Now on to the larger point. Mattson’s bigger ambition is to revive the tradition of liberal public intellectual historians like C. Vann Woodward, Arthur Schlesinger, and Richard Hofstadter. I’m certainly sympathetic to the idea that historians should move away from writing stuff like “Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France,” “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” and “The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914—1920″ — all real examples cited by Mattson. So I agree with him on at least one aspect of the problem. But it’s his solution where he loses me. He writes:
It wasn’t always this way. In the postwar era, there was a generation of historians–like C. Vann Woodward, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, and Schlesinger himself–who were consummate professionals and engaged in the important matters of the day. These historians benefited from the stringent demands of professional objectivity, a tradition that had solidified during the early years of the twentieth century with the growth of the modern university as well as the founding of numerous graduate programs in history and professional associations like the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Yet historians like Woodward, Commager, and Hofstadter did not believe that objectivity and professionalism required locking themselves up in an ivory tower–just the opposite. Objectivity and the broad perspective that a training in history provided made these intellectuals’ engagement in public life an imperative. Now, as professionalization and objectivity–and the cruel realities of limited academic jobs for young historians–exert more pressures than before, we are forgetting the balancing act carried out by a previous generation. Fewer and fewer historians have the skills or ambition–let alone incentives–to make history speak to a wider public world. This leaves public engagement to those who are willing to cheapen the historian’s craft and play political football with the past. Both our understanding of history and our public discussion are the worse for it.
But it seems that what Mattson wants are liberal historians who get to settle arguments by invoking not so much history but their own authority as “real” historians. You get the distinct impression that what he’s really saying is that liberal historians need to get more involved because liberal historians — like him! — are right about everything. Time and again he talks about liberal historians as if by mere virtue of the fact that they were liberal or historians or both their view of history is the real History. Democracy’s readership may not have large objections here, but to the less agreeable reader this smacks of a huge stolen base.
For example, Hofstadter’s scholarship has come under sharp scrutiny in recent years and he doesn’t come out favorably. He was indisputably a brilliant essayist, but not an exacting historian as he himself admitted (he scorned the “archive rats” who did the dusty hard work we associate with the profession). His use of Frankfurt school pseudo-psychology drenched much of his work on conservatism , making it as punchy and interesting as it made it flawed and unfair. His dissertation, which became Social Darwinism in American Thought distorted facts (the Robber Barons were not students of Darwin or even Herbert Spenser , but of the Bible and Adam Smith) and is one of the chief culprits behind the slander that free-market economics and so-called “social Darwinism” are kindred doctrines.
Anyway, I would love to see more liberal historians like Mattson get into the mix, but A) he should practice what he preaches a bit more and B) let’s not make liberal historians into a gnostic priesthood, mm, k?