How Postmodern Historians Have Helped Cripple the American Left

Abstract

The changes that have occurred in the humanities in our colleges and universities over the last thirty years or so—essentially, the era of baby boomer supremacy—are generally viewed as coming from the left side of the political spectrum. That is natural enough. The vast majority of humanities professors vote for Democratic candidates and support causes such as feminism, homosexual rights, affirmative action, and environmental activism, which we associate with the Left. In response, it is fair to say, the National Association of Scholars, which began with a membership that included both distinguished conservatives and distinguished Marxists, has evidently become more conservative in its orientation—though not so much as to persuade a lifelong New Deal Democrat like myself to leave it. It is precisely because I am a lifelong NewDeal Democrat, however, that I see the political impact of what has happened in academia from a very different perspective. This applies particularly to changes in my own field, history. The modern discipline of history, as initially defined in the nineteenth century by men like Leopold von Ranke and Henry Adams, was a child of the Enlightenment, dedicated to the idea that exhaustive research into primary sources could yield the truth about the past, perhaps to the benefit of the present and the future. And thanks in large part to Ranke, it was very largely focused on the development of the modern state, including the state’s efforts to provide for Acad. Quest. (2015) 28:66–72 DOI 10.1007/s12129-015-9476-1