But no modern non-"organic" revolution has resulted in freedom, which is more a matter of evolution, or more exactly, social devolution from the top down. First the nobility challenges the crown and then the ascendent bourgeoisie challenges the aristocracy and later the working class confronts the bourgeoisie, with power moving from monarchy to oligarchy to democracy. ("Ours", John Adams reminded the Francophiles, "was a revolution against innovation.") But Foner's ringing sentence about America's being born in revolution echoes the sentiments of the National History Standards, where students are asked to "compare" America's Revolution with those that took place in the 20th century in Russia, Cuba, China and Vietnam. One would think American students need to be asked another question: Can there be a true revolution without a civil war or counter-revolution? And if America had neither, what happened between 1776 and 1787 that made a revolution unique in not devouring its own children?

In Who Owns History?, Foner's most recent book, that question goes unanswered. The longest essay deals with the age-old question: "Why Is There No Socialism in America?" The flip-side of the question could be: "Why was there no freedom in the Soviet Union?" Had Foner dealt with Weber, Tocqueville, and Marx himself, he might begin to work out an answer to both questions. But he spends all his effort discussing the work of fellow historians who also shy away from listening to what the master thinkers had to say. While Marx warned that Russia could not make the transition to socialism before going through the liberal capitalist stage of development, he recognized that America had moved through that stage and that the question then was whether there would be a stage beyond it. Tocqueville observed that America was "born" free and especially equal, having skipped feudalism, and, in a country where commerce arises with democracy, the value of freedom is established in a "consensus universalis", a point that Marx and Engels confirmed when they said of Americans: "the bourgeois conditions look like a beau ideal to them." What the post-Sixties radical scholars cannot face is that there is no "stage" beyond an America in which liberal democracy has been firmly established.

Unwilling to accept the wisdom of Marx or Tocqueville, Foner cites the work of newer scholars showing past workers, feminists and various ethnic groups supposedly challenging the liberal consensus by protesting against it. But do they challenge it to overturn it or to become part of it? After all, consider not what the Sixties-era students said but what they did. After denouncing the university as a monstrous bureaucratic "system without a face"-- indeed, after shouting with Mario Savio that they would "put their bodies against the machine and make the machine stop until we're free"--the Sixties generation got their Ph.D.s and meekly entered into the university without so much as a blush, becoming the very tenured professors they once abominated.

Foner is interested in freedom less as the philosophical riddle of liberalism than as the political program of radicalism, and thus he protests that the idea of freedom "has been largely appropriated by libertarians and conservatives of one kind or another, from advocates of unimpeded market economics to armed militia groups, insisting that the right to bear arms is the centerpiece of American liberty." The more legitimate idea of freedom, he argues, would have students join with African-Americans to march for civil rights, or going into the factories to support the ranks of labor, or taking a stand on women's rights and gender equality. Foner rightly emphasizes America's failure to live up to its egalitarian ideals and the struggles of those trying to realize such ideals. But he is struck by the thought that as America expanded and developed, it engaged in what he calls "the exclusionary dimensions of American freedom." Wrongly put. Since freedom enjoyed in a democracy is by definition inclusionary, freedom itself cannot engage in acts of exclusion. The story of American freedom is also the story of American power, and power seldom moves with democracy but more often against it. Democracy seeks to expand, absorb, encompass, and, above all, include; power aims to restrict, confine, limit, and, above all, exclude. Freedom and power may be antithetical but they are also inseparable. For example, one faction's freedom to undertake an action curbs another faction's freedom to oppose it. Why, then, does the historian not see the dialectic of freedom and power?

The answer is that the academic Left prefers to use the language of democracy and freedom to avoid looking at what is really going on in the culture wars today. The phenomenon of multiculturalism that Foner and Levine celebrate has little to do with freedom in the proper sense of the term, but much to do with power and those who seek it without mentioning it by name. On the university campus, various minority programs and affirmative action mandates are nothing less than exercises in power that include some groups at the expense of others. That the post-Sixties generation of scholars continues to hire only its own ideological kind is another expression of academic power that has witnessed the establishment of social history and other radical fields and the falling off of traditional political, diplomatic and intellectual history.

Professor Foner himself I happily hasten to add, has been willing to hire and support teachers of differing ideological loyalties, and in his remarkable academic career he has been more professional than political, a gentleman scholar rather than an academic apparatchik. My critique concerns only the claim, made by Lawrence Levine and others, that the post-Sixties generation is more open to new ideas and has a better capacity for change than any prior generation of American historians, and the opposite claim, made by Foner, that progressive political causes have depended upon the maintenance of an unchanging radicalism.

In addition, there remains an unchanging and predictable complaint: In dealing with American history, slavery is Foner's only trump card. Without it, he's a fish out of water. Yet if America has yet to resolve the race question, presumably the Soviet Union had solved the class problem, and thus the American historian returns from Moscow completely bewildered by a people who, instead of accepting their fate, would give up despotic communism for Western liberalism. The denials to freedom trouble the historian of American historiography who would have us feel guilt in the country's having betrayed the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. But of the democratic ideals of Karl Marx, which Sidney Hook went to his grave believing in, the historian remains coldly indifferent. Thus he is seemingly oblivious to the disappearance of freedom's possibility in early 20th-century Russian history after the Constituent Assembly had been crushed by the Bolsheviks directed by Lenin, the Kronstadt uprising massacred at the orders of Trotsky, and the intelligentsia liquidated in the Moscow show trials arranged by Stalin. Foner sees the "silence" surrounding such crimes as explainable, and thus justifiable, by communism's "contribution" to humanity Is this hopelessly stale reasoning the acclaimed "opening of the American mind" on the part of a generation that relishes change? Or is it the reflex of an historian identifying himself as a radical revisionist who cannot, when it comes to his own undying delusions, revise?

John Patrick Diggins is professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and author of a forthcoming book on Eugene O'Neill entitled Desire Under Democracy.

Essay Types: Essay