The Nation — October 30, 2017

I

n the years shortly after the Second

World War, a new idea caught fire in

the North Atlantic: consensus. The

postwar settlement had divided the

world into two spheres. In the West,

liberal democracy—sometimes more so-

cial democratic, sometimes more laissez-

faire—dominated; in the East, various

forms of socialism and communism.

Many intellectuals on the right and left

decried this new age of conformity. Lib-

erals, on the other hand, celebrated it. It

marked their arrival: They had won the

war of ideas, if not control.

Consensus soon caught on within the

historical discipline. In the first half of

the 20th century, a group of Progressive

Era historians—Frederick Jackson Turn-

er, Charles Beard, V.L. Parrington—

had argued that the history of American

politics hinged on a series of social and

political conflicts. In the prosperity and

calm of the postwar years, historians

embraced the opposite view: The Ameri-

can past was defined not by a contest

over ideas and power but by ideological

agreement—a long-standing fidelity to

the liberal tradition.

Some within this consensus school

made their case more critically than oth-

ers (Richard Hofstadter acerbically ob-

served that liberalism’s dominance had

created “a democracy in cupidity rather

than a democracy in fraternity”). But

a more popular school found in it the

resources for a newly assertive Cold War

liberalism: America’s ability to find com-

mon ground was its “genius.”

One of the few dissenting voices

against the idea of consensus in these

years was a young Harvard professor by

the name of Arthur Meier Schlesinger

Jr. Schlesinger was an outspoken liberal,

THE POWER HISTORIAN

by DAVID MARCUS

GETTY IMAGES / WARING ABBOTT

Arthur Schlesinger, 1974.

What was Arthur Schlesinger’s “vital center”?

Schlesinger

The Imperial Historian

By Richard Aldous

W.W. Norton. 496 pp. $29.95

Books & the Arts.