so let me say now what this book does and does not intend:
1. It does not aim to disengage history from the classical effort to be scientific, but rather to reaffirm the ancient humanist aims of the scientists (before military needs began to command so much of their talent), and to catch up with the new understanding in science about what “scientific” means. The physicist Werner Heisenberg put it this way: “Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature.*
2. It does not argue for a uniform approach—mine or anyone’s—to the writing of history, and certainly not for the banning of any kind of historical work, bland or controversial, pernicious or humane, whether written for pleasure or profit or social objectives. Its aim is, by encouragement and example, to stimulate a higher proportion of socially relevant, value-motivated, action-inducing historical work.
3. It certainly does not call for tampering with the facts—by distortion or concealment or invention. My point is not to approach historical data with preconceived answers, but with preconceived questions.** I assume accuracy is a prerequisite, but that history is not praiseworthy for having merely achieved that. Freud once said some people are always polishing their spectacles and never putting them on.
The Politics of History has two kinds of essays. The essays in the first and third sections are about the writing of history. They proceed from a discussion of the uses of knowledge in general to historical consciousness in particular. In them, I try to argue for the notion of the historian as an actor, and this requires discussing many of the problems which fall, professionally speaking, within “the philosophy of history.” Is history “determined” or are we free to make our own? Can the historian justifiably write as a participant-observer in the social struggles of our time? Does “history as an act” lead to distorting the truth? What is the role of causality in history, of explanation? Should we be “present-minded” or “past-minded”? Analytical or speculative? And what of straight narrative as opposed to theoretical history? What is history for, anyway, and what is the responsibility of the historian? One of these essays suggests some criteria for a radical history.
The middle part of the book—the essays in history—represents an attempt to begin to meet those criteria for a radical history. These essays do not have the usual connective tissue of standard historical works; they do not deal with a specific period, or with all periods, or with one problem of the American past. What ties each to the others is a common purpose—to participate a bit in the social combat of our time. Whether or not the essays actually fulfill this aim, I leave to the reader to judge. I have my own doubts. My chief hope is to provoke more historical writing which is consciously activist on behalf of the kind of world which history has not yet disclosed, but perhaps hinted at.
Is it not time that we scholars began to earn our keep in this world? Thanks to a gullible public, we have been honored, flattered, even paid, for producing the largest number of inconsequential studies in the history of civilization: tens of thousands of articles, books, monographs; millions of term papers; enough lectures to deafen the gods. Like politicians, we have thrived on public innocence.
Occasionally, we emerge from the library stacks to sign a petition or deliver a speech, then return to produce even more of inconsequence. We are accustomed to keeping our social commitment extracurricular and our scholarly work safely neutral. We were quick to understand that awe and honor greet those who have flown off into space while people suffer on earth.
If this accusation seems harsh, read the titles of doctoral dissertations published in the past twenty years, and the pages of the leading scholarly journals for the same period, alongside the lists of war dead, the figures on per capita income in Latin America, the autobiography of Malcolm X. We publish while others perish.
The gap between the products of scholarly activity and the needs of a troubled world could be borne with some equanimity so long as the nation seemed to be solving its problems. And for most of our history, this seemed to be the case. We had a race question, but we “solved” it: by a war to end slavery, and by papering over the continued degradation of the black population with laws and rhetoric. Wealth was not distributed equitably; but the New Deal, and then war orders, kept that problem under control—or at least, out of sight. There was turmoil in the world, but we were always at the periphery; the European imperial powers did the nasty work while we nibbled at the edges of their empires (except in Latin America where our firm control was disguised by a fatherly sounding Monroe Doctrine, and the pose of a Good Neighbor).
None of those “solutions” is working anymore. The Black Power revolt, the festering of the cities beyond our control, the rebellion of students against the Vietnam war and the draft—all indicate that the United States has run out of time, space, and rhetoric. The liberal artifacts which represented our farthest reaches toward reform—the Fourteenth Amendment, New Deal welfare legislation, and the U.N. Charter—are not enough. Revolutionary changes are required in social policy.
The trouble is, we don’t know how to make such a revolution. There is no precedent for it in an advanced industrial society where power and wealth are highly concentrated in government, corporations, and the military, while the rest of us have pieces of that fragmented power which political scientists are pleased to call “pluralism.” We have voices, and even votes, but not the means—more crassly, the power—to turn either domestic or foreign policy in completely new directions.
That is why the knowledge industry (the universities, colleges, schools, representing directly fifty billions of the national spending each year) is so important. Knowledge is a form of power. True, force is the most direct form of power, and government has a monopoly of that (as Max Weber once pointed out). But in modern times, when social control rests on “the consent of the governed,” force is kept in abeyance for emergencies, and everyday control is exercised by a set of rules, a fabric of values passed on from one generation to another by the priests and the teachers of the society. What we call the rise of democracy in the world means that force is replaced by deception (a blunt way of saying “education”) as the chief method for keeping society as it is.
This makes knowledge important, because although it cannot confront force directly, it can counteract the deception that makes the government’s force legitimate. And the knowledge industry, which directly reaches seven million young people in colleges and universities, thus becomes a vital and sensitive locus of power. That power can be used, as traditionally, to maintain the status quo, or (as is being demanded by the student rebels) to change it.
Those who command more obvious forms of power (political control and wealth) try also to commandeer knowledge. Industry entices some of the most agile minds for executive posts in business. Government lures others for more glamorous special jobs: physicists to work on H-bombs; biologists to work on what we might call for want of a better name, the field of communicable disease; chemists to work on nerve gas (like that which killed those six thousand sheep in Utah); political scientists to work on counter-insurgency warfare; historians to sit in a room in the White House and wait for a phone call to let them know when history is being made so they can record it. And sometimes one’s field doesn’t matter. War is interdisciplinary.
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