The Historian as Pessimist

The Historian as Pessimist ROBERT CUFF Robert Wiebe. The Segmented Society: An HistoricalPreface to the Meaning ofAmerica. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. 209 pp. Although this highly speculative book is likely to disappoint appreciative readers of Robert Wiebe's earlier work, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (1962), a thoughtful monograph, and The Searchfor Order, 1877-1920 (1967), an impressive and influential piece of historical synthesis, it is not without interest. This is so not only for the interesting perspective it offers on the nature of Wiebe's creative, historical imagination; it also allows us to see more clearly some of the assumptions which have informed his previous writing. More importantly still, it raises persistent, if intractable, questions about the nature of historical writing itself. The Segmented Society reminds us once again of the unhappy fact that the historical interpretation of any substantial portion of national experience frequently turns as much upon ideology as research, theory as evidence, assertion as proof; that history is practised as much as an art as a science. Many examples can illustrate this point, of course, but one thinks in particular of Richard Hofstadter's commentary on Populism and Progressivism in The Age of Reform (1955)or of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s early essay on Jacksonian America. History at this level of generalization, moreover, usually springs as much from concern with the present as from a desire to reconstruct the past. 1 The problem, of course, is that the distinctions between past and present, between history and ideology, are not so easy to draw, or the tensions between theory and evidence so easy to negotiate. In the 1960's, U.S. historians argued over these dilemmas with unusual self-consciousness, and the discontented among them responded in various ways. Some embarked upon a crusade for the scientization of historical knowledge, exemplified at its extreme, perhaps, by Lee Benson's polemical essays, but evident as well among practitioners of the 'new' political, economic and social histories. Others countered the 'history-asscience ' school with a moral call to arms, to make history the cutting edge of social criticism, to redefine the past so as to alter consciousness about the present. Still others who, like Martin Duberman, anguished over their craft, opted in disillusionment for history as art, a means, perhaps, of self-knowledge, but not an art of social utility, or even of ultimate meaning. 2 Rober Wiebe, reacting here in part to these heated professional debates, has clearly not aligned himself with the thrust toward scientization. Indeed, his opaque reflections would fill a methodologist with despair. On the other hand, THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 1, SPRING 1976 he has obviously not given up on the utility of histo1ical understanding. He takes an instrumentalist view of historical interpretation; he seeks to mediate between past and present. And in his search for relevant meaning, he sets out to put the past together, to impose a controlling vision upon it, a task which runs counter to the professional drift toward slicing up the past in ever smaller parts for more specialized study, in whatever mode, for whatever purpose. It is, then, a very personal book in some ways, even if its overriding purpose is the discovery of historical meaning, not self-revelation. Within the context of American historiography, Wiebe seeks to provide an alternative reading of the past to those offered by Louis Hartz and the so-called consensus historians of the nineteen fifties, and by the radical critics of the sixties, all of whom he inexplicably lumps as Marxists. Though he might have proceeded by a close analysis of these competing conceptualizations, or by a systematic examination ofrepresentative work, he has chosen rather to introduce an alternative set of axioms and assumptions and to proceed, then, to explicate them. Wiebe does not confront his interpretative competitors directly and systematically ; he simply by-passes them, and in a surprisingly dismissive manner. This saves time and space, of course; but in the absence of issues substantively joined, we are left with only refutation by implication. The Segmented Society leaves open the question of whether Wiebe's perspective on the past has...