ignored in this article.) Gates, argues Wilentz, misunderstands Thomas Jefferson’s position on blacks. He treats Lincoln unfairly by emphasizing his objections to slavery as a threat to white “free labor” rather than the inviolable human dignity of blacks. He ignores the nineteenth century Constitutional restrictions on ending slavery and consequently fails to understand the limitations on Lincoln’s ability to oppose the practice. Gates—the literary critic—overemphasizes the effect of a book (by abolitionist George Livermore, who was in turn inspired by black abolitionist William C. Nell) and underestimates the significance of the political and military situation, on Lincoln’s move toward recruiting blacks into the Union army. (This one Wilentz treats at great length, calling it an “outlandish claim” and “a counterfeit.”) Here Wilentz’s criticism of the historical efforts of non-historians dovetails with his disdain for what he views as the naïveté of those who insist on philosophical purity from their political figures. “In effect, Gates—and he is not alone—holds that the radical abolitionist view of slavery and its immediate and total eradication is the only one worthy of respect, let alone serious consideration…This may express a noble morality, but it is bad history.”

John Stauffer also comes in for a sustained criticism, for his book Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, which, in Wilentz’s view, “ends up maligning as well as misunderstanding Lincoln’s anti-slavery politics.” The article concludes, however, with a brief meditation on Barack Obama, whose similarities to Lincoln have been noted by many, including the president himself. Despite these similarities, Wilentz sees a problem with a pattern of thinking that trumpets the humble virtues of the non-politican to be found in, of all people, the president of the United States. In his view, this dynamic not only threatens our understanding of history, but also compromises our practice of politics. “The Obama campaign, with its talk of repudiating politics as usual…aroused liberal anti-politics to a fever pitch.” This approach, argues Wilentz, is not that of Abraham Lincoln, who “was never too good for politics” and “would never renounce who he was.” On this view, the idealistic visions of today’s “earnest liberal writers,” are not idealistic at all; instead the insistence on moral purity impedes any politician's ability to accomplish real good.

There is a lot going on in this essay, and even this very lengthy summary leaves much of it untouched. Certainly parts of Wilentz’s article read like it is time for its writer to move beyond throwing darts at pictures of Ralph Nader every morning, but I am less interested in Wilentz’s personal politics than in what might emerge from considering his two theses together. Wilentz argues that political historians possess a clearer understanding of political actors than do scholars working in other academic fields. He also, strongly if implicitly, believes that there is some relationship between the desire for intellectual and moral purity in one’s political heroes, and a tendency to see those qualities when they may not, in fact, exist. While many might argue with the first statement, something like it must at least be plausible if academic specialization is worth anything at all. The second is unassailable. Nonetheless, there is something in the article that is not entirely clear, and that is what, specifically, Wilentz believes to be the relationship between these two propositions. Is it necessarily true that historians see politics more clearly than do literary scholars? Might not historians have their own blinders, biases or preconceived notions with regards to politics, or any other subject? And must it be the case, as Wilentz implies, that historians are more likely to see politics for what it is, while others only view it through the lens of moral purity? That tendency would seem to reflect one’s political, rather than disciplinary, orientation. Is Wilentz suggesting a link between one’s politics and one’s field of study? He is not entirely clear on this point, but something like that seems to be the case.

Wilentz could therefore be accused of smuggling in his own disciplinary biases and political preferences under the guise of an objective quest for standards of greater rigor, and such turf battles seldom showcase anyone at their best. But I personally might prefer such a full-throated defense of one's own intellectual commitments to the kid-glove approach to other disciplines that Gordon Wood’s review suggests. Wood’s model is certainly more defensible: the standards of history are merely different from, not more accurate than, those of literary criticism. How does one respond, then, to Martin Peretz’s caricature of the history profession as laughably mired in relativism? Richard Rorty argued that the “postmodern bourgeois liberal” is one who recognizes the need to “realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly.” As an inspiring slogan, "postmodern bourgeois scholarship" admittedly lacks something. But it may be the best work that can be done.

history, interdisciplinarity and politics in the new republic

In the July 1 issue of The New Republic, that magazine’s crotchety Zionist neocon editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, took a pot shot at the history profession. His real target was President Obama’s woeful (in Peretz’s view) understanding of Middle Eastern history, as evidenced by his then-recent Cairo speech. But in order to clearly articulate the mistaken paradigm in which he sees Obama thinking, Peretz registered a rather damning criticism of academic history itself.

[H]istory these days is no longer a discipline inclined to defend the truthfulness of its claims or the reasonableness of its arguments or the plausibility of its conclusions. More and more, history has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful or what we used to think of as fact. In this intellectual competition, the losers almost always win, or, at least, they win the “moral argument.” Not in real history, mind you, but in many a Western professor’s classroom.

Peretz’s caricature of history, however, is belied by the writing of two historians in his very own magazine. The issue in which appeared his diatribe also featured a Gordon Wood review of Eric Slauter’s The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution, which Wood describes as “the first full-scale effort by a literary scholar to bring the special tools of his discipline to bear on the Constitution and its cultural origins.”

Wood’s reaction to this project is ambivalent, and often his moderate, restrained criticisms suggest that he is bending over backward not to impose historical standards on this non-historical project. He notes early on that the book finds “[t]he historian’s conception of causality…often bent out of shape,” but seems to register this observation as evidence of a difference between disciplines rather than something far more serious. Considering, for example, Slauter’s read on the sexual imagery of U.S. Constitution-building (e.g., the “erection” of a new government and the “impotence” of the Articles of Confederation), Wood notes only that “playing with images in this helter-skelter manner is bound to make the historian very uneasy” and that “[r]eaders will have to decide for themselves how much of these titillating connections they are willing to accept.” In another passage, Wood politely argues that Slauter elsewhere “pushes his literary techniques much too far, at least for this historian.” After considering some of the concluding chapters that he deems more successful, Wood can only muster the faint praise that Slauter has taken on “a laudable goal,” that the book shows “can sometimes be achieved.”

I will follow Wood’s own example by allowing the reader to decide for him/herself whether the historian’s measured criticism belies a more critical private take on Slauter’s book. But the more interesting point, I think, is that raised by Wood’s consistent invocation of his orientation as an historian as the reason for his occasional discomfort with the book. This line of reasoning suggests a kind of disciplinary relativism in which Slauter’s narrative might be compelling to literary critics, but not to historians. It therefore simultaneously refutes Peretz’s characterization and supports it. On the one hand, by suggesting that some claims that might fly in the English department would not be accepted among historians, Wood positions history as the more rigorous, even more objective, discipline. On the other, he pointedly characterizes his historical standards as merely different from, rather than better than, the literary ones implicitly invoked by Slauter. His larger understanding consequently seems to support Peretz’s characterization of historians as weavers of narratives rather than seekers of truth.

Of interest to me here is not the perennial battle between relativism and objectivity in the humanities. Instead, it is that very prominent historians are taking strong positions regarding the practice of history, and whether non-historians are capable of doing it well. Another compelling example of this trend did not take long to announce itself. In the very next issue of the same magazine (July 15), over a quarter of the issue’s pages were given over to a single essay by Sean Wilentz, one that excoriates a series of scholars for, essentially, writing history without being historians. Though neither article says so specifically, they both suggest (to varying degrees) an implicit pushback against the trend toward interdisciplinarity, on the grounds that disciplines (or, at least, the specific discipline of history) provide methodological standards that are uniquely appropriate for their subject matter. Abandon these standards, they seem to argue, and one is unlikely to find work of great value.

Wilentz’s specific topic here is the life of Abraham Lincoln, various aspects of which are covered in the seven books considered in his essay. Wilentz begins by recounting a speech that Lincoln gave when he was still a Whig, before the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1854. In this speech (which, in its original form, took two days to deliver!), Lincoln attacked the Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce for being insufficiently dedicated to the cause of slavery. Pierce, according to Lincoln, despised the Fugitive Slave Law, which Honest Abe proceeded to defend while characterizing Pierce as a metaphorical “mulatto” for his contradictory positions. Wilentz does not introduce this story, he claims, to “debunk Lincoln’s reputation for probity and sagacity.” Indeed, the historian rejects both “the defamatory image of Lincoln as a conventional white racist” and “the awestruck hagiographies that have become ubiquitous in this anniversary year.” Instead, Wilentz claims that his “simpler and larger” argument “is that Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician.”

Such a claim hardly seems controversial, but Wilentz suggests it is lost on “some current writers” who “imagine” that Lincoln’s “every utterance” represents “a foray into moral philosophy or social theory.” Moreover, Lincoln’s speech, with its “casual racism” had little to do with “the major preoccupations of so much of today’s academic scholarship”: race and gender. Instead, the speech in question sought to accomplish several different political goals that would aid the ultimately unsuccessful Whig candidate (General Winfield Scott) against Pierce. Though this particular speech did not represent Lincoln’s “finest political hour,” Wilentz uses it as his opening example to forcefully argue that understanding the sixteenth president on his own terms requires that we represent him first and foremost as someone devoted to furthering specific political goals that included winning elections, maintaining power and governing an unruly electorate. Those who see him as racist or emancipator, philosopher or party hack, simply get him wrong.

Though these views of Lincoln differ significantly one from another, Wilentz seems to suggest that their misattribution stems from a common motivation: a lack of respect for politicians, who are viewed to be, by their very nature, “cautious and unreliable figures who must be forced by unruly events—and by outsiders—into making major reforms.” Under this interpretation:

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement had to compel the southern wheeler-dealer Lyndon B. Johnson to support civil rights and voting rights for blacks. Thus John L. Lewis and the left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations had to push a reluctant Franklin Delano Roosevelt into making and then enlarging the New Deal. And thus Frederick Douglass and the runaway slaves, not Abraham Lincoln, deserve the real credit for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Wilentz believes that this frame imposes preconceptions on those who write about history, and that it consequently tends to limit one’s ability to offer a sound assessment of the past. Those who cannot admire politicians cannot believe that politicians act admirably; consequently, when they do, they are acting in some capacity other than that of a political figure. In the case of Lincoln, this line of interpretation leads to a narrative in which Lincoln underwent a midlife epiphany regarding the injustice of slavery, after which the scales fell from his eyes and he ceased to allow political concerns to limit his moral disapprobation.

Wilentz argues that the frame itself is incorrect and distorting, and, consequently, so are any conclusions that follow from it. Wilentz blames this tendency to misread Lincoln on, overall, two different factors: one political and one intellectual. The political one is an age-old “hostility of some Americans toward partisan competition and political government,” which found its strongest expression in the late nineteenth century Mugwumps. Wilentz argues that this desire to view the actions of one’s heroes as above the political fray, “shows that Mugwumpery has

evolved, paradoxically, into a set of propositions and assumptions congenial to the contemporary American academic Left.” It is difficult to avoid the thought that Wilentz’s ire stems from the embrace by that same group of a more contemporary figure, one who consistently articulates a vision of an America that is far more united than divided, and who prefers the uplifting speech to the grubby political horse-trade. Wilentz, as is well-known, strongly supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in last year’s Democratic primaries, and did not stop criticizing him even after Clinton (now, of course, Obama’s Secretary of State) conceded the race. (Wilentz himself responded to that charge rather angrily in his response to criticisms of the article: “I wrote a 25,000 word essay about Abraham Lincoln, not Barack Obama.”) Since there is no shortage of opinions on the influence of Wilentz’s politics on his scholarship, I instead want to turn to an implicit claim of Wilentz’s piece: that those who do not specialize in political history cannot successfully write about political figures.

The bulk of the article is given over to Wilentz’s treatment of seven books that represent different approaches to Lincoln himself. Taken as a whole, these books represent “an entirely new fashion in the historiography of Lincoln” in which is “diminishe[d] the importance of party politics and government in his career.” Instead, what makes Lincoln a truly great figure is his “literary sophistication and his empathetic powers.” Wilentz traces the vogue for this interpretive angle to Garry Wills’s 1993 Lincoln at Gettysburg; while magnanimously conceding that the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “has its merits,” he argues that because “Wills is more interested in doctrine and culture than in politics, his book elides the basic fact that the speech had…no immediately discernible political effect whatsoever.” In the wake of this treatment, more recent scholarship gives us a “politics that has been cleansed and redeemed, which is to say a politics that is unreal—a politics constructed out of words, just words.” Now Lincoln, writes Wilentz, “belongs to the English department.”

In the treatments that follow, Wilentz takes issue with every book that he mentions, almost all for exhibiting one (or both) of two seemingly interrelated flaws: treating Lincoln as something other than a politician, and failing to meet the historian’s standard of evidence. “Most historians would think twice,” for example, “about relying as much as” does Michael Burlingame in his Jungian biography of Lincoln “on second- and even third-hand testimony.” Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, is one of the few to consider the “mulatto” speech with which Wilentz introduces his article. But because Kaplan is interested in a different aspect of the speech than is Wilentz, his analysis is inadequate. By tracing the origin of a literary trope that Lincoln used in that speech, Kaplan concludes that Lincoln’s racialist patterns of thought were typical of the time. For Wilentz, though, this analysis misses the point. “So the actual subject of Franklin Pierce and the speech’s actual politics have receded into a thicket or words and Lincoln’s misappropriated metaphors and the discursive practices of the 1850s.” Indeed, if there is a third theme here, it is Wilentz’s hostility toward literary criticism. He notes that the Library of America’s Lincoln Anthology, edited by Harold Holzer, fails to include a significant number of historians in its survey of the reactions of “great writers” to Lincoln. “[T]he exclusion…of these authors…who have actually known the most about the man and his times is stunning…As the practice of writing about Lincoln by non-historians continues…it will come as no surprise that English professors are at the head of the line, given the recent trend for literary critics to write about any subject they please, and in a tone of serene authority.”

All of these strains come together in a lengthy attack on Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the co-editor of Lincoln on Race and Slavery. (For reasons that are not explained, the other editor of this book, Donald Yacovone, is essentially ignored in this article.) Gates, argues Wilentz, misunderstands Thomas Jefferson’s position on blacks. He treats Lincoln unfairly by emphasizing his objections to slavery as a threat to white “free labor” rather than the inviolable human dignity of blacks. He ignores the nineteenth century Constitutional restrictions on ending slavery and consequently fails to understand the limitations on Lincoln’s ability to oppose the practice. Gates—the literary critic—overemphasizes the effect of a book (by abolitionist George Livermore, who was in turn inspired by black abolitionist William C. Nell) and underestimates the significance of the political and military situation, on Lincoln’s move toward recruiting blacks into the Union army. (This one Wilentz treats at great length, calling it an “outlandish claim” and “a counterfeit.”) Here Wilentz’s criticism of the historical efforts of non-historians dovetails with his disdain for what he views as the naïveté of those who insist on philosophical purity from their political figures. “In effect, Gates—and he is not alone—holds that the radical abolitionist view of slavery and its immediate and total eradication is the only one worthy of respect, let alone serious consideration…This may express a noble morality, but it is bad history.”

John Stauffer also comes in for a sustained criticism, for his book Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, which, in Wilentz’s view, “ends up maligning as well as misunderstanding Lincoln’s anti-slavery politics.” The article concludes, however, with a brief meditation on Barack Obama, whose similarities to Lincoln have been noted by many, including the president himself. Despite these similarities, Wilentz sees a problem with a pattern of thinking that trumpets the humble virtues of the non-politican to be found in, of all people, the president of the United States. In his view, this dynamic not only threatens our understanding of history, but also compromises our practice of politics. “The Obama campaign, with its talk of repudiating politics as usual…aroused liberal anti-politics to a fever pitch.” This approach, argues Wilentz, is not that of Abraham Lincoln, who “was never too good for politics” and “would never renounce who he was.” On this view, the idealistic visions of today’s “earnest liberal writers,” are not idealistic at all; instead the insistence on moral purity impedes any politician's ability to accomplish real good.

There is a lot going on in this essay, and even this very lengthy summary leaves much of it untouched. Certainly parts of Wilentz’s article read like it is time for its writer to move beyond throwing darts at pictures of Ralph Nader every morning, but I am less interested in Wilentz’s personal politics than in what might emerge from considering his two theses together. Wilentz argues that political historians possess a clearer understanding of political actors than do scholars working in other academic fields. He also, strongly if implicitly, believes that there is some relationship between the desire for intellectual and moral purity in one’s political heroes, and a tendency to see those qualities when they may not, in fact, exist. While many might argue with the first statement, something like it must at least be plausible if academic specialization is worth anything at all. The second is unassailable. Nonetheless, there is something in the article that is not entirely clear, and that is what, specifically, Wilentz believes to be the relationship between these two propositions. Is it necessarily true that historians see politics more clearly than do literary scholars? Might not historians have their own blinders, biases or preconceived notions with regards to politics, or any other subject? And must it be the case, as Wilentz implies, that historians are more likely to see politics for what it is, while others only view it through the lens of moral purity? That tendency would seem to reflect one’s political, rather than disciplinary, orientation. Is Wilentz suggesting a link between one’s politics and one’s field of study? He is not entirely clear on this point, but something like that seems to be the case.

Wilentz could therefore be accused of smuggling in his own disciplinary biases and political preferences under the guise of an objective quest for standards of greater rigor, and such turf battles seldom showcase anyone at their best. But I personally might prefer such a full-throated defense of one's own intellectual commitments to the kid-glove approach to other disciplines that Gordon Wood’s review suggests. Wood’s model is certainly more defensible: the standards of history are merely different from, not more accurate than, those of literary criticism. How does one respond, then, to Martin Peretz’s caricature of the history profession as laughably mired in relativism? Richard Rorty argued that the “postmodern bourgeois liberal” is one who recognizes the need to “realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly.” As an inspiring slogan, "postmodern bourgeois scholarship" admittedly lacks something. But it may be the best work that can be done.