"Power All the Way Down"

"Already during his lifetime some scholars complained that, as the historian Lawrence Stone put it, Foucault's 'dominance and control' model 'reduces the actors in history to two, the controllers and the controlled.' In a recent book, 'Left Is Not Woke,' Neiman goes further. For the political left, she argues, Foucault's legacy has been disastrous: a reflexive distrust of Enlightenment ideals—including tolerance, universalism and progress itself—which are viewed as cynical ploys by European states to justify imperialist ambitions. His theory does not allow for a human collective bound by shared values and fighting for the common good, she writes, only for 'a bunch of tribes jockeying for power.'"

At The New York Times, Emily Eakin marks the 100th birthday of Michel Foucault.

And at Slate, Laura Miller reviews Eakin's The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory.

"Intense Politicisation, with Neither Institutional Roots nor Ambitions"

"'On the surface,' Jäger writes, 'the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.' As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s evocative phrase 'bodies without organs'. Modern political movements, he writes, are 'concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism'."

Zoe Williams at The Guardian talks with Anton Jäger, author of Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences.

"If the Study of History Teaches Anything, It Teaches Us the Limitations of Life"

"Professor Wood distilled what he found exceptional in the Revolutionary period in 'The Radicalism of the American Revolution.' 'To base a society on the commonplace behavior of ordinary people,' he wrote, 'may be obvious and understandable to us today, but it was momentously radical in the long sweep of world history up to that time.'"

At The New York Times, David Stout, Alex Traub, and Ash Wu write an obituary for Gordon S. Wood.

And David Waldstreicher at The New Republic writes an appreciation.

"What Went Wrong?"

"Some portion of the book's confusion about capitalism, and its author's refusal or inability to stand by its claims about capitalism, is symptomatic and shared. In 2014, Seth Rockman, one of Beckert's colleagues in the new history of capitalism, announced that the field had 'minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism.' That was a virtue, Rockman claimed, not a vice. If they 'let capitalism float as a placeholder,' scholars would be freed to do 'the empirical work of discovery' and find 'ground-level evidence of a system in operation.' Twelve years—and 1,325 pages—later, free time is over, and judging by the results in hand, scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began." 

Corey Robin at The Nation reviews Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History.

"In All of Its Complexity, Contradictions, and Ingenuity"

"Launching today and just ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary, a special issue of The Atlantic brings together a remarkable group of scholars, essayists, and reporters to revisit America's founding era, measuring the success of the American experiment, two and a half centuries later, against the lofty dreams and designs of the founding generation. In an editor's note, The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes of the issue, 'You will see that we are not simplistic, jingoistic, or uncritical in our approach, but we are indeed motivated by the idea that the American Revolution represents one of the most important events in the history of the planet, and its ideals continue to symbolize hope and freedom for humankind.' He continues, 'We are publishing this at the end of 2025 for a number of reasons: This month marks the launch of an Atlantic project meant to explain the meaning of the Revolution and its consequences, which we will carry through all of next year… We also recognize that the American experiment is under extraordinary pressure at the moment, and we think it important to do anything we can to illuminate the challenges we face.'"

The Atlantic unveils "The Unfinished Revolution."

"'The Past Is the Key of the Present and the Mirror of the Future'"

"Today, the writing and teaching of history has been drawn into the vortex of the culture wars. Why is history so controversial? The French historian Ernest Renan had an answer. Historical analysis, he famously wrote in the late 19th century, has always been linked to broader ideas about the nation-state. National consciousness, or at least the sense of unity and patriotic pride that accompanies nation-building, he argued, rests in part on historical mythology. Indeed, Renan wrote, because 'historical error' plays a significant role in the creation of a national consciousness, advances in the field of history—including the replacement of myth by accurate accounts of the past—are often seen as 'a threat to the nation.'"

Eric Foner at The Nation writes that "[h]eated controversy over what history books students and interested adults should encounter has a long history."

"Political Education Is Going to Take Place Mostly Outside of Universities Now"

"The term white privilege was invented in the 1960s by leftists, by Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev. I was very sympathetic to that term. But then as it got into the universities and got to be spoken mostly in the universities, I think we forgot that it only really made sense inside of a social movement, that otherwise if you just go up and tell a poor white person you're privileged, that's not organizing, that's just labeling. It had to be part of a social movement. And even now I'm trying to say 'white advantage' instead of 'white privilege' for that very reason. But the main thing that your question points to is that over the long haul, we on the left in social movements lost out to a more therapeutic and individualistic approach to diversity training." 

Olivia Weeks at The Daily Yonder interviews historian David Roediger.

And at The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch writes about "The Elite University Presidents Who Despise One Another."

"Tedium, Skill, Pleasure, Camaraderie, Exhaustion, Power, and Freedom"

"While so much of Montgomery's writings were focused on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the worlds of work he described have ended up having far more in common with the way we work today than even he might have anticipated. Many of the service-sector workers who have started to organize in recent years—healthcare workers, teachers, screenwriters, actors, and, yes, academics—are people who have strong professional and ethical codes for their work and have become accustomed to some measure of workplace autonomy. They see their freedom at work and their sense of power to do it well threatened by the arbitrary power of their bosses and the sometimes faceless forces of capital. The American workers of today come from many backgrounds and many parts of the world, their politics shaped in part by their experiences in their countries of origin, as was the case for the immigrant workers of the late 19th century whose stories Montgomery told. They are people spurred to action by a rebellion against the imperatives of a new age of scientific management and drawn together by their common plight. They are artists whose day jobs in game stores and coffee shops foster just enough passion and solidarity to try to organize a union. All of this might have been familiar to the iron molders, glass blowers, coopers, and others of the early years of the 20th century."

Kim Phillips-Fein at The Nation reviews A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance.

In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen

"All of this steered my own work in a new direction. I decided to write a critical genealogy of another cherished contemporary ideal: freedom. I wanted to examine why the identification of liberty with a minimal state, which seemed so dominant in the 2010s, had come about. In exploring this question, I was able to build both on my own earlier work on French eighteenth and nineteenth-century political thought as well as on a vast literature on early-modern conceptions of freedom produced by Quentin Skinner and other Cambridge School historians. In his seminal Liberty Before Liberalism, Skinner had recovered an older way of thinking about freedom he called republican (or neo-Roman) which equated liberty not with an absence of state interference, but with establishing popular control over state power.[16]"

At The Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum, Annelien de Dijn writes about "How I became an Intellectual Historian."

"'He Seemed to Stand, Above All, for Clarity of Thought'"

"The writer with whom Lears has the closest affinity is the late historian Christopher Lasch. The two have the same frame of historical reference—broad, but with its focal point at the turn of the twentieth century—and the same inclination to embed intellectual history in social history. Lears apparently senses this, too, because one of the most probing essays in this book is 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' (1995), a long study of Lasch's work published the year after he died. Like Lears, Lasch was a hopeful liberal who, in mid-career, found liberals' interest in the common man to be on the wane. Unlike Lears, Lasch veered sharply to what one would then have called the left, immersing himself in Freud and Marx, before emerging with a populist vision of American life that defended the family against the state and struck a lot of intellectuals at the time as right-wing. Lears was one of these. When Lasch wrote, 'We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good,' Lears confessed that it 'makes me wonder if we lived on the same planet.'"

Christopher Caldwell at The American Conservative reviews T.J. Jackson Lears's Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians: The Off-Modern in American History.

"The Label Now Seems Not Just Acceptable but Necessary"

"Like Hitler, among the first political leaders to master radio, Trump mastered electronic media like Twitter and won the support of America's largest television chain, Fox News. Like the fascist leaders Trump understood the deep disaffection of parts of society for traditional leaders and institutions, and he knew how to exploit a widespread fear of national division and decline. Like Hitler and Mussolini he knew how to pose as the only effective bulwark against an advancing Left, all the more fearful because it took on cultural forms unfamiliar to provincial rural America—feminism, Black Power, gay rights."

In a 2021 Newsweek article, Robert O. Paxton calls Donald Trump a fascist.

As does Will Saletan in The Bulwark.

And at The Bulwark, Gabriel Schoenfeld writes, "After all, it is Trump himself—and figures close to him—who for years now have been stoking the flames of discord in fascist-lite mode."

"Class Not as a Thing but as a Relationship"

"Thompson's empathy with those forced to struggle on an inhospitable social terrain has lessons for us, too. Today, the issue is the enormous condescension not of posterity but of the present: the contempt for working-class people, the hostility to benefit 'scroungers', the derision of those forced to use food banks, the indifference to injustice. It is visible also in the scorn for the supposed bigotry and conservatism of the working class or in the disdain of those who voted the wrong way or have become disillusioned with the left. Thompson's insistence that 'their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experiences' is as necessary to acknowledge now as it was then."

Kenan Malik at The Guardian marks E.P. Thompson's 100th birthday.

"As Refreshing as a Half-Full Glass of Water"

"Though historians—of all people—should know better, we sometimes still talk, and write, as if there is a single national audience for popular history. There wasn't and isn't, at least not any more than there is for a novel or a play. By illustrating the strategies and the successes of these five historians, Witham takes down the heated if not hysterical tone of both historians and pundits about presentism and the politicization of history."

At Boston Review, David Waldstreicher reviews Nick Witham's Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America.

"I Don't Think Professional Historians Fully Understand the Damage They Are Causing to the History Discipline's Credibility and Integrity"

"There is little that is tentative in this volume. The United States is an empire. American exceptionalism is a lie. The United States is xenophobic. There is no complexity. The world is divided into right and wrong, true and false, left and right. There is a lot of either/or but not much both/and. We find few good people doing bad things, much less flawed people achieving good things. There is almost no engagement with competing scholarly perspectives."

At The Hedgehog Review, Johann N. Neem reviews Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer's Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.

"Wasn't Just Read, However. It Was Devoured"

"'When you judge the work of somebody, it's what the work itself did, the ways it makes us think differently,' said historian William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. 'Equally important: How many ships did it launch? And "City of Quartz" launched so many ships—whether it's dissertations or conferences or articles.'"

Carolina A. Miranda at the Los Angeles Times writes an obituary for Mike Davis.

"When the Cold War Ends, It Loosens Not Just the Motivation for Conservatives to Get Involved Internationally, but Also the Motivation for Them to Champion Democracy"

"We think of the end of the Cold War as reshaping the geopolitical landscape, but it also really changed economics and politics in the United States. There is a major recession in the U.S. at the time of the '92 election, and parts of California that have been propped up by government spending and the aerospace industry had collapsed almost overnight. There was this sense of uncertainty about what the world is going to look like going forward and who is going to prosper and who is going to fail. It's also at a pivot point in decades of deindustrialization and shifting toward a knowledge economy and a service economy. So things really were in flux, and I think the politics of the day reflect that."

Ian Ward at Politico interviews Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

"Team Herodotus" vs. "Team Thucydides"

"We are, Mr. Cohen writes, in a 'golden age' of history writing. For most of human existence, the recording of the past has been 'sacred history,' propaganda put forth by a priestly caste or authorities who claimed to rule by divine right—or, sometimes, simply to be divine. History as we know it—honest and free inquiry across the disciplines—has, he argues, only been possible in two epochs. The first was the founding era of the Greeks and the Romans. The second is ours, the era initiated in 1520, when Pope Leo X commissioned Niccolò Machiavelli to write a 'History of Florence.' Homer uses histor to mean a 'good judge.' A historian's judgment is impaired when a theological thumb is on the scales—but is the judgment of secular historians any better?"

Dominic Green at The Wall Street Journal reviews Richard Cohen's Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past.

"Relegated to the Bottom Tier of American Presidents"

"Hemmer said it was part of a pattern that began with lying about those inaugural crowds: 'I think that when historians look back over the course of the Trump Presidency, they'll say that "Little Lie" at the beginning was buy-in for the "Big Lie" at the end, because that insurrection seemed to be the culmination of so many of the things that we saw as unique, bizarre, bad about his presidency.'"

Rita Braver at CBS Sunday Morning asks various historians to assess Donald Trump.

"Still Pack a Bold Punch"

"Both volumes urge recognition of illiberalism for what it is: a clear and present danger to constitutional democracy—not a loyal opposition with which one breaks bread and compromises. Both take a realistic view of American conservatism's peculiar susceptibility to conspiracy theories and toxic identity politics. Both implicitly reject the idea that the fever will break if only the forces of liberal democracy extend their hand in a show of good will. People are sometimes rational. Often, they are not."

At Politico, Joshua Zeitz returns to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Vital Center and Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

But Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins at Dissent call for "a break with the anxieties that drove Cold War liberalism."

"Liberalism's Favorite Historian"

"All the peculiar elements of the affluent, educated worldview are here: the reduction of history to a struggle between moral categories, the deletion of working-class movements from the story of progress, the distaste for economic grievance, the obsessive focus on the executive office, and the score-keeping of racist remarks, as though wickedness could be quantified and exorcised in that way." 

Thomas Frank at Harper's reviews Jon Meacham's The Soul of America.