Consensus history
Consensus historyis a term used to define a style of Americanhistoriographyand classify a group of historians who emphasize the basic unity ofAmerican valuesand the Americannational characterand downplayconflicts,especially conflicts alongclasslines, as superficial and lacking in complexity. The term originated with historianJohn Higham,who coined it in a 1959 article inCommentarytitled "The Cult of the American Consensus". Consensus history saw its primary period of influence in the 1950s, and it remained the dominant mode of American history until historians of theNew Leftbegan to challenge it in the 1960s.
Meaning[edit]
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In 1959,John Highamdeveloped the concept of an emerging consensus among historians that he saw as based on the search for "a placid, unexciting past" as part of "a massive grading operation to smooth over America's social convulsions." Higham named his research concept critically a "Cult of the American Consensus". Higham felt the conservative frame of reference was creating a "paralyzing incapacity to deal with the elements of spontaneity, effervescence, and violence in American history". He maintained it had "a deadening effect on the historian’s ability to take a conflict of ideas seriously." Either he disbelieves in the conflict itself (Americans having been pretty much of one mind), or he trivializes it into a set of psychological adjustments to institutional change. In either case, the current fog of complacency, flecked with anxiety, spreads backward over the American past.[1]
Peter NovickidentifiedRichard HofstadterandLouis Hartzas leading "liberal consensus historians" andDaniel J. Boorstinas a "leading conservative consensus historian". Novick includes as other prominent leadersDavid M. Potter,Perry Miller,Clinton Rossiter,Henry Steele Commager,Allan NevinsandEdmund Morgan.[2]Consensus history rejected the concept of the central role ofclass conflictand all kinds of othersocial divisionsthat were prevalent in the older "Progressive" historiography, as articulated especially byCharles A. Beard,Frederick Jackson Turner,andVernon L. Parrington.
The concept of consensus history was viewed as one-sided and harmonizing conflicting forces from the very beginning, but especially byNew Lefthistorians in the 1960s, who again stressed the central roles of economic classes, addingracismandgender inequalityas two other roots ofsocialand political conflicts.[3]
Richard Hofstadter[edit]
The term was widely applied to his revision of the supposedly Beardian idea that a fundamental class conflict was the only key to understanding history. After 1945, Hofstadter identified with a political liberalism that seemed similar to the views of other "consensus historians". Hofstadter rejected the term, because in his view conflict, also on economic terms, remained an essential aspect of political development.[4]
The general misunderstanding of Hofstadter as an adherent of "consensus history" can be found inEric Foner's statement that Hofstadter's bookThe American Political Tradition(1948) "propelled him to the very forefront of his profession." Foner argues:
Hofstadter's insight was that virtually all his subjects held essentially the same underlying beliefs. Instead of persistent conflict (whether between agrarians and industrialists, capital and labor, or Democrats and Republicans), American history was characterized by broad agreement on fundamentals, particularly the virtues of individual liberty, private property, and capitalist enterprise.[5]
Hofstadter in 1948, thus rejected the extremely simplified black-and-white polarization between pro- and anti-business politicians as early as hisAmerican Political Tradition(1948).[6]But he was still viewing politics from a critical left-wing perspective.[7]Making explicit reference toJefferson,Jackson,Lincoln,Cleveland,Bryan,Wilson,andHoover,Hofstadter made a statement on the consensus in the American political tradition, which is sometimes seen as "ironic":[8]"The fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading...the major political traditions have shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition; they have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man." Hofstadter later complained that this remark in a hastily written preface requested by the editor had been the reason for "lumping him" unfairly into the category of "consensus historians" likeBoorstin,who celebrated this kind of ideological consensus as an achievement, whereas Hofstadter deplored it.[9]In the former draft preface he had written, that American politics "has always been an arena in which conflicts of interests have been fought out, compromised, adjusted. Once these interests were sectional; now they tend more clearly to follow class lines; but from the beginning American political parties.....have been intersectional and interclass parties, embracing a jumble of interests which often have reasons for contesting among themselves."[citation needed]
Thus, Hofstadter modified Beard's interpretation of history as a succession of mainly socio-economic group conflicts without completely abandoning it.[10]He thought that in almost all previous periods of the history of the United States, except the Civil War, there was an implicit fundamental consensus, shared by antagonists, explaining that the generation of Beard andVernon Louis Parringtonhad "put such an excessive emphasis on conflict, that an antidote was needed."[11]With a sociological understanding Hofstadter saw that "a political society cannot hang together, at all, unless there is some kind of consensus running through it".[12]On the other hand, he did not minimize conflicts within such a society as "...no society as such a total consensus as to be devoid of significant conflict."[11]There was one total failure of consensus he admitted, which led to the Civil War.
Hofstadter himself expressed his dislike of the termconsensus historianseveral times.[13]He also criticized Boorstin for overusing the consensus and ignoring the essential conflicts in history.[14]
The post-1945 era was depicted by consensus historians as a harmonious return to the past, argues Lary May. He says that Hofstadter, Hartz and Boorstin believed that "the prosperity and apparent class harmony" after 1945 reflected "a return to the true Americanism rooted in liberal capitalism." The New Deal was seen as a conservative movement that led to the building of a welfare state that saved liberal capitalism instead of transforming it.[15]Contrary to May,Christopher Laschwrote that unlike the "consensus historians" of the 1950s, Hofstadter saw the consensus of classes on behalf of business interests not as a strength but "as a form of intellectual bankruptcy and as a reflection, moreover, not of a healthy sense of the practical but of the domination of American political thought by popular mythologies".[16]
See also[edit]
- Historiography § U.S. approaches
- Historiography of the United States
- Liberalism in the United States § Liberal consensus
References[edit]
Footnotes[edit]
- ^Higham 1959.
- ^Novick 1988,p. 333;Jumonville 1999,pp. 232–239.
- ^Higham 1989;Unger 1967.
- ^Brown 2006,p. 75.
- ^Foner 1992,p. xxi.
- ^Jumonville 1999,p. 235.
- ^Jumonville 1999,pp. 232–239.
- ^Kraus & Joyce 1990,p. 318.
- ^Palmer, William (2015-01-13).Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians.University Press of Kentucky. p. 186.ISBN9780813159270.
- ^Diggins 2011.
- ^abPole 2000.
- ^Pole 2000,p. 74.
- ^Rushdy 1999.
- ^Kraus & Joyce 1990.
- ^May 2010.
- ^Lasch, Christopher (March 8, 1973)."On Richard Hofstadter".The New York Review of Books.ISSN0028-7504.Retrieved2018-12-29.
Bibliography[edit]
- Brown, David S.(2006).Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography.
- Diggins, John Patrick(2011). "Liberal Consensus and American Exceptionalism". InKazin, Michael(ed.).The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History.Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 324–327.ISBN978-1-4008-3946-9.
- Foner, Eric(1992). Introduction.Social Darwinism in American Thought.ByHofstadter, Richard.Boston: Beacon Press. pp. ix–xxviii.ISBN978-0-8070-5503-8.
- Higham, John(1959). "The Cult of the American Consensus: Homogenizing Our History".Commentary.27(2): 93–100.
- ———(1989)."Changing Paradigms: The Collapse of Consensus History"(PDF).Journal of American History.76(2): 460–466.doi:10.2307/1907981.ISSN1936-0967.JSTOR1907981.Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 3 March 2016.Retrieved10 September2021.
- Jumonville, Neil (1999).Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present.
- Kraus, Michael; Joyce, Davis D. (1990).The Writing of American History(rev. ed.). Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.ISBN978-0-8061-2234-2.
- May, Lary (2010). "Review ofDancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression,by Morris Dickstein ".Journal of American History.97(3): 765–766.doi:10.1093/jahist/97.3.765.ISSN1945-2314.
- Novick, Peter(1988).That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession.Cambridge University Press.
- Pole, Jack (2000). "Richard Hofstadter". In Rutland, Robert Allen (ed.).Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945–2000.Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. pp. 68–83.ISBN978-0-8262-6362-9.
- Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. (1999).Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form.New York: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-802900-7.
- Unger, Irwin(1967). "The 'New Left' and American History: Some Recent Trends in United States Historiography".American Historical Review.72(4): 1237–1263.doi:10.2307/1847792.ISSN1937-5239.JSTOR1847792.
Further reading[edit]
- Collins, Robert M. (1988). "David Potter's People of Plenty and the Recycling of Consensus History".Reviews in American History.16(2): 321–335.doi:10.2307/2702542.ISSN1080-6628.
- Higham, John(1962). "Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic".American Historical Review.67(3): 609–625.doi:10.2307/1844104.ISSN1937-5239.JSTOR1844104.
- Hodgson, Godfrey(1978).America in Our Time.pp. 67–98.
- Hofstadter, Richard(1968).The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington.
- ———(1950). "Beard and the Constitution: The History of an Idea".American Quarterly.2(3): 195–213.doi:10.2307/3031337.ISSN1080-6490.JSTOR3031337.
- Hoover, Dwight W. (1965). "Some Comments on Recent United States Historiography".American Quarterly.17(2, part 2): 299–318.doi:10.2307/2710801.ISSN1080-6490.
- Schulman, Bruce J.(2019). "Post-1968 U.S. History: Neo-Consensus History for the Age of Polarization".Reviews in American History.47(3): 479–499.doi:10.1353/rah.2019.0067.ISSN1080-6628.
- Singal, Daniel Joseph (1984)."Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography"(PDF).American Historical Review.89(4): 976–1004.doi:10.1086/ahr/89.4.976.ISSN1937-5239.Retrieved10 September2021.