Terrorism, History, and Historians: A View from a Social Scientist

Abstract

The United States was born of a violent revolution, yet political violence occupies a unique position in the collective American psyche. The historian Beverly Gage states that until recently historians had a difficult time addressing how social violence shaped America’s past; many of them assumed that “consensus rather than conflict” was the driving force behind the formation of the state. Further, she points out, even today most historians have little to say on the subject of terrorism. By the late 1960s, when the country was gripped by violence “everywhere,” Gage writes, “Americans seemed to be thinking and talking about violence, except within the historical profession.” She also highlights Richard Hofstadter’s exhortation to his fellow historians to get involved and place the ongoing debate over violence within a sound historical perspective.1 Although Hofstadter’s admonition was certainly appropriate, historians were not the only group surprised by the steadily increasing violence in the United States at that time; social scientists were as well. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States was flush with total victory in a war that was seen almost unanimously as a battle between good and evil, and the nation began relishing its status as a “superpower.” This lack of moral ambiguity continued during the height of the Cold War. As the country basked in its self-perception of being at the pinnacle of military, economic, and political power, American social science scholarship remained largely self-congratulatory. Violence was seen as an outcome of institutional and social structural imperfections found only in so-called third world nations. In the democratic West, common citizens were thought to be empowered by their ability to voluntarily form lobbying groups and to change the offending social order, thereby eliminating the need for violent revolutions. Yet reality stood in the way of this rosy requiem of social conflict in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. In the context of this incongruity, the prominent political scientist Harry Eckstein lamented in 1964: “When today’s social science has become intellectual history, one question will certainly be asked about it: why did social science, which had produced so many studies on so many subjects,