The mother of intervention

Radical historians still rankle the American political mainstream, decades after the Vietnam war and the social movements of the 1960-70s. The "Vietnam syndrome" - now ironically articulated by conservatives like Pat Buchanan - looms large in a post-cold war impulse to reassess the costs of interventionism. Other reasons for history's volatility have more to do with the continuing impact of feminism and various race-based movements. If American history is to be recast as "multicultural," then the legacy of the founding fathers is likely to inspire doubt rather than the traditional awe. This prospect, however exaggerated, will prove a lively subject of debate for the foreseeable future. A.A.M. van der Linden proposes to go to the root of the dissenting history by concentrating on the half-dozen scholars who made a large impact on the new left graduate students in the United States and abroad (including van der Linden himself) during the 1960s and early 1970s. In a volume intended mainly for scholars, William Appleman Williams, James Weinstein, Staughton Lynd, Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman get the lion's share of the attention.

But an almost equal amount of space, and rather more sympathy, is extended along the way to those whom the radical historians criticised: the liberal historians who dominated the scholarly discussions of the 1950s. Indeed, so much does this particular shading of the scholarly and political debate form the core of van der Linden's interpretations that the volume might be more accurately described as an intellectual's return from left to centre, and properly titled "The liberal response to radical historians".

The author's consequent effort to collapse a complex subject into a few areas of historiographical controversy fits badly the diversity of radical history's trajectory. The omission of women's history, certainly the most influential of all the new fields launched around 1970, is startling. A similar absence of popular culture, Native American, Asian-American and Mexican-American history from his account makes impossible a careful study of long-term conceptual shifts. All these fields might be described together as social history, a distant secondary interest to the 1950s focus on political systems. But it was precisely the liberals' narrow view of political power that proved the most vulnerable to new generations of scholars.

The idiosyncratic qualities of A Revolt Against Liberalism further damage van der Linden's case. He interjects personal conclusions into scholarly debates without supplying further evidence, drifts far into the historiography of the 1980-90s, and along the way makes many minor factual errors. In short, van der Linden charted for himself a domain too large for his own conclusions.

Paul Buhle is visiting professor, department of American civilisation, Brown University, USA.