[In the following review, Kazin praises Zinn's exposure of the fallacies associated with conventional historical truths despite the weakness of some of his arguments.]

Howard Zinn writes the type of history scholars are supposed to disdain. “For me,” he writes, “history could only be a way of understanding and helping to change (yes, an extravagant ambition!) what was wrong in the world.” This book is the committed radical's latest attempt to scour the past for lessons to instruct those who might transform American society. Declarations of Independence is organized as a series of passionate moral arguments with the normative assumptions of contemporary politics—that some wars are just, that “Machiavellian realism” is a proper basis for foreign policy, that the legal system serves just ends, that capitalism rewards hard work, etc. Zinn's conclusions flow directly from his pacifist and anarchist (of the collectivist variety) beliefs. These days, many traditionalists charge left-wing academics with writing “polemical” history. Zinn never pretends to be doing anything else.

But that should not devalue his achievement. Splendid and squalid polemicists alike have always drawn on historical examples to drive a point home or to structure an entire argument. The difference between a Thomas Paine and a Gerald L. K. Smith (their specific opinions aside) lies in the emotional valence of their evidence, the originality and precision of their prose, and the timeliness of their major arguments. Judged by these standards, Zinn's book is a flawed success.

He is best at debunking certain pillars of the common wisdom that he views as rationales of the powerful. Disputing free market hosannas, he shows that, beginning with colonial land grants, the rich have been always benefited, handsomely, from government aid. Whereas free land for transcontinental railroad builders in the 1860s and tax cuts for corporations in the 1920s and 1980s were considered necessary for economic growth, payments to single mothers are castigated as “welfare.”

Similarly, Zinn rebuts the almost universal opinion that World War II was a just, idealistic war. He reviews the United States record of prewar appeasement, the military's “area bombing” of civilians massed in such cities as Dresden and Tokyo, and the administration's support for restoring the French and British empires. Several passages about his own experience as a bombardier in the European theater give these sections a poignance and humility that heightens their persuasiveness.

But to strip away from rulers their mask of legitimacy, a polemicist must understand why they continue to rule. And Zinn is quite unequal to that admittedly complex task. Throughout the book, he implies that “the dominant ideology” is merely a device for accumulating profits, denying free speech to dissidents, and motivating Americans to go to war. In his single-minded emphasis on self-interest, Zinn betrays the sensibility of a muck-raker with a fistful of grievances instead of a radical armed with a sophisticated theory of history. Because he gives his antagonists no credit for having a world view of their own, he cannot convincingly explain why a majority of Americans have usually agreed with the ideas put forth by members of ruling elites (or their publicists). Some radical scholars today make too much of hegemony; Howard Zinn makes too little of it.

Despite this major weakness. Declarations of Independence is a work that should be taught. In a clear style and compassionate voice, it challenges the political preconceptions most undergraduates bring to survey classes. And it keeps alive a tradition, more than two centuries old, that currently has few serious practitioners. Zinn is certainly no Tom Paine, Henry George, or Matilda Joslyn Gage (author of the 1893 feminist classic Woman, Church and State). But like those visionaries, he believes historical interpretation should liberate Americans and not merely inform them.