The Absent Marx: Class Analysis and Liberal History in Twentieth-Century America by Ian Tyrrell (review)

ShorterBook Reviews 449 risk.For my part, I am glad that this work, even with its faults, is available. The studyof American culture can no longer ignore festival performance. Robert H. Lavenda College of Social Sciences St. Cloud State University Minnesota IanTyrrell. The Absent Marx: Class Analysis and Liberal History in TwentiethCenturyAmerica . Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press, Contributions in American HistoryNumber 115, 1986. xii + 270 pp. This book analyzes how historians living in the United States have written Americannational history since the nineteenth century. According to Tyrrell, an implicit liberal synthesis ("masked by pluralism") persists in the American literature, in contrast to the French and British literatures which have taken different directions. During the past fifteen years, however, confidence in the liberalsynthesis has waned, leaving American historians uncertain of direction, despitethe unprecedented technical sophistication in their work. In this context, Tyrrell posits an explicit Marxist synthesis as the most promising alternative. With its often condensed content, The Absent Marx demands much from its readers. Still, it is a "must-read" for instructors of courses on historiography and avaluable reference work for American national history, labour history, women's history and social history. In several ways, Tyrrell updates or revises knowledge of American historiography . First, his interpretation of liberal continuity inthe literature contrasts with the periodization in standard accounts (e.g., "a succession of historical schools, beginning with the 'scientific historians'"). Similarly, he views the recent '"radical," "conservative" and "quantitative social science" histories as variat1om ,on the liberal theme, not breaks from tradition. Second, he contrasts the contmuity in the American literature with important departures from the liberal tradition in the French and British literatures. Third, Tyrrell gives a badly-needed critiqueof the empiricism underlying the liberal synthesis, thereby making a point for American historiography which Gareth Stedman-Jones earlier made for the Britishliterature ("History: the Poverty of Empiricism" in Robin Blackburn, ed., Ideology in Social Science [1972]). Lastly, he effectively surveys the Marxist influence in American historical writing, showing how the tradition has been transformed, muted, or distorted to accommodate liberal orthodoxy. The bedrock liberalism in American historiography comprises faith in the ~pecialvi11uesof American democracy and the role of the individual within this settmg. A powerful empiricism-a fetish for facts gleaned from documents, a 450 Shorter Book Reviews tendency to ''treat as facts the most readily observable phenomena' '-informs the liberalism. Marxist and other European traditions rely heavily on theory and conceptual apparatus for understanding reality (e.g., "non-sensible realities,'' such as the Marxist concept of' 'mode of production,'' which are not self-evident in documents) and tend to distrust facts as fragmenting reality and separating events from their full context. By contrast, American historiography tends toreifl; facts ("empirically verifiable realities") and mistrusts theory beyond whaton~ can derive from facts through inductionalism. A spectacular exemplar of the "rampant empiricism" in the American tradition is the Philadelphia Social History project, a model of ''uncritical fascination with technique and method over theoretical adequacy," which Tyrrell characterizes as "a kind of academic Parkinson's Law in which the funding of research and the accumulation of data appear in a symbiotic relationship of ever-increasing proportions.'' Tyrrell' s central questions are why the liberal tradition has persisted longerin America than elsewhere, and why the Marxist alternative has exerted a weaker and more belated influence. He is unimpressed by the explanation of American exceptional ism-for example, the argument that America lacks a strong workingclass political movement, such as Britain has, and which favours Marxist accounts. As he notes, British Marxist writing flourished after 1950, when the British labour movement was losing strength. Further, both countries· had a class structure, capitalist industrial development, and other phenomena pertinent toa Marxist account before 1950. Why then the feeble Marxist influence? Although treating several influences, Tyrrell stresses three: a "Beardian innoculation," a uniquely American renewal of liberalism, and an unusually vicious Cold War repression. Charles Beard's contribution was a simplistic, easily-refuted model of Marxist history which served to "innoculate" the liberal tradition against later Marxist "infection.'' Substituting ''economic interest groups" for class while holding to facts as the test of reality, Beard's history was dismissed as a "single-factor economic" account of the...