The ‘new social history’ in America

Abstract

American historiography in the immediate postwar era was dominated by the theme of consensus. Although this label, conventionally applied to the political and intellectual life of the late 1940s and 1950s, places too confining a straitjacket on so diverse and idiosyncratic an array of individuals as academic historians, it nevertheless conveys a few essential truths about historical writing during those troubled decades. Richard Hofstadter, perhaps the most influential, and the most intellectually complex, of the so-called consensus historians, called for a reinterpretation of the American political tradition which gave due weight to the values shared by most Americans:The existence of such a climate of opinion has been much obscured by the tendency to place political conflict in the foreground of history. … Thefierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading; for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise. … The sanctity of private property, the right of the individual to dispose of and invest it, the value of opportunity, and the natural evolution of self-interest and self-assertion, within broad legal limits, into a beneficent social order have been staple tenets of the central faith in American political ideologies.3