The New History and its Critics

...See her letter to the New Criterion, March 1986, pp...

...All three demean 242 • DISSENT New History politics, thereby robbing history of its unifying theme...

...Surely, as ex-communists like Richard Wright tried to show, this is not the case...

...ten years later, virtually all had soured on whatever sympathies they had with Marxism and the left...

...The works Himmelfarb singles out may be more typical of psychohistorical practice, but an intellectual current ought to be judged by its best work, not by its uneven pioneering efforts or its mediocrities...

...Had Himmelfarb really wanted to make good on her interest in history's well-being, she might have made a greater effort to establish where she and so many of her antagonists share common ground...

...At another level, the more these approaches proliferated, the more they sapped historical studies of their sense of context and human agency...

...They produced their full share of bad history books, spoiled by sentimental hero worship, ahistorical moralizing, naive romantic visions of the Third World, and a "Marxist" variant of functionalist sociology...

...Hobsbawm...

...Instead, she belabors the negative in the new scholarship, celebrates conventional history, and resists the notion that the two might actually inform one another...

...But to carry it through requires a recognition of the deficiencies in Himmelfarb's brand of traditionalism as well as in the work she chastises...

...As a group, though, the British Marxists have had to struggle with one of the tragedies of SPRING • 1989 • 247 New History modern intellectual life: Why it took so long— until 1956—for such brilliant scholars to begin to face up to things about the party that almost all of their most benighted countrymen had known for years...

...Surely these are part of the story...

...Hofstadter once explicated what some of these innovations were: By looking to psychology, the sociology of knowledge, functional analysis, public opinion polls, and quantitative methods, the historians of the 1950s and early 1960s sought to make "the entire sociological penumbra of political life" into "an organic part of historical thinking...

...When, for example, Thompson wrote in 1973 of his refusal to follow "the well-worn paths of apostasy" or become a "Public Confessor and Renegade," he left the impression that to say too much, too loudly, about communism is to turn into Whittaker Chambers...

...Yet in the United States, it has fallen to economists, philosophers, and political scientists to fashion an academically plausible neoconservativism...

...Labor historians excoriated social science treatments of class that were so "obsessively concerned with methodology" that they proceeded "to the exclusion of the examination of a single real class situation in a real historical context...

...British radical historians led the way, in works like E.P...

...To do so was the inspiration behind the rest of today's new history, no matter what methodological dead ends it may have run into...

...Himmelfarb's basic complaint is that the new history—analytical in form, social or psychological in focus—has displaced traditional or conventional history, with its narrative method and political focus...

...Hardly any of these 1950s liberals considered reverting to a political narrative history that they associated all too easily with the genteel tradition...

...Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (published in 1963, in part as a ringing response to social science interpretations of the Industrial Revolution) and Christopher Hill's assault on Peter Laslett's quanto-opus, The World We Have Lost...

...If they did, historians would have to cast a jaundiced eye on the motives and thinking behind some of the most suggestive postwar historical writing, not simply of those she criticizes directly, but of Richard Hofstadter, Oscar Handlin, Daniel Boorstin, Bernard Bailyn, Edmund S. Morgan, C. Vann Woodward, David H. Donald, David Brion Davis, John Hope Franklin, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Linda Gordon, and so many others...

...Thoughts, ideals, morality— indeed, human agency—all but disappear...

...Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution...

...At their worst, they have degenerated into what C. Wright Mills called crackpot empiricism, the amassing of statistical series and folkish literary remains to no discernible historical purpose...

...The hounding of the Marxist historian David Abraham, the filiopiety of the Constitution bicentennial, the Meesian theory of "original intent," evangelical celebrations of our biblical republic (the list goes on) have all made their mark...

...Her writing improves when it comes to the mélange of history and the social sciences that, in this country, passes for the mainstream of the new social history...

...What's more, large portions of these radical critiques bore striking resemblances to those delivered (often later) from other corners of the profession...

...Yet none is an "old history" of the kind Himmelfarb venerates...

...A knee-jerk reaction would be to accuse Himmelfarb of applying a singular standard to those who were taken in by Stalin—demanding full recantations from them alone...

...Over the last decade, meanwhile, a third stream of criticism has emerged from the new social historians themselves—from those who have tried to preserve the field's animating spirit...

...She seizes on one strand of radical history, Marxism, paying close attention to the writings of such postwar British Marxist historians as Thompson, Hill, and E.J...

...Daniel Boorstin was a third...

...But much radical history was splendid...

...At the very moment that so many historians began looking to the social sciences for help, the social sciences were scrapping the historical dimension of their work: sociologists with their opinion surveys, economists with their marketplace models of homo economicus, political scientists with their gerry-built indexes of relative deprivation...

...Among popular and academic historians alike, liberals, radicals, and old-line conservatives—not the reborn neocons —have produced the most influential and widely read work of the last fifteen years...

...If anything, she is too quick and easy...

...The Marxist, she grandly asserts (as if there were only one type) selects facts to suit prearranged theses and ignores facts that might undermine orthodox doctrine...

...Yet Himmelfarb's criticisms beg more questions than they answer...

...Perhaps this seeming irony is a mere coincidence...

...She points an accusing finger at three groups of miscreants— the psychohistorians, the new social historians, and the radical historians.' She charges that all three are determinist, so much so that they efface the importance of historical events and the dignity of individuals...

...We might expect Himmelfarb to be razor-sharp about this, considering that some of these Marxists write in her own field of expertise...

...How did the immigrant experience or the frontier experience affect national development...

...Such a reconciliation is not only possible, it is taking place...

...Quite apart, New History though, from their various conclusions, these historians and their graduate students shared an affinity for new subjects and new methods— and especially for insights of the social sciences...

...Her argument really rests not on what the British Marxists wrote in 1952, nor on their political pronouncements since 1956, but on their failure to renounce radicalism tout court...

...Moreover, they would have to overcome what Himmelfarb herself points to as a certain American distrust of essentially political, essentially narrative history...

...Alongside these men were many other historians who joined in what Hofstadter called a "monographic uprising" that began, roughly, in 1950...

...Less statistically minded social historians, meanwhile, imagine that social relations can be studied in pristine isolation from political institutions and the life of the mind...

...More SPRING • 1989 • 245 New History curious still is another, rather more important set of ironies—about the new social history and the left...

...It is doubtful that Himmelfarb's one-sided strictures ever could have cut much ice, at least in this country...

...This is, by any reckoning, a muddle...

...Zeldin's interpretive style is, however, so idiosyncratic that it cannot be attached to any group...

...Most were reared on the writings of Progressive historians like James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr...

...Himmelfarb should not be included in this group...

...One wonders, though, exactly which Marxist histories she means...

...After eight years of Reagan, the most conspicuous neoconservative historical genre remains the tub-thumping diatribes in Commentary, the New Criterion, and the American Scholar.' Himmelfarb's writings are a cut above these...

...provocations, they are carefully considered, sometimes insightful...

...But going back to George Bancroft in the 1830s, American historians, even when writing about politics and thought, have shown an impatience with political narrative and the history of ideas, preferring to pursue larger philosophical, social, and psychological themes: Parkman and his forests, Turner and the frontier, Beard and his economic interpretations, Du Bois and the souls of black folk...

...One is their use of the behavioralist social sciences (usually, in this country, functionalist sociology or neoclassical economics...

...Many have come to agree with Lawrence Stone that it might be time for historians to jump "the social scientific ship, which appears to be leaking and undergoing major repair...

...20.00...

...Another was Oscar Handlin, whose writings and teachings in the 1940s and 1950s, influenced as they were by Parsonian sociology, did much to lay the groundwork for the new social history of immigrants and city life...

...0 Notes Which is not to say the last eight years have been without conservative influences...

...As early as the 1940s, some of them began questioning the simplifications and silences in Progressive history...

...And these essays— a series of assaults on the so-called "new history" — stand as monuments of reasoned criticism compared with the sputtering of professors like Norman Cantor...

...Of course, posing such questions can be a dangerous 248 • DISSENT New History business, from a neoconservative as well as a traditionalist standpoint...

...Indeed, as she admits, nearly all of the British writers under discussion have rejected that model, which relegates politics and consciousness to the epiphenomenal "superstructure...

...American radicals quickly followed suit, in monographs, articles, and reviews that culminated, in the mid-1970s, in Herbert Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game and Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth FoxGenovese's caustic essay, "The Political Crisis of Social History...

...Call it the democratic impulse in history writing...

...There is plenty in the early writings of the British Marxists that can be held aloft for ridicule and condemnation: Paeans to the Soviet dictatorship, nice words about Lysenko and "socialist science," all the fudging and flummery to be expected from a group of young, would-be intellectuals who (as Hobsbawm recalls) "were apt to fall into the stern and wooden style of the disciplined Bolshevik cadres...

...Himmelfarb, however, inveighs against how the new social historians slight politics and ideas...

...This, as much as anything, initiated the trends Himmelfarb now rejects—for the work of the 1950s liberals carried with it (in the jargon of the day) certain latent dysfunctions...

...Himmelfarb's recital of all this is impressive less for its originality (much of it has been said before, sometimes by self-critical social historians) than for its urgency...

...She declares that the new history is at war, not just with the old history but with "history itself" and with "reason itself...

...As Himmelfarb observes, the problem with so much of the new social history is not that it often concentrates on the powerless masses instead of the powerful few, or that it examines social phenomena like class, or even that it borrows from social theory to give shape and meaning to the past...

...The British Marxists (most of whom left the Communist party in or around 1956) have certainly been candid about their former adherence to the party line...

...A bit mystical, maybe, but the heart still vibrates to that string more than it does to Himmelfarb's...

...Politics in the new social history usually gets reduced to tautological abstractions like "social control...

...One was the brilliant historian Richard Hofstadter, who in his numerous books (notably The Age of Reform) disdained conventional narrative and the old-fashioned history of ideas, drew freely on postwar social scientific concepts like "status anxiety," and lavished attention on third-rate political writers, all as a way to understand a broader American "political culture...

...Whatever their autobiographical reticence (and even Himmelfarb must acknowledge they have hardly been silent) the British Marxists have worked through their political and theoretical reasoning for all to see in their historical writings...

...Likewise, historians need to explore how the exercise and changing structure of power outside of formal politics affects political institutions and ideas, and vice versa...

...and here she delivers her most telling points...

...It was these radical historians—Marxists, non-Marxists, feminists, and others—who, in their own research as well as their criticisms of others, provided the new social history with some of its stiffest challenges, precisely on the grounds that it slighted politics, consciousness, ideas, and human agency...

...It also clarifies where much of the new history made its wrong turn—in its resolution of the flight from 1930s Marxism and Progressivism more than thirty years ago, and in particular in its fascination with the social sciences...

...Finally, she notes, they were once, to a man, loyal Stalinists who have insufficiently accounted for their previous crimes against scholarship...

...Whatever their faults, the classics of Marxist history cannot be accused of abasing or ignoring political events, institutions, and ideas...

...84-85...

...Himmelfarb explains her meaning: It is the Marxists' economic determinism that slights politics and ideas, in ways so similar to the rest of the new history...

...at times, with a kind of reverse snobbery, they seem to insist that the mundane practices of ordinary people are somehow more important than events like the American Revolution or the Civil War...

...while her own political shifts have taken her over the years from sectarian leftism through liberalism to the hard right, she has always written fairly traditional intellectual history—studies of Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill and so on...

...Starting in the mid-1970s, there have come the snipings of the neoconservatives, enraged by what they perceive as history's capitulation to the radical left and the counterculture...

...Then there was Seymour Martin 244 • DISSENT Lipset, who, though formally a sociologist, did as much as anyone to introduce American historians to postwar social science...

...My concern here, though, is with the actual writing of history and the specific criticisms of the neoconservatives...

...At one level, Himmelfarb's critique is a blanket indictment of all Marxist scholarship...

...All three slight ideas, by treating them as by-products of some deeper struggle— Oedipal, demographic, or economic...

...The list of those involved reads like a postwar American Historical Association honor roll...

...Those most drawn to the social sciences, she notes, often make the mistake of trying to decide what people really thought strictly on the basis of some behavioral trend, judging motives and causes on the basis of outcomes or effects...

...Origins of the New History Much of today's new history—the new social history in particular—originated not as a revolt against tradition but in the efforts of 1950s liberals to supplant the legacy of the Progressive historians and of 1930s Marxism...

...Du Bois on Reconstruction...

...So are the political writings of John C. Calhoun and Thaddeus Stevens...

...Although hardly of a single mind, these scholars shared a great deal besides their common interest in the American past...

...And no one can accuse, say, E.P...

...It ought to be all the more embarrassing, then, for Himmelfarb to look through some of the more publicized and acclaimed historical works published over the past few years, among them James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, Nell Irvin Painter's Standing at Armageddon, and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution...

...She will not have it: The differences between these two modes, she says, have become so profound that they amount to "different conceptions of history...

...Nevertheless, if the 1950s liberals steered clear of the most odious kinds of pseudohistory, their sympathy for and use of the social sciences (along with Boorstin's anti-intellectualist stance) certainly helped lead American historical scholarship down what Himmelfarb considers the primrose path...

...All focus heavily on "traditional" subjects—wars, treaties, legislatures, political movements...

...By the mid1960s social history had begun to look increasingly like a branch of the social sciences...

...another, larger part takes us not to Paris, but to places like Morningside Heights and to the 1950s, not the 1960s...

...Albert Soboul on the French Revolution...

...But this is not enough for Himmelfarb, who would have them change their research agendas entirely and write scholarly studies of Marxism and communism...

...One might even ask whether the new social history wasn't, at least in part, the outgrowth of an earlier phase of the neoconservatives' fitful march to the right...

...Repulsed by the sentimentalism and moral blindness of the Popular Front, fed up with the sectarianism of Trotskyists and ex-Trotskyists, chilled (in some cases) by cold war hysteria, most would have described themselves as pluralist liberals—not optimistic do-gooders, but men of that modernist, tragic frame of mind that Lionel Trilling associated with the liberal imagination.4 Impressed with American capitalism's resilience, skeptical of radical causes, they searched for new ways to come to terms with American history in an age when all ideology seemed bankrupt...

...Either way, it is curious that Himmelfarb's account sidesteps these matters, leaving us with a flat impression of the new social history as some sort of "radical" enterprise out to subvert history and reason...

...As proof, she produces what appears to be an admission of guilt from E.J...

...Moreover, as Himmelfarb herself goes on to observe, the economic determinist strain in Marxist history has, over the last three decades, come under withering attack from the left...

...But these shortcomings were not immediately evident, even to a scholar as respectful of ideas as Hofstadter...

...Himmelfarb makes easy work of pointing this out in some brief remarks about Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther and discussions of two psychobiographies of the 1970s...

...But also, perhaps, a certain confusion—that all-too familiar idea that to break too far from one's radical past is to renounce radicalism, or to give ideological advantage to the ruling class...

...W.E.B...

...And, without question, some new historians, flushed by the enthusiasm typical of any rising intellectual trend, have sounded obnoxiously intolerant...

...And most shared a certain political trajectory as well...

...No one, however, can deny the enormous boom in the prestige of historical subdisciplines that were either marginal or nonexistent thirty years ago...

...If we are to understand anything of, say, American slavery and its demise, then an understanding of who said what to whom concerning the Compromise of 1850 or the drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation (and on what date) is obviously important...

...Himmelfarb's aim is true, but her performance here looks too much like a dazzling display of Coney Island marksmanship...

...all propose broadly social interpretations while endeavoring to avoid determinism...

...The other is their concentration on everyday life, customs, and social relations, usually among the middling or lower orders...

...2 To her credit, Himmelfarb has dissociated herself publicly from at least one of Cantor's tirades...

...All are organized as chronological narratives...

...But Himmelfarb's case doesn't rest with what she calls "the triumph of the new...

...Other radicals lamented the new social history's "philistine disregard for the centrality of politics" along with its "willful pretense at `value-free' analysis which drains any notion of consciousness or interest...

...2 Considering that Himmelfarb intended these essays as * The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals, Cambridge Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987, 209 pp...

...So, in the work of some of the Victorian narrative historians Himmelfarb admires, one finds all sorts of hair-raising statements about exotic foreigners and the sham of constitutional liberty...

...Of course, this country has produced some grand political narrators, descending in acuity and literary skill from Henry Adams to James Ford Rhodes...

...Traditional political narrative or the history of ideas —the old history—can never be dispensed with...

...The British Marxists, she says, renounce "empirical" history and prefer their "predetermined schema" — leading us to ask why E.P...

...This is a tactical overstatement: A check of the personnel in the major history departments nationwide or of recent recipients of honors like the Pulitzer Prize shows that rumors of traditional history's overthrow are greatly exaggerated...

...Building on diverse theoretical currents—from Gramscian Marxism to postwar feminism—the best works broke free of the limits of "official" leftism...

...In Hofstadter's estimation, they succeeded both in toppling the classic works of the Progressives and in releasing historians' speculative capacities and research energies...

...a surprisingly large number (at least among the most prominent) had been young radicals...

...The specifics of changing social structure, popular thought, divisions of class and color, ethnicity and gender—in short, all of what Hofstadter called "the sociological penumbra" —must be kept at the center as well...

...Hobsbawm...

...Still, there is a temptation to wonder if Himmelfarb's polemics ought to be thrown back in her direction...

...Such criticism has come primarily from four directions...

...Set alongside what Hofstadter called the "anti-intellectualist" current exemplified in Boorstin's writings, they tended to slight ideas as well...

...Anyone expecting a more searching, informative, conservative appraisal of current trends in British Marxist history (or any kind of radical history) will not find it here...

...An important intellectual historian of Victorian Britain, Himmelfarb has at least contributed, in The Idea of Poverty (1984), an ambitious, if tendentious piece of scholarship about the English Industrial Revolution...

...She does observe that some of today's trendier themes date back well into the nineteenth century, and she makes passing references to more recent influences, from Fernand Braudel and the French Annales school to the 1960s American preoccupations with black, feminist, and populist history...

...But while this is true—and to Himmelfarb's discredit—it is also an evasion...

...Thompson of still harboring illusions about communism and the Soviet Union—not when he has written so eloquently of the "exterminist" logic of both super power blocs...

...Indeed, leftist historians were quicker than most to see what was wrong in the new scholarship...

...Still others wrote of the "reductive fallacy" and the search for "monocausal explanations" in the new work...

...And, with that, the field began to attract the numbers crunchers, antiquarians, and crackpot empiricists who now populate it...

...It was no new historian, but Ralph Waldo Emerson who spoke of "what a shallow village tale our so-called History is," and of how we must write our annals "broader and deeper if we would truly express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride...

...In the late 1960s and early 1970s the arrival of the new radical historians threw some 1950s liberals into fits, which in turn hastened the emergence of academic neoconservativism...

...Is There a Common Ground...

...Social-science historians tend to be cynical about ideas, treating them either as euphemistic glosses on self-interest or as the detritus of demographic and economic forces...

...Having made his separate peace with McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, Boorstin moved into a rather different sort of cold war pluralism...

...Instead, at a time when America was just beginning its love affair with computers and sociological "experts" —and with public and private agencies eager to fund almost anything that sounded "scientific" —the new social history became an academic growth industry...

...Many came from urban, non-WASP (usually Jewish) backgrounds, forming that first generation of outsiders to make it big into a profession long blighted by bigotry...

...The 1960s radical historians were a diverse and fractious group...

...Since she does not bother with this history, let us sketch it out for ourselves...

...Alerted, at last, to the scholarly limits and presentist biases of social science behaviorialism, a growing number of them have begun trying to take politics and ideas more seriously...

...How did psychological and symbolic factors affect the past...

...In the historical profession as a whole," she writes, "the new history is the new orthodoxy...

...The problem is the way social historians do these things—the specific theories they deploy and the kinds of conclusions they draw...

...Much of this writing has since been lumped together as the consensus school— a label that often hides as much as it reveals...

...Some of the new social history's most impassioned critics, however, have come from another quarter entirely—the same rejuvenated left that sends the neoconservatives into paroxysms...

...Triumph of the New...

...Himmelfarb, however, instead of exploring this struggle and giving a full exposition of her antagonists' evolving views, pastes up some collected snippets from their writings and tries to score political points...

...So urgent, in fact, are these essays that we lose sight of what the SPRING • 1989 • 243 New History new social history has to offer...

...Clearly something is happening here, and Himmelfarb doesn't know what it is—or at least she didn't anticipate it when she put her book together...

...Now and then, some older humanists have raised alarms, none more eloquently than Jacques Barzun...

...Marxism," she forthrightly declares "has succeeded in this: in demeaning and denigrating political events, institutions, activities, and ideas...

...Recent Marxist and radical history at least has the virtue of grappling with these issues...

...Few, if any, were conservatives...

...What, then, is wrong with contemporary radical history as exemplified by Thompson et al...

...Beneath the sturm and drang, however, some of the most influential radicals were raising fundamental objections to the kinds of new history that 1950s liberal historians (including some who have since become neoconservatives) had once helped inspire...

...She also might have pondered why so many historians have chafed at some of the premises of the old history...

...3 Himmelfarb also singles out the work of Theodore Zeldin...

...Historians—especially American historians— have decided that there is little point in pitting old against new, that the time has come to transform and combine both modes...

...Attacks on the new social history began almost as soon as the field consolidated its gains in the mid-1960s...

...although Boorstin stuck more closely than others to narrative, his books vaunted the importance of social process and argued the unsettling thesis that ideas were basically irrelevant to American politics and culture...

...To rescue history from further desecration, she looks forward to a return to those time-tested methods and subjects— "dynasties and governments, wars and laws, treaties and documents" —which she claims the new historians dismiss out of hand...

...We might expect Himmelfarb to assail better books than she does...

...And they help us see why the neocons have had so much trouble impressing practicing historians...

...And when faced with the task of herself refuting the "substantive philosophy" of recent British Marxist history, her analysis descends to the point of intellectual shiftiness...

...Pride, no doubt, played a part in this, as well as sentimental attachments and an abiding disgust at the creepy conformism of various remorseful ex-communists...

...The ironies here are arresting...

...Not that we should blame the 1950s liberals for all the subsequent excesses and stupidities of the new social history...

...Daniel Boorstin might be counted as an exception here...

...And so (as we keep finding out) there are dirty hands among scholars, living and dead, all along the political spectrum...

...most have pointed to the ways "Stalinist pieties" distorted their earlier writings...

...Himmelfarb spends the least energy on psychohistory—appropriately enough, given that many of those she calls new historians consider the field a disaster area...

...As young outsiders-turnedinsiders, they still wanted answers to questions that had first interested them in history: What were the economic, cultural, and religious bases of political authority...

...Thompson, probably the most influential of the lot, has spent so much of his time defending history as a preeminently empirical pursuit, the sworn foe of predetermined models...

...She accuses the British Marxists of being "excessively materi alistic" —but never draws the delicate line that demarcates excessive from appropriate materialism...

...Straying too far from the confines of the old history opens up the possibility that professors and students might begin to perceive gaps between everyday realities and those grand Anglo-American principles—of "liberty and right, checks and balances, self-government and good government" — that Himmelfarb would have our history impart...

...Himmelfarb is too prudent to ignore this strange convergence altogether...

...all make abundant use of the new history's finding and insights...

...Or perhaps there is more to it, as part of a generational history of successive renunciations, first of the left, then of liberalism...

...This last point touches off alarms...

...Certainly there has been no shortage of strong and valid criticisms of the British Marxists' work, from almost every vantage point...

...And so is a recognition that politicians and statesmen usually follow a pragmatic logic that heeds self-interest as well as loftier ideals...

...Yet to sustain her argument she must prove that the radicals are somehow (if only unconsciously) allied 246 • DISSENT New History with the other new historians, in a common front against traditionalism...

...some were New Deal liberals...

...Many of these studies (and even Himmelfarb must admit this) have made enormous contributions in charting the unknown contours of material life, popular consciousness, and social development...

...This shift toward "valuefree" theory often carried with it a political burden—to elevate the values of the postwar capitalist democracies as "normative," "modern," and therefore desirable...

...Now, twenty years on, neoconservatives like Himmelfarb are raising some of the same objections the radicals have been raising all along—but in the name of protecting traditional history from radical perversions...

...Himmelfarb is too busy posturing...

...Beginning with the postwar, liberal background of today's new scholarship, this little chapter in recent intellectual history highlights some ironic political connections, along with the narrowness of the ground Himmelfarb has now chosen to occupy...

...The trouble is, she wrenches this smoking gun from some self-critical Hobsbawm reminiscences about standard operating procedure among the Communist historians in the 1940s and early 1950s...

...Here Himmelfarb takes on the widely respected scholarship of historians like Peter Laslett and Lawrence Stone...

...Gertrude Himmelfarb's engaging, censorious collection of essays brings to mind how little the neoconservatives have affected American historical writing.* Surely no one could have predicted this failure, given both the resources at the neocons' command and history's notorious exposure to shifting political winds...

...Among others, Peter Gay's and Carl Schorske's rather different studies of Freud and Austro-German cultural politics mobilize psychoanalytic concepts far more persuasively than the run-of-the-mill psychobiographies do—and without threatening reason or history...

...Two features distinguish the kinds of social history Himmelfarb reproves...

...But this is not enough...

...Marxist historians have never been the sole or even the major purveyors of economic determinism: In the United States, for example, it was the decidedly non-Marxist Charles Beard who established the economic interpretation of history as an important intellectual force...

...Recent conservatizing trends have certainly touched historical scholarship in other Western democracies...

...It is hard not to notice an apparent paradox here: Several of the 1950s liberals who helped inspire the new history—scholars like Handlin, Boorstin, and Lipset —are today neoconservatives...

...The real pity, though, is that while Himmelfarb presents herself as the defender of the history of ideas, she says so little about the American intellectual origins of the new social history itself...

...the old history— "once at the center of the profession" —is now peripheral...

...For years, psychohistory has operated largely as an academic sideshow —debunking lofty reputations in a manner that actually precludes moral, political, or historical judgments...

...with an empirical hardihood as vigorous as anything in the mainstream, they opened up new views on everything from the history of slavery to the politics of women's suffrage...

...Criticizing the Scholarship This backward glance reminds us of something that Himmelfarb obscures: The new history's motivating impulse was not to efface politics and ideas or subject them to some sort of sociological tyranny, but to interpret them anew, in their broadest historical context...

...More recently, Cantor has tried to align American neoconservativism with the intellectual legacy of European fascism...

...She charges that recent Marxist writings appear to be "a continuation of politics by other means" —a baffling passage given that some pages earlier she flatly equates politics with the pursuit of reason...

...And make the best of it...

...SPRING • 1989 249...

...Whereas once "[i]t was only the Marxist who regarded politics as the epiphenomenon of history," now (alas) almost all historians do...

...Why was there no socialism in America...