[In the following review, Green discusses Zinn's rejection of the possibility of achieving objectivity in historical writing.]

The purpose of Howard Zinn's excellent collection of essays on history and historiography is to draw attention by both analysis and precept to “the consequences in action of historical writing. The meaning … of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.” (p. 279) “The Politics of History,” then, is a literal title, referring not to political events in time past but to the current activities as historians (and social scientists) themselves, Zinn's own included. For in a world, as he puts it, “where children are still not safe from starvation or bombs,” it is willy-nilly a political act to engage one's sympathies with or withhold them from the actors who have made the present and are making the future, and who are the objects of our study; indeed, the very choice by academics of a subject matter itself is also a political act. Thus Zinn rejects the canon of so-called objectivity in research, for since all social studies whose interpretation bears on our assessment of our own condition are ipso facto political, “objectivity” is only a mask with which we hide the real social consequences of what we are doing and saying.

In the beginning and concluding theoretical essays that form the framework of this collection, Zinn criticizes inter alia: 1) history-writing as supposedly value-free narrative about events whose interpretation is significant for us as citizens today (and which therefore can't possibly be genuinely “value-free”); 2) history-writing about such events, in the analysis of which the historian shows the wrong human sympathies, rather than pretending to have none; 3) the conventional wisdom particularly in the field of American History, which fobs apologetics off as “historical knowledge” to be passed on from generation to generation; 4) pedantic historiographical controversy about the supposedly best way to insure the discovery of those chimeras “science” and “objectivity” in historical studies, a controversy which otherwise intelligent academics engage in as a substitute for committing themselves to the discussion of important substantive issues; and 5) history-writing as value-free narrative about events of mere antiquarian interest. (Zinn, I think, overdoes this last point. The tellers of socially trivial tales are the true members of a very narrow, specialized calling related to Zinn's in name only; no more than shoemakers ought they to be scolded for not being critical intellectuals—no more than Agatha Christie ought to be scolded for not being James Joyce.)

In all these cases the clear point Zinn makes is that historians and social scientists are political men (one of Zinn's essays is entitled “Knowledge as a Form of Power”), functioning as apologists for the American status quo. Some carry out this function tacitly—through professional narrow-mindedness (4 and 5), methodological naivete (1 and 4), or lack of commitment to piercing beneath the veil of appearances (3); others carry it out overtly (2) by opposing the drastic social changes Zinn feels are necessary (and will be felt as necessary, he suggests, by anyone who detaches himself from the interests of the wealthy and powerful of the world). Unfortunately there is some confusion in Zinn's theoretical discussion of these points: the concluding essays are pitched almost entirely at the level of methodology, when in fact the more important criticism is that so many academics lack independence of intellect or a feeling for justice (3 and 2)—and these are not methodological problems at all.

This confusion in an otherwise brilliant discussion is more than compensated for by the uniform excellence of the substantive essays that form the bulk of this book. It is in these essays that Zinn both particularizes his critique of status quo apologetics and—what is more rarely done—offers his own, competing version of history in the service of social change rather than history in the service of the current world and national division of powers.

Roughly speaking, these essays fall into two groups. First those collected under the heading “Nationalism” vigorously attack the credentials of American liberalism in foreign policy. In a well-known article on the Vietnam War and with especial forcefulness in a chapter of historical summary entitled “Aggressive Liberalism,” Zinn undercuts the pieties with which Americans assure themselves that they have been peaceful and reformist in external affairs (including especially the affairs of this continent), rather than warlike and reactionary. Of course this argument is familiar by now; but it is Zinn among others who helped to make it so familiar.

The second group of essays forms a long and often exciting example of what Jesse Lemisch has called “History from the Bottom Up.” This kind of history, unlike most of our standard histories, is not based on the perceptions of political and social leaders, intellectuals and other beneficiaries of the American success story; rather, it is built around an attempt to understand the lives and hopes of the American underclass, and of our relatively few but enduring rebels; the “success” of American liberalism on the domestic scene is not presumed (as it is by “consensus” historians) but is precisely the fundamental point in question. In essays on inequality in American history, the 1914 massacre of striking mineworkers at Ludlow, Colorado, Fiorello LaGuardia, the New Deal, the Abolitionists, racism in America, and the suppression of mass civil rights demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, Zinn returns to this point over and over again. There has always been a multitude of the excluded and oppressed in America, and their oppression has often been (and still is) terrible; liberal meliorism has often been of little help to this class and on many occasions, especially when race has been involved, has not even been benign (Zinn demonstrates conclusively that the Kennedy Administration, by its unwillingness to protect peaceful protestors against savage attack, combined with its willingness to prosecute them when they defended themselves, allowed and even fostered a “pattern of brutality against the Negro” in the Deep South—and today everywhere). Finally, he reveals American history-writing at its most complacent and methodologically inept in its treatment of the American radical tradition, as he shows that our historians have followed the pattern of psychoanalyzing the latent motives of radicals, but unquestioningly accepting the manifest statements of principle of the ruling class—and of the historians themselves! Writing about Lewis Feuer's analysis of the Berkeley rebels Zinn notes that “Biopsychological ‘causes’ of human catastrophe are … marvelous reinforcers of the going order because they have no operable corrective … Explanations of social events by castration complexes insure impotency” (p. 165).

In sum, Zinn writes from the same standpoint that Christian Bay justifies in his The Structure of Freedom: a society—and for an historian like Zinn the past of a society—is to be judged not by the power and freedom available to its best-off citizens, or even to the average citizen, but by the kind of life available to its outsiders. Zinn, like several others now doing the same kind of work in diverse areas of research—Lemisch, Stephen Thernstrom, Michael Parenti, Peter Bachrach, Louis Lipsitz, and Robert Coles for example—has made a major contribution to a more balanced judgment of this society. It may be time for the practitioners of this kind of scholarship to come together and create their own standard texts to spread their unconventional wisdom.