Word: consensus
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PRESIDENT Nixon's State of the Union message illustrated anew how swiftly a once radical idea can become national consensus and good politics. Only a few years ago, the notion that the quality of life in America is not good enough, and that the U.S. is wantonly despoiling its physical environment was the concern mainly of left-wing critics, grumpy academics and dedicated conservationists well out of the mainstream of U.S. politics. Yet last week the President effectively moved to assume personal command of the gathering battle for a better environment...
...Consensus historians have generally given high marks to the "Progressive Era" of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and to F.D.R.'s New Deal, for accomplishing significant reform within a democratic framework. The revisionists are not willing to concede so much. To Gabriel Kolko of the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Progressive Era represented not the bridling of predatory big business by the Federal Government but rather the capture of Government by business. In The Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko argues that most Government regulation was enacted at the behest of leading corporations, which wanted railroad legislation, meat...
...revisionists have a particular quarrel with the dominant scholarly voice of the recent past: what they call "consensus history," as exemplified by such diverse writers as Richard Hofstadter of Columbia, Daniel Boorstin of the Smithsonian Institution, Henry Nash Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, and George Kennan of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The consensus historians, who came to maturity during World War II and the early years of the cold war, exhibit an understandable hostility to totalitarianism in their writings. By contrast, they emphasize the spirit of compromise and accommodation in American history. Compared with...
...almost axiomatic with consensus historians that violent revolutions do more harm than good. But in the best revisionist work to date, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Barrington Moore Jr. of Harvard makes a strong case for the necessity of revolution. Without such a revolution in its past, he declares, a nation cannot achieve industrial democracy. Revolution is necessary to destroy the reactionary power of the agricultural interests that impede modernization: both large landholders and peasantry...
...able to live at peace with the past. History does not prove very comforting to those who yearn for Utopian change. That is one reason, no doubt, why the revisionists - with the ex ception of Moore - have not written works equal to the best of the consensus school. It seems to be true that conservatives - men with a fondness for the past - write the better history; witness Gibbon, Spengler, Henry Adams. The revisionists have a valid point: If the past is not usable, then what is its value...