The Methodological Connection to the Campus Climate (Part 3): A Clue from History

Academic history—especially American history—more than most other disciplines is notable for the way in which each generation sets out to overturn the dominant viewpoint and leading interpretations of the preceding generation. You can see this as far back as the Progressive Era historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, Carl Becker, Albert J. Beveridge, and James Allen Smith, who sought to overthrow the whiggish narratives of the leading 19th century historians like Henry Adams and George Bancroft. Those Progressive historians cast a deeply skeptical eye on American democracy and the Founding, and their critical histories fit closely with the reformist political mood of the Progressive Era.

By the mid-20th century, however, a new revisionist cadre, the so-called “consensus school,” rejected the Progressive Era historians wholesale, dismissing the Progressive canon according to errors of fact and interpretation. The leading figures of the “consensus school” were Louis Hartz, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Henry Steele Commager, and above all Richard Hofstadter. On the surface, this revisionism was not directly ideological, as the consensus school historians were all liberals or progressives of one stripe or another. But as was the case with the Progressive historians, the consensus school’s understanding of American democracy was in close harmony with the dominant ideology of early Cold War liberal internationalism and anti-Communism.

Fast forward another generation to the 1960s and 1970s, as a new wave of revisionism rubbished the consensus school. Some of this was ideological: New Left historians such as Staughton Lynd, James Franklin Jameson, and Gabriel Kolko, along with Howard Zinn cast a skeptical eye on the American liberal tradition and the Cold War amidst the hothouse climate of the Vietnam War and student protest movement. Less radical historians also produced sweeping new interpretations that rejected both the Progressive and consensus school historians, seeing America as a product of many more discordant and neglected ideas and cultural contingencies, such as Caroline Robbins, J.G.A. Pocock, and Gordon Wood.

You can see another iteration of this cycle at work today with the reaction to the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which relies on the work of younger historians, many of them writing a self-conscious “new history of capitalism.” The 1619 Project arguably reflects the new academic consensus about how slavery should be understood in American history, but has provoked the sharpest reaction not from conservative historians—Wilfred McClay and Allan Guelzo being notable exceptions—but from older liberal historians such as Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, and, most odd of all, the World Socialists. Here the generational split looms larger than the ideological split.

But there were also some distinct methodological changes in academic history that contribute to this constant generational overturning. To take a long sweep again, in the 19th century there was great enthusiasm especially in Europe for both philosophical history and scientific history—the first owing to the influence of Hegel and German historicism, the second to Darwin. Henry Steele Commager wrote that: “Almost every historian of that [19th century] generation felt that he was on the verge of some discovery that should do for history what Darwin had done for nature.”

Philosophical history has not gone away, but in the 20th century the strong influences of social science and Marxism went a long way toward instigating new methodologies for historical investigation that paid more attention to social and material forces, a “history from the bottom up,” and often explicitly scorned the “great man” style of Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. A pre-eminent example of this methodological innovation is the famous mid-century Annales school clustered around the French historian Fernand Braudel, with its fine-grained syntheses of how material and social forces shaped historical change over the long run. In the U.S. there was a period in the 1960s and 1970s when “cliometrics”—historical investigation rooted in detailed statistical analysis—was ascendant in many history departments. Cliometric history could be a mind-numbing exercise in statistical trivia, but some made significant contributions to widening our historical horizons. The controversial analysis of southern plantation slavery by Stanley Engerman and Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel in the 1970s arguably prepared the way for the 1619 Project, for example.

Along with the impulse to be more scientific and cross-disciplinary came attention to the social history of minorities and underrepresented groups. Social history is partly cliometric, but also partly linked with demands for justice and recognition from overlooked minorities. The pendulum swings of academic history make it difficult to draw clear lines between overdue revisions and inclusion of neglected voices and perspectives, versus an ideologically distorted emphasis that starts to affect the discipline as a whole. To be sure, there are still many academic historians who specialize in “big events” or specific subfields like the French Revolution, imperial Russia, Victorian Britain, Latin America, Africa, or dynastic China, but some once-prominent subfields, like military history and constitutional history, have largely disappeared, along with, as mentioned at the outset, conventional biography of prominent political figures. Today’s humanities and social sciences tend tofocus on race, class, and gender, often. framed through colonialism to the point it seem the imperial phase of the European powers in the second half of the second millennium is the most important period of all human history.

Similar to the dynamics within political science discussed in the first two installments of this series (here and here) conservative-minded historians are likewise alienated from both the ideological center of gravity and the dominant methodological focus of American history today. A self-reinforcing feedback loop deepens. One of the strange paradoxes of academia today is that the fierce competition for academic jobs and pressure for university departments to climb up the coveted U.S. News rankings actually stifles innovation and risk-taking within many disciplines, as no one wants to be “out of the mainstream.” Set aside possible ideological biases; few history departments will want to hire—or even have a subfield position for—someone who wants to specialize in military history or presidential biography. Methodological and ideological homogeneity harden further, aggravating what Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School calls “the dominance of conformity” in which individuals with strong points of view become even more extreme when they deliberate only with others of the same point of view. The effect of this is not simply a further narrowing of campus orthodoxy that sometimes aggressively marginalizes non-left thinkers and ideas (the “cancel culture” phenomenon); the “mainstream” of academia is becoming even more remote from the mainstream of America.

There is no obvious remedy for this state of affairs, but the trend ought to be more widely recognized. The sudden uncertainty about the immediate future of universities amidst the COVID-19 crisis might provide some opportunities for thinking about how to shake up campus cultures. That will be the focus of the next installment in this series.