Comments on Pauline Maier's "State Of The Field"

March/April 2005 · Historically Speaking 27 Comments on Pauline Maier's "State of the Field" Peter S. Onuf The drafting and ratification ofthe federal Constitution should be a pivotal topic in American historical studies, linking colonial and Revolutionary history. Instead, Pauline Maier complains, the "disjunction " between the two periods has been growing; with the exception of a few senior historians, only political scientists and law professors till this neglected field. But I think she exaggerates. Recent historiographical developments suggest that the disjunction is disappearing. Before I elaborate this claim, let me briefly address the other two disjunctions Maier emphasizes, the one "between scholarly interests and those of the reading public" and the other "between historical scholarship and history as taught in secondary school." Of course, these disjunctions have always been with us, but they don't strike me as particularly severe now. As long as I've been in the business, historians have complained about failing to reach a general audience and about how we need to "return to narrative." Yet all this time, even during the heyday of social science history, historians have been reaching a general audience. Jeremiads about our impending irrelevance have reinforced the powerful influence of best-seller lists, bicentennials, and high school curricula in shaping our agenda. Rants against American exceptionalism—the all-purpose pejorative for this pandering to the public—are themselves eloquent testimony to our continuing relevance and responsiveness. The danger is not that we will lose our readers, but that we'll end up having nothing useful or difficult or discomfiting to say to them. Maier suggests that the profession as a whole has moved progressively—or, perhaps, regressively—"from political to social and then cultural history," taking concluding potshots at "imagined communities" and the socalled "public sphere." These missiles, to mix metaphors, seem misguided to me. Benedict Anderson and Jürgen Habermas, once fashionable , are easily caricatured these days, and it is undoubtedly the case that much silly and reductive work has been committed in their name. The complaint appears to be that big generalizations about print culture are not empirically grounded. But surely the return to politics and political culture should be welcome , particularly when historians move past print and dig deep in the sources. And students of national identity and nation-making provide a good antidote to exceptionalism— taking the "nation," its singularity and its superiority, for granted—without indulging in America-bashing (another perverse and lamentable symptom of exceptionalism) or avoiding the subject altogether. New work on nation-building and political culture is in fact addressing the very disjunction Maier laments. This work promises to liberate us at last from the reductive influence of the ideological school on our understanding of the Revolution. Building on the neo-Whig resuscitation of political and constitutional thought, the republicanists located the real Revolution in a putative ideological transformation that antedated the war itself, making mere institutional developments seem epiphenomenal. The search for deep patterns in political discourse and their remote classical origins mirrored the social historians' search for deep structures in society. Both approaches militated against political history. Both either insisted on the fundamental continuity between colonial and Revolutionary history, or stipulated a Revolutionary transformation that had little or nothing to do with politics in the conventional sense. The ascendancy of the republican revisionists was thus a disaster for political history in the narrow, conventional sense. Promising beginnings to the study of Revolutionary political mobilization— including Maier's superb From Resistance to Revolution (1972)—could not be sustained, despite the extraordinary efforts of the new social historians to prepare the way. It was hard to take mobilization seriously when it had so little apparent connection to the deep cultural and social transformations that the study ofpolitical language supposedly illuminated . What was happening on the ground seemed epiphenomenal at best, and the relation between the real Revolution and the military conflict itself seemed increasingly tenuous . The problem with the revisionists' conception of ideology is that it obscures contingency , and therefore the domain of political choice and action in which our subjects operated . They are instead depicted as prisoners of language, captured by a worldview that blinded them to reality. Or, to put...