Volume 11, Number 5 · September 26, 1968
Abolitionist
By Eugene D. Genovese
Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution
by Staughton Lynd
Bobbs-Merrill, 288 pp., $7.50
Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism
by Staughton Lynd
Pantheon, 174 pp., $4.95
The publication, almost simultaneously, of both these books by Staughton Lynd provides an opportunity to assess his position both as a historian and as an ideologue of the New Left. Normally, it would be bad manners to confuse the two roles, but Lynd has argued forcefully that they ought not to be separated, and both books, especially Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, are plainly meant to serve political ends. As a contribution to American radical historiography, Lynd's work must be evaluated as part of the present effort of recent scholars, most of them under forty, to establish an ideological foundation for their political movement. These men and women have been in revolt against a vulgar-Marxist tradition based on economic determinism, a glorification of the lower classes, and the self-defeating tendency to read the past according to the political demands of the moment. Historians like W. A. Williams, Aileen Kraditor, and Christopher Lasch, starting from such different ideologies as Christian socialism, orthodox Marxism, pragmatism, and existentialism, have recently converged in an attack on the economic determinism and romanticism of the earlier tradition and, especially, the assumption that myth-making and falsifying in historical writing can be of political use. It is ironic that even historians who do not consider themselves Marxists are steadily building a genuine American version of Marxism by the very act of destroying the caricature to which they fell heir. Lynd speaks as part of this current, but, as these books reveal, he might more properly be placed in the tradition being overthrown.
Review, 4269 words
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