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Paradigms, Progressandthe Interpretation of History June Goodfield. An Imagined World: ASto, vofScientificDiscovery. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.240+ x pp. Michael Kammen,ed. The Past Before Us: Contemporat)' Historical Writing in the United States.Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. 524pp. Richard Reinitz.Irony and Conscience: 4me1ican Historiographyand Re111/10/d Niebuhr's Vision.Lewisburg: Bucknell UniversityPress, 1980.230pp. Cushing Strout. The Veracious Imagination. Essal'S onAmerican Histo1y,Literature, andBiography. Middletown: Wesleyan Umversity Press, 1981.301+ xiv pp. Daniel J.Wilson.Arthur 0. Lovefoy and theQuest for Intelligibility. Chapel Hill: L'niversity ofNorth Carolina Press, 1980. 248 +xviipp. David W.Noble There are important interrelationships between Richard Reinitz' book, Irony andConsciousness, and Gene Wise's American Historical Explanations (1973). Wise borrowed from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(1962) to argue that something like a paradigm revolution took placein the writing of American history between 1940and 1960.According toWise,a Progressive paradigm or explanation-form dominated the writing ofAmerican history from the 1890sinto the 1940s.By the latter date, it was challengedby a counter-Progressive or Consensus explanation-form. For Progressives,history was to be written as a movement from a dark and undemocraticpast toward an enlightened and democratic future. For counterProgressives ,however, history did not have such a teleological nature and wasnot characterized by clear-cut confrontations between the forces of democratic enlightenment and those of undemocratic darkness. The counter-Progressives, Wise declared, wrote narratives that expressed ambiguity andirony. Reinitztook Wise's theme of irony and explored it in greater depth. "My study:'Reinitz wrote, "can be seen as an exploration of the development of a particularexplanation-form" (p. 13).In using Kuhn's model, Wise looked for thelossof authority by such leaders of the Progressive paradigm as Charles Beardand Vernon Louis Parrington. And he looked for new authority figures fromoutside the historical profession to replace those leaders as they were Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 3, Winter 1982 322 David W Noble rejected by younger historians in the 1940sand 1950s. One such figurewas the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Unlike Wise, however, Reinitz analyzed Niebuhr's writings in depth. "Irony pervades our understanding of the history of recent decades;' Reinitz continued, "This book demonstrates howa particular kind of ironic perception of America came to occupy a central position in the writing of American history. The irony used is a secularized version of that developed by Reinhold Niebuhr" (p. 11). Reinitz, who was teaching American cultural history at the time ofhis death in 1979, saw the acceptance of irony by professional historians as itself a kind of progress: "The growth in the use of Niebuhrian ironyin American historical writing is an indication of a maturation of American historical consciousness;' he declared; "The writing of American History, like American culture, has been afflicted with exaggerated conceptions of American innocence, virtue, wisdom, and power, and with the pretensionto chosenness" (p. 12). In analyzing Niebuhr's ironic interpretation of history, however, Reinitz did not try to tell the story of how Niebuhr moved from a Progressive explanation-form at the time of World War I to an ironic position by World War IL "Niebuhr arrived at an ironic vision of history out of his peculiar combination of an orthodox Christian sense of original sin with a modern desire for liberal reform;' Reinitz wrote, and "This combination was givena historical cast by his conception of man as defining himself dramatically through time" (p. 33). An implication of Reinitz' position is the constancyof an "orthodox Christian sense of original sin:' But if one relates Niebuhrto the Puritan attitudes toward sin which Sacvan Bercovitch recently has discussed in The American Jeremiad, it is possible that we will find that Niebuhr was deviating from the major American Protestant traditions and that his writings mark a paradigm revolution in theology as much as theydo in historiography. The years between 1920 and 1940 were as crucial for Niebuhr's transition from a Progressive to a counter-Progressive theologyas they were for the historical profession. After discussing Niebuhr, Reinitz looked at major books by Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin to find the extent to which the writings of the Consensus historians paralleled Niebuhr in...

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