The Rise and Fall of Liberal Historiography
If a historian of the United States entered the public square in the 1960s or 1970s, it was often for reason of radical commitments. Eugene Genovese became a lightning rod after offering his “welcome” to the possibility of a Viet Cong victory; Staughton Lynd emerged as an icon of conscience thanks to Yale’s denial of his tenure over his antiwar activities; Lawrence Goodwyn’s writing on populism served as a historical bible for movement activists; Christopher Lasch was even read by Jimmy Carter in the White House, although he later castigated the president for missing his point. The profession seems to play this role less frequently today — despite celebrated exceptions such as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Today the most prominent “historians in public” are in different ways, and for good or ill, mainly working within liberalism, seeking to defend its institutions and norms against attack. Lasch’s brief moment in the sun notwithstanding, this latter group has a wider audience and even a kind of access to state power.
Tracing the fall of radical history and ascent of liberalism in the historical profession offers a chance to consider historians’ own place in the consolidation of professional-class liberalism, a process negotiated in part through a new relationship between social history and the tradition I call institutionalism: the approach that emphasizes political actors — policymakers, parties and their leaders, and the intellectuals who inform them — as first movers. What makes this approach specifically liberal is its emphasis on the autonomy of political ideology and action from social forces.
As our profession both accesses the halls of power at its upper reaches and collapses in its internal economic structure, it is undergoing significant intergenerational ideological polarization. This development prompts reassessment of the renewed relationship between historiography and liberalism, through which historians drew closer analytically and practically to the institutions of state power — and so became institutionalists both in method and in politics. In the process, they gained new powers. But we may have lost something too. This ambiguity is written across the scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s.
To place historians within the development of history is a useful exercise in two ways. First, of course, it is central to the project of historiography, the intergenerational dialogue by which we become self-conscious of how our angle of retrospective view has changed as we have moved forward in time. More ambitiously though, it is sometimes possible to say something meaningful about a historical event or process by reading contemporary historical work symptomatically. To push historiography from its traditional place as a secondary source and treat it as primary material might turn over fresh layers from familiar episodes. In particular, it is in relation to debates about method that historians often disclose some truth of their era.
In the years after 1980, the U.S. historical profession fell into intense internal debate — reaching a peak in the 1990s but not fully resolved today — as the lines of inquiry established by social history seemed increasingly alien in a more conservative historical moment. Theoretical and methodological strife ricocheted through historical scholarship, a branch of the “theory wars” occurring simultaneously across disciplines. The intellectual-historical context, the collapse of the horizon of possibility glimpsed by the New Left and the decline in scholarly belief in the potentiality of social activism, corresponded to the political context of the defeat of the postwar welfare state. Within U.S. history, a debate ensued about how to absorb the meaning of Reaganism — and ultimately, more broadly, neoliberalism — into scholars’ account of the past, for which social historians’ core concept of “agency” no longer seemed adequate given these political results. The political event had to be digested not only at the empirical level of substantive historical arguments, but also at the more abstract level where historical concepts are forged.
Social history in particular, the engine of historiographical transformation since the 1970s, faced critiques from within and without implicating the “agency” concept. Agency, a humanist idea, aimed to describe the capacity of ordinary people to influence historical events: at each juncture, the historical presence of women, the enslaved, African Americans, immigrants, and the working class could be established and their efforts shown to have contributed to the outcome. Yet the disappointing political outcomes of the 1980s cast doubt on such an approach.
As the debate developed, it emerged that the reasons that some categories of human experience coagulated into “agents” of a particular kind — social-movement actors, especially — had largely been taken for granted by the “new social history.” What made a machinist an agentive worker and his union struggles a subject for labor history, asked Nell Painter, but the racism of his exclusionary union something less analytically significant? Surely one had to ask how race and class were constructed to reach an answer. Such critiques formed the basis of the “cultural turn” in history.
It was also here that the second critique, arising from social science, made its impact. Social history’s original maneuver — a critique of consensus liberalism — seemed ill-placed in a world where consensus liberalism had been defeated not from the left but from the right. As Alan Brinkley put it in his classic 1994 essay on conservatism, “New Left political scholarship has … generally been more interested in discrediting liberalism — and, within the academic world, in wresting leadership and initiative from liberal scholars — than in confronting what it has generally considered a less formidable foe: the self-proclaimed Right.” In his first footnote, Brinkley observed that social scientists have done a far better job than historians of tracking conservatism.
While those influenced by both cultural history and social science can be characterized as “post-Marxist,” they exited social history’s vaguely Marxist encampment heading in almost opposite theoretical directions: one group into the interpretive and hermeneutic, the other into positivism. Yet only the first, the cultural turn, has attracted sustained disciplinary reflection. The rise of cultural history has been widely debated, celebrated, and criticized. (Reader, imagine a colleague describing a talk or paper as “very 1990s. ”What you envision probably involved discourse analysis, performativity, postcoloniality, the carnivalesque, or similar.) But what came of this second, social-scientific line of argument, which often emanated from a more avowedly politically and methodologically liberal position? We must remain in some sense within it, since we have not yet looked backward at it.
Brinkley, however, was part of a broader historical phenomenon. The call for social historians in crisis to reunite with liberalism — against which the field initially had emerged in revolt—was widespread. “The once-passionate impulse to recapture working-class struggles and commitments to anticapitalist imperatives now risks creating sentimental reminders of times lost and aspirations disappointed,” wrote Ira Katznelson in the same year, 1994, pointing to the failure of socialist dreams.
His proposed alternative was to engage what he called “liberal theory,” in particular “to reincorporate at the center of the discipline the subjects of state-focused politics, institutions, and law.” What the U.S. history field has not yet made explicit in its own self-narrative is how successful this call was.
This reentry into liberalism in the end produced a generation of “new political historians,” whose method was “institutionalism.” (Something closely related occurred in the next decade with another off-ramp from social history, this one into the history of capitalism.) The purpose here is not to attempt to vindicate or disprove institutionalism—neither of which could be done even at book length—but to illustrate and historicize it. For a new generation of scholars, this method has been in continuous ascendancy for most of our lifetimes. What results has it yielded and what limits has it met?
Social history’s exhaustion by the 1990s had real sources, and institutionalism offered something significant in response. But institutionalism also aimed to suppress some animating elements of social history that might prove useful in the discontented, unequal period beginning around 2010. Many of us who have been shaped profoundly by institutionalism—arguably its third generation in the field of U.S. history—also lack the memories and scars that inspired it. We have different ones instead, which we can understand and to which we can assign meaning only partly through concepts developed in the 1980s and 1990s. This generational difference corresponds to a wider one among professionals, the younger cohorts of whom have drifted leftward, bypassing lessons of moderation learned and exemplified in the 1980s and 1990s by professional-class liberals. Since this period, political conditions have changed for the worse, possibly quite drastically. Such deterioration poses questions for any method of political analysis.
Broadly, scholarly institutionalism can be classed into three groups. They are the “organizational synthesis” of the 1970s and 1980s in business and political history, the substantivist economic sociology of Karl Polanyi, and most significantly the “state-centered approach” that arose in the 1980s in political science (often itself called “neo-institutionalist” or “neo-Weberian”). These traditions have their own intersecting but distinct histories, but they share some personnel, as well as three fundamental features.
First, institutionalists have been concerned with market structure. As was repeatedly argued by center-left reformers in the 1980s and 1990s, it is easier and more effective to regulate markets than to infringe directly on investment decisions and property rights: progressive reform might instrumentalize the power of markets rather than set itself against them hopelessly. These instincts shaped scholarly agendas. In the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s especially, production tended to fall out somewhat as sites of social antagonism or historical analysis as it ceased to be a site of political possibility. Instead, market behavior signalized social class — consumer politics or antimonopoly.
Second, institutionalists share a particular interest in the specific and contingent organizational forms of economic and political life, to which they give causal priority over more abstract formalisms or determinisms. Politics and markets happen only through formation of organizations, and these organizations have particular histories. A populist focus on specific mechanisms and actors rather than structural determinants of elite power — corporate forms, elite networks — emerged here.
And third, institutionalists see political power as irreducible to socioeconomic power. Instead, they trace it to organizational form, most importantly the state form. The modern bureaucratic state depends on expert knowledge and civil society organization, including party organization — a common feature of all modern societies. Finally, for this reason, the political party in general — and for U.S. scholars, the Democratic Party in particular — have distinct historical importance. Politics must be done through parties. They are — and in the modern U.S. the Democratic Party exclusively is — the indispensable vehicles of social progress. In this view, liberal electoral success is analytically prior to, and ultimately politically more imperative than, any other political program. Generational efforts at political change, such as go into great social movements, and which often demand sacrifices of liberal politicians, diminish in importance.
Institutionalism had at its heart a profound commitment to historical contingency. As Richard John put it, “It is, for example, no longer as intuitively plausible as it had been in 1980 to posit that the major changes in American public life bubbled up from below.” Importantly, John drew a distinction between “society” and “political economy” as units of analysis: “Not only individuals and groups, but also institutions, can be agents of change.” What marks this position as the historical methodology of political liberalism is the analytic removal of “society” and “political economy” into separate spheres: over here are citizens going about their lives; over there are markets and the state institutions that govern them. The relationship between the spheres has no necessary shape — it is, as John emphasizes, “contingent.”
Historians appreciate contingency, of course. Benignly, such a method of contingency allows for the possibility that the state might actually represent the people: if politics is not reducible to the social, then the inequalities in society might be counteracted by the equalities of democracy. As Gary Gerstle, a 1980s labor historian par excellence who became a prominent political historian, concluded his synthesis of American state development, Liberty and Coercion, “Fixing the system does mean giving Americans the tools and flexibility to fashion a government that works, and one that as members of a polity in which the people are meant to be sovereign, they deserve.” Such neo-Progressivism does not dismiss the reality of social inequality. Indeed, it laments it. But it dispenses with social inequality as a direct cause of historical effects. It is in its method rather than its ethics that institutionalism diverges most from the traditional commitments of social history. Divergence being only partial—methodological more than ethical — encounter and affiliation were possible.
But it is also historians’ task to explain obdurate continuities of social hierarchy. And as those continuities have reasserted themselves over recent decades, the shortcomings of this methodological liaison have shown more clearly. How can it be that each discrete outcome appears contingent and non-inevitable on close examination; yet at the same time, when we pull back the frame, so many events seem to align toward the reproduction of social inequality? Answering this question requires a move up the ladder of abstraction, a resort to structural explanation. To the extent that such moves fell out of historians’ repertoire, then the meeting of the two traditions seems less an alliance of equals and more an assertion of liberal hegemony over a defeated Left — tracking closely with developments going on in American politics writ large.
It stands to reason that mass incarceration and financialized racial and social inequality — characteristic developments of the neoliberal period — would usher the historical study of political institutions onto new ground. These phenomena epitomize how the American state is an instrument of unequal, coercive rule. Neo-institutionalism arose to explore the possibility of progressive governance in the face of the neoliberal challenge, arguing that social and economic forces did not give any irresistible logic to the upward redistribution of wealth and power. But the 2020s present a harder environment for this view than the 1980s and 1990s did, as even figures from within the orbit of neo-institutionalist political science have recognized.
Within the intellectual sphere, 40 years of worsening inequality have given rise to an increasingly radicalized layer of younger scholars who are disinclined to suppress the mechanisms of social determination as the special pleading of parochial interests, and unwilling to accept that what is most needed to achieve appropriate and coherent governance is for competent liberal technocrats to hold power. Mass incarceration, U.S. imperialism, unchecked climate catastrophe, the privatized welfare state, the financialization and deregulation of the economy, the illegalization and deportation of immigrants — liberals have their fingerprints on all these phenomena; just as they do on the crisis of the university itself, which has forged the unequal institutional environments in which we ourselves work. Yet the discovery of these fingerprints has itself been made possible by the fusion of institutionalist social science with social history, which generated a reservoir of historical knowledge we can draw on to explore the darker, less democratic threads of our history — and the possible social bases for resistance and transformation.
Although all historians are shaped by the moments in which we write, we first learn how to look at the world historically through the eyes of scholars shaped by an earlier moment. Tensions in historical discourse must develop from this sliding contradiction. But we can learn from this paradox if we will allow it its own historical meaning, in which we are necessarily implicated politically. Doing so is not antithetical to learning from previous generations: it is how we do it. As E.P. Thompson once observed, historians “are as much subject to our own time’s formation and determinations as any others. If our work is continued by others, it will be continued differently.”
Adapted excerpt reprinted with permission from Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals Since the 1960s, edited by Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
