Fate and freedom in history: the two worlds of Eric Foner

National Interest, The, Fall, 2002 by John Patrick Diggins

The answer is that the academic Left prefers to use the language of democracy and freedom to avoid looking at what is really going on in the culture wars today. The phenomenon of multiculturalism that Foner and Levine celebrate has little to do with freedom in the proper sense of the term, but much to do with power and those who seek it without mentioning it by name. On the university campus, various minority programs and affirmative action mandates are nothing less than exercises in power that include some groups at the expense of others. That the post-Sixties generation of scholars continues to hire only its own ideological kind is another expression of academic power that has witnessed the establishment of social history and other radical fields and the falling off of traditional political, diplomatic and intellectual history.

Professor Foner himself I happily hasten to add, has been willing to hire and support teachers of differing ideological loyalties, and in his remarkable academic career he has been more professional than political, a gentleman scholar rather than an academic apparatchik. My critique concerns only the claim, made by Lawrence Levine and others, that the post-Sixties generation is more open to new ideas and has a better capacity for change than any prior generation of American historians, and the opposite claim, made by Foner, that progressive political causes have depended upon the maintenance of an unchanging radicalism.

In addition, there remains an unchanging and predictable complaint: In dealing with American history, slavery is Foner's only trump card. Without it, he's a fish out of water. Yet if America has yet to resolve the race question, presumably the Soviet Union had solved the class problem, and thus the American historian returns from Moscow completely bewildered by a people who, instead of accepting their fate, would give up despotic communism for Western liberalism. The denials to freedom trouble the historian of American historiography who would have us feel guilt in the country's having betrayed the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. But of the democratic ideals of Karl Marx, which Sidney Hook went to his grave believing in, the historian remains coldly indifferent. Thus he is seemingly oblivious to the disappearance of freedom's possibility in early 20th-century Russian history after the Constituent Assembly had been crushed by the Bolsheviks directed by Lenin, the Kronstadt uprising massacred at the orders of Trotsky, and the intelligentsia liquidated in the Moscow show trials arranged by Stalin. Foner sees the "silence" surrounding such crimes as explainable, and thus justifiable, by communism's "contribution" to humanity Is this hopelessly stale reasoning the acclaimed "opening of the American mind" on the part of a generation that relishes change? Or is it the reflex of an historian identifying himself as a radical revisionist who cannot, when it comes to his own undying delusions, revise?

(1.) Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (translated by Deborah Furet) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 117.