Jack Chatfield on Radical Visions and American Dreams

Radical Visions and American Dreams By Richard Pell Harper and Row, 424 pp., $12.50 Since the Second World War historians of American culture and politics have been at work systematically undermining the notion, popularized by Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, and their students, that the country’s history is a saga of relentless economic and ideological conflict and, moreover, one in which a vigorous tradition of idealistic “radicalism” plays a major role. Not all post-progressive historians discount conflict as thoroughly as, say, Louis Hartz or Daniel Boorstin. Indeed, Richard Hofstadter coedited a documentary history of American violence; and he attacked what he considered the simplicities and omissions of “consensus” history in the concluding chapter of his book on the progressive historians.

But writers who have examined episodes of democratic “ferment”—abolitionism, prison reform, unionism, feminism, and progressivism—have discovered that old categories of Left, Right, and Center are practically useless as tools for understanding the American past. What emerges from the work of this generation of historians is more in line with Durkheim than with Marx. Beneath the surface agitation and clamor for change are instincts that are nothing if not profoundly conservative: a longing for stability, for community, for rootedness, for the integrating myths and values that define a culture and give it direction and weight.

JC

About the Author

Jack Chatfield

Featured Tags

Radical Visions and American Dreams By Richard Pell Harper and Row, 424 pp., $12.50 Since the Second World War historians of American culture and politics have been at work systematically undermining the notion, popularized by Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, and their students, that the country’s history is a saga of relentless economic and ideological conflict and, moreover, one in which a vigorous tradition of idealistic “radicalism” plays a major role. Not all post-progressive historians discount conflict as thoroughly as, say, Louis Hartz or Daniel Boorstin. Indeed, Richard Hofstadter coedited a documentary history of American violence; and he attacked what he considered the simplicities and omissions of “consensus” history in the concluding chapter of his book on the progressive historians.

But writers who have examined episodes of democratic “ferment”—abolitionism, prison reform, unionism, feminism, and progressivism—have discovered that old categories of Left, Right, and Center are practically useless as tools for understanding the American past. What emerges from the work of this generation of historians is more in line with Durkheim than with Marx. Beneath the surface agitation and clamor for change are instincts that are nothing if not profoundly conservative: a longing for stability, for community, for rootedness, for the integrating myths and values that define a culture and give it direction and weight.