SOURCE: Henretta, James A. “Lost Utopias and Present Realities.” American Quarterly 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 537-43.

[In the following review, Henretta discusses The New History and the Old along with other books by various authors on similar topics. Henretta asserts that Himmelfarb's criticisms are frequently accurate, but comments that her arguments are often unconvincing and overly dogmatic.]

Once upon a time history mattered, and historians stood proud. “They felt themselves to be sages and prophets,” Theodore Hamerow tells us [in Reflections on History and Historians], because of a widespread belief that their discipline “held the key to an understanding of the past and a vision of the future.” Then, amidst the uncertainties of the post-World War II world, society and historians alike lost faith in history as a reliable guide. Simultaneously, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology appeared “more precise, scientific, reliable, and reassuring than history,” usurping history's central place in the public mind and the college curriculum (11).

This “grave crisis” sparked a revolution in historical scholarship. To “escape from decline, neglect, and irrelevance,” New Historians adopted the approaches and methods of the social sciences. In the process, as Gertrude Himmelfarb continues the lament [in The New History and the Old], they rejected the traditional assumptions of their discipline, “that the proper subject of history is essentially political and that the natural mode of historical writing is essentially narrative” (1). New Social Historians focused on lives and experiences of the people which they deciphered and recounted in dramatically different ways:

The New history tends to be analytic rather than narrative, thematic rather than chronological. It relies more upon statistical tables, oral interviews, sociological models and psychoanalytic theories than upon constitutions, treaties, parliamentary debates, political writings, or party manifestos.

(14)

These initiatives transformed the discipline. Political narrative that “was once at the center of the profession is now at the periphery,” Himmelfarb complains. Equally important, the integration of the new “subdisciplines dealing with workers, blacks, ethnic groups and social and sexual ‘deviants’” would result “in the disintegration of the whole” (4, 8). Hamerow doubts that a synthesis of those subdisciplines would even be attempted. Even more than their traditional predecessors, New Social Historians do not write for the educated public, but for “other professionals, who [are] less impressed by style and wit than by technical virtuosity” (60).

These attacks come, predictably enough, from the political right. As the neo-conservative Himmelfarb notes, the New History challenges all the “elitist, moralistic, consensual assumptions governing traditional history” (132). Yet Russell Jacoby, writing from the left, offers a similar critique of academic culture [in The Last Intellectuals]. Before the appearance of large universities, Jacoby claims, historians and other intellectuals wrote for the educated reader. However, as intellectuals became academics, they no longer wrote in a language accessible to the public. Rather they raised issues and used jargon familiar to fellow specialists, who determined their reputations and salaries. Academic professionalism not only narrowed the audience but also enervated the power and the passion of the radical critique itself. “In its longing to be rigorously scientific,” Jacoby maintains, academic “Marxism frequently began to look like the social science it wanted to subvert” (186).

Lost utopias abound, on the left and on the right. The massive reality of a well-financed university culture has subverted both the Old History and traditional radical assumptions. Neither the aristocratic man of letters nor the alienated bourgeois intellectual shapes the life of the mind in late twentieth-century America. That task has fallen, by weight of numbers, to the professionalized and specialized academy. Our authors acknowledge that transformed reality, but they do not accept it. Their critiques expose the limits of the academy—but also the futility of their solutions, which recall the outworn dogmas of the past. The new academic world demands understanding and a new cultural agenda.

Not so, says Gertrude Himmelfarb in The New History and the Old. She vigorously defends her neo-conservative viewpoint in ten essays, revisions of critical pieces published in influential highbrow magazines (Harper's, Commentary, New Criterion) over the past decade. A diverse lot, these essays range from a defense of nineteenth-century English Whig historians to a critique of contemporary British Marxist scholars. What unity the essays possess stems from their consistent skepticism toward the claims of the New History and their dogged defense of the Old.

Himmelfarb's criticisms are frequently on the mark. Like Hamerow, she correctly assails the jargon, complexity, and abstruse quantification in much “sociological” history (50-53). Alert to the dominance of theory in many psychohistorical studies, she is astute in protesting that “the facts, such as they are, can obviously be made to bear almost any interpretation” (111). However, too often Himmelfarb's judgments appear contradictory and politically inspired. She ridicules Peter Stearns's suggestion that “the history of menarche is … equal in importance to the history of monarchy,” while defending Michael Oakeshott's equally provocative (and sexist) image of the historian confronting the past—“He loves it as a mistress of whom he never tires and whom he never expects to talk sense.” “Like an imminent hanging,” Himmelfarb writes,

this passage concentrates the mind wonderfully. It obliges the reader to confront the implications of Oakeshott's argument as no prosaic exposition of it would have done.

(13, 175)

But the same defense could be made of Stearns's assertion of the importance of social history. To be persuasive, Himmelfarb's critical standards must be applied equally and without favor.

And they must not be arbitrary. Too often Himmelfarb simply asserts the superiority of the intellectual agenda of nineteenth-century liberalism. She celebrates history as “the rational ordering and organization of society by means of laws, constitutions, and political institutions” and stresses constantly the importance of the nation-state and Whig political ideology. If we abandon this Old History, she warns,

we will lose not only the unifying theme that has given coherence to history, not only the notable events, individuals and institutions that have constituted our historical memory and our heritage, not only the narrative that has made history readable and memorable … but also a conception of man as a rational, political animal.

“And that loss,” she concludes, “is even more difficult to sustain, for it involves a radical redefinition of human nature” (21, 25).

There is the nub of the issue. Himmelfarb, citing Aristotle, argues that “only in the ‘polis’ is man truly human, decisively different from ‘bees or any other gregarious animals,’” a fully “rational animal” (25-26). Only in the polis? Is it only in political life that men and women rise decisively above other animals? Strange wisdom indeed from the pen (or perhaps even from that marvelous human invention, the word-processing computer) of an historian of Darwin and the European intellectual tradition! Himmelfarb asserts other debatable propositions in an equally dogmatic manner. Even limiting the subject matter of history to rational action, is it really the case that “the political realm is more conducive to rational choice … [than] the social realm which is governed by material and economic concerns?” (31-32). Political life is hardly removed from the broad forces of history. Equally important, the limits—and the potential—of human beings and human freedom are the same in all realms of life. Only the circumstances, obstacles, and options are different.

These historical constraints and possibilities loom large in the scholarly thinking of Theodore Hamerow. Consequently, Reflections on History and Historians is less a polemic against social history than a carefully argued interpretation of the evolution and present condition of the historical profession. Still, Hamerow, too, has grudges that add passion to his argument. He deeply resents the dominance of the New History in major universities and the support accorded its practitioners by foundations and grant committees. Whatever the cause of these resentments, they do not significantly distort his scholarly judgment. Thus, Hamerow clearly recognizes the link between the Old History and the nineteenth-century ideology of a liberal education.” Its “goal was self-understanding and self-improvement,” he writes, “for the perfection of society [could] be achieved only through the perfection of the individual.” So Hamerow posits his astute insight into the present dilemma of the humanities, “Having become identified with the individualistic cultural ideas of the past, they appear irrelevant to the collective social aspirations of the present” (28, 30).

Nor does Hamerow blame the New History for the relative decline of the historical profession. Like Jacoby, he identifies the professionalization of higher learning as the real enemy. “Professionalism led logically to specialization, to an expertness which was exhaustive in intensity but narrow in scope.” This constriction—in method, substance, and style—afflicted the Old History as early as the turn of the century and was well advanced by the 1930s. Each succeeding decade saw fewer influential books published by Hamerow's heroes, free-lance nonacademic scholars “motivated primarily by a compelling private curiosity about the past,” people who wrote history that had the “charm of literature.” In their place appeared growing cadres of Ph.D.s, products of a rigorous system of graduate training that emphasized abstract ideas and copious research. The New History and foundation support only accelerated the fragmentation of learning and the inevitable gulf between academic scholars and educated readers. “The transformation of history … would have taken place in any case” (49, 72, 71).

Hamerow is too accomplished a scholar to ignore the achievements of the New History and even incorporates some of its methods into his own work. To demonstrate the changing social background of American academics, he draws heavily on quantitative data amassed by sociologists. Ten tables of statistical evidence dot the chapters of Reflections on History, one for every twenty-six pages of text. More importantly, the quantitative data demonstrates the plausibility of various causative arguments, such as the relationship between the recent “democratization” of the historical profession and the decline both of the “genteel tradition” and the Old History (77-86, 122). An avowed cliometrician could not have done it better than Hamerow. Moreover, despite Hamerow's lavish praise for the history written by self-taught amateurs, he explicitly affirms that “the apprentice system despite its abuses and weaknesses, appears to be not only the best but the only way to train scholars in history” (116).

Hamerow's deep commitment to history probably accounts for these inconsistencies in his argument. In a desperate intellectual gesture to save “a vital part of the cultural heritage,” he welcomes the decline of history in the curriculum and the monopoly of academics over its study. Whatever their cost, he hopes these developments

can free historical learning from the narrowness and pedantry of academic life, from the heavy-handedness of formal scholarship, from the conventionality of an organized profession … [making it] an individual and spontaneous expression of human creativity like art, music or literature.

(33)

These words evoke sadness, even pathos. For they condemn to irrelevance the entire life and life's work of their author, a genuinely eminent and thoroughly academic scholar of nineteenth-century German history. The sense of crisis among Old Historians must indeed be grave to occasion such self-doubt and angst.

What is to be done? In a glowing Appendix, Hamerow celebrates the scholarly and commercial triumphs of leading nonacademic historians—George Dangerfield, James Thomas Flexner, and Barbara Tuchman among others. Hamerow is deeply impressed, even dazzled, following personal interviews that reveal “very busy lives,” cultural and material opulence, and stimulating intellectual milieu—filled with “prominent writers, poets, artists … political leaders … elite clubs, societies, and academies.” These writers' nonacademic history is equally upscale and dramatic, “almost without exception narrative in form, emphasizing the role of individual personality in shaping or reflecting the social environment” (255-58). Life in the fast lane, indeed!

How many scholars, writers of popular history, or “public intellectuals” will the literary marketplace support? How creative and critical will their books and articles be? Hamerow wisely declines to speculate, leaving Russell Jacoby to convey the grim news. Inexpensive, intellectually stimulating urban bohemias are now few in number, and the rewards of authorship are meager. In 1979, half of all American authors received less than ＄5,000 from their publications, and only five percent earned enough to maintain full-time, lifelong writing careers. The vast majority of nonacademic authors labored for their daily bread in ancillary fields, usually magazine, newspaper, or book publishing. Their jobs were consuming enough to demand “an immense amount of talent, devotion, or plain luck” for any of these women and men “to contribute to the general culture” (225-26). Hamerow's road to the revitalization of history through the literary marketplace is just as much a dead end as Himmelfarb's excursion down the cul-de-sac of nineteenth-century liberalism.

What, then, is the character and potential of “American culture in the age of academe”? Jacoby is pessimistic. As an activist scholar, he deplores both the withdrawal of New Left intellectuals into narrow academic disciplines and their subsequent satisfaction with campus audiences. This professionalism, combined with the decline of bohemia and of a vigorous print medium, has stifled the critical intellectual culture necessary for significant social reform. According to Jacoby, we now understand the world without seeking to change it.

The flaw in Jacoby's argument lies in his restricted definition of the “public intellectual” in an age of mass education. Before World War II, American colleges were elite institutions. For the most part, they taught children of the well-to-do, reinforcing the social and cultural values of the parental generation. Now massive state universities and hundreds of local community colleges touch the lives of a majority of the nation's youth and, at least in some minimal sense, introduce them to new cultural and intellectual values. Like their students, the American professoriate is now recruited from a broad range of economic, ethnic, and religious groups. As Hamerow astutely observes, “Protestantism has ceased to be a criterion of social acceptability in the world of learning,” as has Republicanism (122, 128). More than ever before, academics are people of the left.

And so is much of their scholarship. As Himmelfarb discerns (to her horror), the New History is profoundly radical, not because it is Marxist but because it is democratic. It elevates the experiences of common people and, she protests, subordinates the activities of elites, “those aspects of the past which serious and influential contemporaries thought most meaningful” (18). More seriously still, the new democratic scholarship subverts the domination of elite European patriarchal culture by celebrating the literary and artistic contributions of women, blacks, and other historically oppressed social groups. This effort, in turn, has begun to yield still more revolutionary results: a fundamental reassessment of the critical standards and epistemological assumptions of the humanities. As the debate over the “Western Tradition” at Stanford University revealed, the stakes of the contest are high. The basic issue is cultural hegemony.

The struggle for a more democratic intellectual life has been joined in the university, and the graduates of those institutions—who now number in the tens of millions—will decide its fate. In this regard, Jacoby is right; “younger intellectuals responded to their times” by becoming academic scholars, but “they need not” become arid professionals (237). Have we conveyed to our students a deep understanding of the high scholarly standards, the creative insights, and the democratic perspectives of the humanities disciplines? Have we shaped their lives and their thinking in profound ways? If so, then we have fulfilled at least one of the responsibilities of “public intellectuals” in the age of academe.

Works Cited

Reflections on History and Historians. By Theodore S. Hamerow. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. 267 pages.

The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals. By Gertrude Himmelfarb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. 209 pages.

The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. By Russell Jacoby. New York: Basic Books, 1987. 290 pages.