[In the following essay, Schlesinger responds to Engelhardt's essay "Man in the Middle: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Postwar American Liberalism" (see above), commenting that Engelhardt "is essentially fair-minded" but misinterprets Schlesinger's positions regarding ideology, the dangers of Communism in the United States, and the role of private property under social control.]

It is a bit disconcerting for an historian to find himself the target of history. But, as we were long ago authoritatively informed, "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword"; so I accept the occupational risk and thank the South Atlantic Quarterly for the opportunity, before the sword finally falls, to comment on the comment.

Let me say at once that I do not envy anyone the awful task of reading a forty-year flow of words, some historical in purpose, some biographical, some polemical. I think Mr. Engelhardt's piece is essentially fair-minded and often generous, though not always, in my view, quite accurate.

Early on, for example, he credits me with anticipating the alleged belief of the intellectuals of the 1950's "in the exhaustion of political ideology, the pluralistic theory of politics, and the consensus interpretation of United States history." I am unquestionably a pluralist in my view of politics, and of life as well. As William James said, temperaments determine philosophies; and, like James, I temperamentally abhor monisms. I agree with Isaiah Berlin in doubting "a final harmony in which all riddles are solved, all contradictions reconciled" and in seeing conflicts of value "as an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life."

But I must demur on the other two charges. My point has been not the exhaustion but, on the contrary, the danger of political ideology. Mr. Engelhardt goes on to suggest that I am a closet ideologue myself. Not by my definition of ideology, a word I have always used to denote an all-encompassing, all-explanatory, monistic system; but Mr. Engelhardt evidently prefers to blur what I continue to regard as the useful distinction between a systematic and rigid body of dogma on the one hand and a cluster of general ideas and ideals on the other. Karl Mannheim had a bizarre definition of ideology—one that would, for example, exclude Marxism.

As for the consensus interpretation of American history, I am more commonly—and I am sure more correctly—regarded as the author of one of "probably the last … historical studies to be written squarely in the Progressive [i.e., anticonsensus] tradition" (Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians). My historical as well as my political writings have always opposed the notion that the American past was devoid of conflict and that there was no substantial difference between, say, Jackson and Biddle or Roosevelt and Hoover.

Am I, as Mr. Engelhardt darkly suggests, "a liberal with conservative assumptions?" Only if one accepts the idea that liberalism requires faith in the perfectibility of man and society. If Mr. Engelhardt really believes that this is what modern liberalism is about, he misses the whole point. The postwar generation premised its liberalism on Reinhold Niebuhr's mighty dictum: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." Even before I started reading Niebuhr, I regarded the recognition of human limitations as providing the firmest intellectual foundation for liberalism (see the last paragraph of The Age of Jackson).

Like many younger scholars, Mr. Engelhardt displays a mysterious queasiness when confronted by the phenomenon of anti-Stalinism. Why this should be, I do not know. Even post-Stalin Russia is nobody's prize, surely not Mr. Engelhardt's (though he does appear to criticize me for "still" insisting, as late as 1960, "that the Soviet Union was a theological society characterized by commitment to a dogmatic ideology," as if this were not an accurate description of the Soviet Union even in 1981); and Stalin's Russia was beyond all dispute a horror. Why does Mr. Engelhardt suppose a liberal could have been anything but anti-Stalinist?

He is quite wrong in writing that liberals like myself considered communism, apart from Soviet espionage, "a genuine internal threat to the security of the United States." As we used to put it at the time, communism was a danger to the United States, not a danger in the United States. Mr. Engelhardt, however, dismisses the distinction between rational and obsessive anticommunism and seems dubious about the feasibility of "a middle position" between sober defense of national interest on the one hand and messianic crusades on the other. What would his recommendation have been? To have renounced anti-Stalinism altogether?

On the whole, he does not deal with anti-Stalinism on its merits but rather rests his disapproval on alleged secondary effects: not only messianic crusades against communism at home and abroad; but emphasis on foreign policy at the expense of domestic reform; undue identification with the existing structure of American society; responsibility for the conservative drift of American policy.

In my own case, far from favoring foreign policy at the expense of domestic reform, I argued for domestic issues so insistently in the 1950's that Max Ascoli excommunicated me as an isolationist in the pages of his magazine The Reporter. As for the American social structure, I do indeed believe that a free society requires the diversification of ownership. In that sense, I suppose, I am a defender of the existing structure. Indeed, I would very much like to see someone explain sometime how the means of political opposition and of free expression can survive the abolition of private property.

Individual freedom surely requires two conditions: economic resources relatively safe from the state, and a system of justice relatively independent of the state. The nationalization of the means of production and distribution would, so far as I can see, destroy both these conditions. Nor do syndicalist fantasies of decentralization, workers' control, etc., seem to me to provide any realistic answer to the power drive of the modern communist state. In short, I see no way of protecting autonomous institutions if they have no property base from which to defend themselves against the state. So I conclude that the Bill of Rights requires the retention of private property and that the problem of politics is to place private property under social control. Does Mr. Engelhardt disagree with this line of thought? If so, he should stand forth and declare himself. If not, why is my position so reprehensible?

Within the framework of mixed ownership, I remain, as I have always been, an opponent of business domination and an advocate of affirmative government on behalf of the poor and powerless: "One must ask," Mr. Engelhardt writes, "… were liberal intellectuals like Schlesinger in some way responsible for the conservative drift of American policies?" My answer to this, only briefly noted by Mr. Engelhardt, is that liberalism and conservatism ebb and flow in American politics according to a discernible cyclical rhythm. As the reform activism of Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson wore out the American people after two decades and ushered in the do-nothing twenties, so the activism of Roosevelt and Truman was followed by the Eisenhower lull, and the activism of Kennedy and Johnson by the Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan stasis. (In this connection, I should note that I did not vote for Carter in 1976. I expected to vote for the Democratic candidate, as I had always done in the past, but, once in the booth, could not bring myself to pull the lever for a man so hostile to the Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy tradition and consequently did not vote at all for president. In 1980 I voted for John Anderson.)

Little is more predictable than that seasons of action, passion, idealism, and reform should give way to seasons of apathy, hedonism, cynicism, and recuperation—and that these latter periods should continue until the national batteries are recharged and until the problems recently neglected demand a new burst of social innovation. It is this cyclical rhythm, not the sins of liberal intellectuals, that in my view accounts for conservative swings in American politics.

Mr. Engelhardt seems unhappy that the liberal periods should rely on strong leadership. I wish, by the way, that he and everybody else would stop using the word "charismatic." Max Weber, who invented the word, applied it to medicine men, warrior chieftains, and religious prophets, leaders ruling by magic, miracle, and revelation. The concept of charisma has nothing to do with leadership in a democracy, where, as Wilson said, "the dynamics of leadership lie in persuasion." Leadership has always seemed to me to have an indispensable role in the democratic process, both practically—in order to get things done—and morally—in order to affirm human freedom against the supposed inevitabilities of history. "The appearance of a great man," wrote Emerson, "draws a new circle outside of our largest orbit and surprises and commands us." Is this so terrible? Can Mr. Engelhardt really regard Washington, Jackson, and Lincoln, the Roosevelts and the Kennedys, as threats to American democracy?

Mr. Engelhardt's besetting problem is the Slippery Slope argument: don't do a good thing now lest it lead to someone else doing bad things later. So one must not contain the Soviet Union lest it result in Vietnam, nor favor a strong presidency lest it produce Watergate, nor support the welfare state lest it yield a bureaucracy. This is an argument for doing nothing at all. I don't suppose this is really where Engelhardt ends up. But he is singularly vague about his alternatives. Before rushing to judge others, historians surely have the obligation to consider what their own standards are and what choices they themselves would have made in the circumstances.