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  • What Is Political History?The Question of the Public and the Private
  • Eli Zaretsky (bio)
Julian E. Zelizer . Governing America: The Revival of Political History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012. viii + 416 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

In the early 1880s, when Herbert Baxter Adams established one of the first seminars devoted to "scientific history," he adorned the room with the slogan "History is past politics and politics present history." In 1884 this became the slogan of the American Historical Association. No sooner was the dictum pronounced, however, than the privileging of political history was challenged. The first round of protests came from the Progressive historians such as Frederick Turner, Charles Beard, and Arthur Schlesinger, who called attention to the role of geography, economic conflict, and the cities in shaping American history. The next round came from the Popular Front, whose greatest historians, W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James, viewed race and class as the great axial structures of U.S. history. Next came the wave of Marxist-influenced historians of the Sixties and Seventies, such as Eugene Genovese and David Brion Davis, who focused on slavery and abolition; soon followed by the historicization of the separation between the public and the private, inspired by the women's movement. Finally, the Seventies witnessed the rise of social history, labor history, cultural history, and women's history, as well as increasing specialization, fragmentation, and the search for historical synthesis.

To be sure, the focus on politics never disappeared. It found its best-known expression as the "presidential synthesis"—the Age of Jackson, the Age of Roosevelt, the Age of Reagan. Politics also dominated popular historical writing, textbooks, and biography. Nonetheless, as journal articles and monographs were increasingly given over to social history, a small but distinguished subculture arose that periodically called for the revival of "political history," either lamenting its supposed neglect or prophesying its imminent resurgence.1 Julian Zelizer's Governing America: The Revival of Political History is in this tradition.

Zelizer comes to this position justly. Beginning with his 1988 book on Wilbur Mills, Julian Zelizer has almost single-handedly opened a new field of historical research centered on taxation, which is, in many ways, the heart of [End Page 557] modern government. His current book reflects this achievement. A collection of seventeen disparate articles, the book is divided into four sections: (1) historiography, which tries to define the field of political history, often pitting it against social history; (2) the fiscal basis of government (for example, taxation); (3) the nitty-gritty or "institutional" character of government (Congressional committees, campaign finance reform); and (4) "national security." (The scarequotes are mine). What holds the collection together is Zelizer's passion to establish the importance of what he calls political history.

What is political history? There are two possible answers. In one, which I advocate, we use the term politics in the large sense that Aristotle and Thucydides gave it, referring to "public" values of justice and of freedom. In the modern world, their classical conception of politics was redefined to include social power: classes, the sexual division of labor, the role of race, and the like. The second meaning of politics is its common everyday sense of a set of specific behaviors, such as voting, policy disputes, and party factions. Zelizer uses the term in the second sense, with little reference to the first. Given his project of restarting political history, we have to ask whether this is the better approach.

The problem first surfaces in his historiography. According to Zelizer, the neglect of political history began in the 1960s. "In the minds of rebellious graduate students," he writes, "the presidential synthesis had produced a skewed narrative of the American political tradition that ignored intense conflicts over class, race, ethnicity and gender" (p. 2). In its place, the "social and cultural history revolution . . . produced a wealth of knowledge about the formation of the nation from the bottom up" but rejected "'traditional' political history as elitist and irrelevant" (pp. 2, 19). This situation changed for the better, according to Zelizer, in the 1980s and '90s, largely through the influence of political science, a...

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