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Marx argued that the rightful goal of philosophy was not merely to study society but to change it. Similarly, the revisionists seek what they term a "usable past"—which means, in effect, a past that supports their present political convictions. The evidence suggests that they have overused the past. Their understandable anguish over the Viet Nam War has led them to condemn American participation in other wars; too readily, they find a link of culpability stretching from one conflict to the next. In so far as they tend to disregard history that does not serve their needs, they are antihistorical. Thus, when Staughton Lynd, in Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, combs American history to establish a tradition of radicals who shared his vision of a noncapitalist, decentralized society, he plucks out Tom Paine, Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau as fellow ideologues. This is not history but polemics.
Many revisionists impose too strict a pattern on the chaos of history. By concentrating on inexorable social and economic forces, they do not make sufficient allowance for political, cultural and psychological factors. The accidental in history too often eludes them. The American Revolution, for example, was not necessarily the inevitable product of contending social forces. In his Origins of American Politics, Bernard Bailyn points out that the colonial leaders, misled by radical British publicists, developed an almost paranoid fear that the British Crown was adding to its power when in reality that power was waning. This misreading of the times contributed significantly to the movement for independence.
Limits of Economics
A rigid theory of economics is insufficient to explain the behavior of democratic statesmen like F.D.R. and Truman.
No doubt these Presidents were interested in the preservation and expansion of American markets. But their foreign policies were determined by other, more significant factors — among them a legitimate and noneconomic desire to maintain a balance of power in the world, without which peace is not possible. They were also subject to a variety of domestic pressures, not all of which can be defined in economic terms. As Hofstadter argues in defense of F.D.R.'s prewar policies, "his undeniably devious leadership at certain moments reflected not his Caesaristic aspirations but the difficulties of a democratic politician confronting the force and unhampered initiative of Caesaristic powers" — meaning fascist Japan and Germany.
The point equally well applies to later U.S. Presidents confronting Soviet Russia.
It is in the nature of radicalism not to be 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?