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The Quintessential Liberal
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12194 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
4,905 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
THE CYCLES OF AMERICAN HISTORY
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1986
498 pp., $22.95
For the past four decades, the historian Arthur M. Schesinger, Jr., has been America's most important advocate, chronicler, and interpreter of liberalism. In The Cycles of American History, his most recent book, he states that "people tend to be shaped throughout their lives by the events and ideals dominating the time when they arrived at political consciousness." Born in 1917, Schlesinger arrived at "political consciousness" during the 1930s and 1940s. The crucial events of these two decades - the New Deal, World War II, and the post-war confrontation with the Soviet Union - left an indelible impression on him. Despite the brilliance, subtlety, and eloquence of his mind, Schlesinger has remained stubbornly impervious to challenges both from the Right and Left of the Cold War liberal orthodoxy of these years.
During the 1940s, Schlesinger was the wunderkind of American historians. The son of Arthur M. Schlesinger, the prominent Harvard historian, Schlesinger, Jr., grew up in a stimulating intellectual atmosphere of books, conversation, and travel. The elder Schlesinger was one of few Democrats on the Harvard faculty in the 1920s, and a strong supporter of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. Through his mother, he was descended from George Bancroft, the progressive historian and Jacksonian political figure. His first publications appeared while he was still in high school, and he entered Harvard College when only sixteen, graduating summa cum laude. His undergraduate thesis, Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress, prepared under the supervision of Perry Miller, was published in 1939 to favorable reviews. Brownson's life as a socially involved intellectual, concerned with both the world of ideas and the needs of society, was an example to his biographer of the possibilities of a career combining scholarship and political activism. In an essay on Walter Lippmann published in the 1950s, Schlesinger described Lippmann's life, and perhaps his own, as a constant "search to define the role of the intellectual in the polity of a free society."
After graduation, Schlesinger spent a year at Cambridge University, returning to Harvard in 1939 where he became a member of the newly established Society of Fellows. This was a Harvard experiment that enabled a small group of budding scholars to ignore the normal academic requirements of graduate study and roam all over the university,
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