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The Scholarly Odyssey of an Activist Historian: Alan Dawley in Historiography
By Ian Tyrrell, University of New South Wales
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It would be tempting to see the late Alan Dawley as an intellectual product of the 1960s, a decade that has attracted considerable attention among historians and that shaped the political and intellectual preoccupations of a generation. To be sure, Dawley played a part in that era's social-protest movement that shaped his career as a scholar-activist. Katy Weschler Dawley spoke recently of a young man "with a purpose," who "became committed to achieve goals of justice, civil-rights and antiwar movements."1 These were indeed abiding commitments that would have made the separation of activism and scholarship difficult for any historian, and there is no doubt that Dawley was such a writer driven at the outset by political ideals.2 |
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Yet it was the far less attractive 1970s that held another key to Dawley's intellectual odyssey. Caught in the middle of this little-understood decade, radicals who cut their teeth on the social protests of the sixties had to rethink. They had to reassess positions that assumed a correlation between activism and social change. They had to work out a deeper understanding of the relations of state and society. They had to explain why political and social institutions had not come tumbling down in response to social protest, and why so many of the American people (Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew's silent majority) did not respond to telling critiques of the warfare state. Marxist class struggle was always a part of 1960s radicalism, but the theoretical and scholarly study of class had taken a back seat to the assertion of popular history and activist concerns. By the 1970s, more and more of the student activists of an earlier decade turned to the academy for reflection and to the study of class to explain changed circumstances. |
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Class was integral to the intellectual agenda in which new ideas about the relationship of Marxist theory to history took hold. These ideas were liberating for those who took part in the scholarly activism of that time; the historical debates among the graduates of the New Left generation centered on the impact of the so-called British Marxists. American historians seeking ways to explain the trajectories of social conflict had looked back to Beardian and broader Progressive Era concepts of struggles between the people and elite interests, and found these dissatisfying and incomplete. They knew that the consensus theorists of the 1950s portrayed the United States as a liberal society in which basic agreement occurred over ideology, and knew equally well that such theories did not explain their own experience. They therefore looked across the Atlantic for more sophisticated and intellectually satisfying formulae. Among the ideas crossing the Atlantic westward in these years, none was more influential than the work of historian E. P. Thompson. Thompson was attractive to American radical historians not so much because he used class analysis, but because he dealt with Marxist concepts with a liberating degree of openness. Spurning Old Left shibboleths such as the determining role of productive economic forces, Thompson focused not on the institutional politics of trade unions or labor parties, but on workers coming to class consciousness in their own political, cultural, and social lives. This insistence on the agency of the working class corresponded to the instincts of the New Left. The structural relations of class had to be given life through the experience of struggle, defined by the cultural inheritance that workers brought to the making of class. Thompson's work was addressed to just this point, particularly through evocative accounts of preindustrial cultural and political traditions, working-class versions of Methodism, and political radicalism in the era of the French Revolution. |
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