Movement in American history that emphasizes American values and downplays conflict
Consensus history
is a term used to define a style of American
historiography
and classify a group of historians who emphasize the basic unity of
American values
and the American
national character
and downplay
conflicts
, especially conflicts along
class
lines, as superficial and lacking in complexity. The term originated with historian
John Higham
, who coined it in a 1959 article in
Commentary
titled "The Cult of the American Consensus". Consensus history saw its primary period of influence in the 1950s, and it remained the dominant mode of American history until historians of the
New Left
began to challenge it in the 1960s.
Meaning
[
edit
]
In 1959,
John Higham
developed the concept of an emerging consensus among historians that he saw as based on the search for "a placid, unexciting past" as part of "a massive grading operation to smooth over America's social convulsions." Higham named his research concept critically a "Cult of the American Consensus". Higham felt the conservative frame of reference was creating a "paralyzing incapacity to deal with the elements of spontaneity, effervescence, and violence in American history". He maintained it had "a deadening effect on the historian’s ability to take a conflict of ideas seriously." Either he disbelieves in the conflict itself (Americans having been pretty much of one mind), or he trivializes it into a set of psychological adjustments to institutional change. In either case, the current fog of complacency, flecked with anxiety, spreads backward over the American past.
Peter Novick
identified
Richard Hofstadter
and
Louis Hartz
as leading "liberal consensus historians" and
Daniel J. Boorstin
as a "leading conservative consensus historian". Novick includes as other prominent leaders
David M. Potter
,
Perry Miller
,
Clinton Rossiter
,
Henry Steele Commager
,
Allan Nevins
and
Edmund Morgan
.
Consensus history rejected the concept of the central role of
class conflict
and all kinds of other
social divisions
that were prevalent in the older "Progressive" historiography, as articulated especially by
Charles A. Beard
,
Frederick Jackson Turner
, and
Vernon L. Parrington
.
The concept of consensus history was viewed as one-sided and harmonizing conflicting forces from the very beginning, but especially by
New Left
historians in the 1960s, who again stressed the central roles of economic classes, adding
racism
and
gender inequality
as two other roots of
social
and political conflicts.
Richard Hofstadter
[
edit
]
The term was widely applied to his revision of the supposedly Beardian idea that a fundamental class conflict was the only key to understanding history. After 1945, Hofstadter identified with a political liberalism that seemed similar to the views of other "consensus historians". Hofstadter rejected the term, because in his view conflict, also on economic terms, remained an essential aspect of political development.
The general misunderstanding of Hofstadter as an adherent of "consensus history" can be found in
Eric Foner
's statement that Hofstadter's book
The American Political Tradition
(1948) "propelled him to the very forefront of his profession." Foner argues:
Hofstadter's insight was that virtually all his subjects held essentially the same underlying beliefs. Instead of persistent conflict (whether between agrarians and industrialists, capital and labor, or Democrats and Republicans), American history was characterized by broad agreement on fundamentals, particularly the virtues of individual liberty, private property, and capitalist enterprise.
Hofstadter in 1948, thus rejected the extremely simplified black-and-white polarization between pro- and anti-business politicians as early as his
American Political Tradition
(1948).
But he was still viewing politics from a critical left-wing perspective.
Making explicit reference to
Jefferson
,
Jackson
,
Lincoln
,
Cleveland
,
Bryan
,
Wilson
, and
Hoover
, Hofstadter made a statement on the consensus in the American political tradition, which is sometimes seen as "ironic":
"The fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading...the major political traditions have shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition; they have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man." Hofstadter later complained that this remark in a hastily written preface requested by the editor had been the reason for "lumping him" unfairly into the category of "consensus historians" like
Boorstin
, who celebrated this kind of ideological consensus as an achievement, whereas Hofstadter deplored it.
[9]
In the former draft preface he had written, that American politics "has always been an arena in which conflicts of interests have been fought out, compromised, adjusted. Once these interests were sectional; now they tend more clearly to follow class lines; but from the beginning American political parties.....have been intersectional and interclass parties, embracing a jumble of interests which often have reasons for contesting among themselves."
[
citation needed
]
Thus, Hofstadter modified Beard's interpretation of history as a succession of mainly socio-economic group conflicts without completely abandoning it.
He thought that in almost all previous periods of the history of the United States, except the Civil War, there was an implicit fundamental consensus, shared by antagonists, explaining that the generation of Beard and
Vernon Louis Parrington
had "put such an excessive emphasis on conflict, that an antidote was needed."
With a sociological understanding Hofstadter saw that "a political society cannot hang together, at all, unless there is some kind of consensus running through it".
On the other hand, he did not minimize conflicts within such a society as "...no society as such a total consensus as to be devoid of significant conflict."
There was one total failure of consensus he admitted, which led to the Civil War.
Hofstadter himself expressed his dislike of the term
consensus historian
several times.
He also criticized Boorstin for overusing the consensus and ignoring the essential conflicts in history.
The post-1945 era was depicted by consensus historians as a harmonious return to the past, argues Lary May. He says that Hofstadter, Hartz and Boorstin believed that "the prosperity and apparent class harmony" after 1945 reflected "a return to the true Americanism rooted in liberal capitalism." The New Deal was seen as a conservative movement that led to the building of a welfare state that saved liberal capitalism instead of transforming it.
Contrary to May,
Christopher Lasch
wrote that unlike the "consensus historians" of the 1950s, Hofstadter saw the consensus of classes on behalf of business interests not as a strength but "as a form of intellectual bankruptcy and as a reflection, moreover, not of a healthy sense of the practical but of the domination of American political thought by popular mythologies".
[16]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
Bibliography
[
edit
]
- Brown, David S.
(2006).
Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography
.
- Diggins, John Patrick
(2011). "Liberal Consensus and American Exceptionalism". In
Kazin, Michael
(ed.).
The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History
. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 324?327.
ISBN
978-1-4008-3946-9
.
- Foner, Eric
(1992). Introduction.
Social Darwinism in American Thought
. By
Hofstadter, Richard
. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. ix?xxviii.
ISBN
978-0-8070-5503-8
.
- Higham, John
(1959). "The Cult of the American Consensus: Homogenizing Our History".
Commentary
.
27
(2): 93?100.
-
???
(1989).
"Changing Paradigms: The Collapse of Consensus History"
(PDF)
.
Journal of American History
.
76
(2): 460?466.
doi
:
10.2307/1907981
.
ISSN
1936-0967
.
JSTOR
1907981
. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on 3 March 2016
. Retrieved
10 September
2021
.
- Jumonville, Neil (1999).
Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present
.
- Kraus, Michael; Joyce, Davis D. (1990).
The Writing of American History
(rev. ed.). Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.
ISBN
978-0-8061-2234-2
.
- May, Lary (2010). "Review of
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
, by Morris Dickstein".
Journal of American History
.
97
(3): 765?766.
doi
:
10.1093/jahist/97.3.765
.
ISSN
1945-2314
.
- Novick, Peter
(1988).
That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession
. Cambridge University Press.
- Pole, Jack (2000). "Richard Hofstadter". In Rutland, Robert Allen (ed.).
Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945?2000
. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. pp. 68?83.
ISBN
978-0-8262-6362-9
.
- Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. (1999).
Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form
. New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN
978-0-19-802900-7
.
- Unger, Irwin
(1967). "The 'New Left' and American History: Some Recent Trends in United States Historiography".
American Historical Review
.
72
(4): 1237?1263.
doi
:
10.2307/1847792
.
ISSN
1937-5239
.
JSTOR
1847792
.
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Collins, Robert M. (1988). "David Potter's People of Plenty and the Recycling of Consensus History".
Reviews in American History
.
16
(2): 321?335.
doi
:
10.2307/2702542
.
ISSN
1080-6628
.
- Higham, John
(1962). "Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic".
American Historical Review
.
67
(3): 609?625.
doi
:
10.2307/1844104
.
ISSN
1937-5239
.
JSTOR
1844104
.
- Hodgson, Godfrey
(1978).
America in Our Time
. pp. 67?98.
- Hofstadter, Richard
(1968).
The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington
.
-
???
(1950). "Beard and the Constitution: The History of an Idea".
American Quarterly
.
2
(3): 195?213.
doi
:
10.2307/3031337
.
ISSN
1080-6490
.
JSTOR
3031337
.
- Hoover, Dwight W. (1965). "Some Comments on Recent United States Historiography".
American Quarterly
.
17
(2, part 2): 299?318.
doi
:
10.2307/2710801
.
ISSN
1080-6490
.
- Schulman, Bruce J.
(2019). "Post-1968 U.S. History: Neo-Consensus History for the Age of Polarization".
Reviews in American History
.
47
(3): 479?499.
doi
:
10.1353/rah.2019.0067
.
ISSN
1080-6628
.
- Singal, Daniel Joseph (1984).
"Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography"
(PDF)
.
American Historical Review
.
89
(4): 976?1004.
doi
:
10.1086/ahr/89.4.976
.
ISSN
1937-5239
. Retrieved
10 September
2021
.
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