Book Review

There must be a reason why the Pentagon plans to fight only one and a half major wars at a time. David Harlan is waging so many historiographical battles on so many fronts in this collection that readers may be excused if they find themselves mystified by his confusing alliances and often contradictory pronouncements. He criticizes Sacvan Bercovitch for ingratitude toward the Puritan heritage, chastises feminist scholars who indulge in gender essentialism, and tracks the ways Hayden White, Richard Rorty, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have deployed poststructuralist theory in the service of liberal humanism. But as a believer in the age-old adage that "the enemies of my enemies are my friends," Harlan enlists people who would otherwise hate to be on the same side of any cause in his relentless campaign against those he deems responsible for the "degradation" of American history—or, more precisely, of American intellectual history. Harlan's adversaries include Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, Thomas Haskell, David Hollinger, James Kloppenberg, and Joyce Appleby, who are the objects of stinging attacks for their prose, their hostility to poststructuralism, their efforts to place ideas in historical context, and for what Harlan claims is the moral obtuseness of their work. Above all, Harlan condemns them for mounting what he considers a rearguard defense of objectivism in the guise of a pragmatic, moderate historicism.

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Harlan's critique of contextualism resembles arguments Dominick LaCapra made a decade ago in his debate with Kloppenberg in the pages of the Intellectual History Newsletter. But Harlan gives LaCapra's "textualist" position a new twist by embracing an openly presentist stance that would eliminate distinctions between historical writing and cultural criticism and by arguing that poststructuralist theory permits the reinvigoration of history as "a form of moral deliberation." For Harlan, this translates into a revival of the sort of history written by Perry Miller a half century ago. It will come as a shock to some to discover that Harlan's whiggish narrative of theoretical progress—which applauds one postmodern thinker after another for freeing us from the shackles of objectivity to engage in personal projects of self-fashioning—dovetails with an endorsement not only of Miller's approach to history but also of the Puritan theology that Miller admired.

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