‘The Cycles of American History’<i> (Houghton Mifflin: $18.95; 473 pp.)</i>

President Reagan has just speculated that the United States could prove the first exception to the historical fate of great powers: “. . . I should say that America, with its people and its freedom, which is unique in the world, could be the first exception to the historical rule about which you asked.” In this new book, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. explores, among other things, exceptionalist views like these and places them in the long view of American history. The Founding Fathers hoped that their Republic might prove an exception to the general rule but thought it prudent to count on making the best of the rule rather than on proving to be the exception. The tension between the realistic views of the Founders and the exceptionalism of the likes of President Reagan is but one of the cycles in American history that Prof. Schlesinger elucidates. This volume contains his reflections upon our history, his considered account of how it has worked. As always with Schlesinger’s books, the history offers an alternative to what he dislikes in contemporary public life. Given contemporary public life and his views of it, this book is a powerful alternative. Schlesinger’s history is no armchair diversion, it offers an injunction and an invitation and a case for the engaged consideration of American public life in the light of American history.

“The Cycles of American History” collects 14 essays (revised for this volume) that treat three large concerns. Two essays offer an interpretive theory of our history, six consider aspects of our foreign relations, six domestic political life. The subjects include the general American approach to foreign policy, moral absolutes and human rights as foreign policy objectives, the origins of the Cold War, the question of American imperialism, Solzhenitsyn’s challenge to the West, American political parties, the role of government in the economy, the “Imperial Presidency,” the vice presidency, presidential reputations and leadership in democracy. All are broached within a context of the shifting cycles of value and opinion and policy that, in Schlesinger’s view, characterize our history.

Schlesinger has created a framework of interpretation in which change and repetition, the simultaneous presence of which baffles every student of every history, play the prominent part in our collective past that we know them to play in our lives. He suggests that our history works in rough 30-year cycles that alternate between eras of public purposes and private interest. These are swings in national mood that affect not only government but values and expression, that characterize national life. The effect of this theory is at once clarifying and subtle. It gives our political history a pattern and yet does not rescue the present moment from choice.

Schlesinger construes an American tradition and its counter tradition to inflect these large cycles and interact within them. He admits that his definition of “tradition” suggests where his bias lies and with characteristic urbanity invites “other historians to reverse the terms. . . . Let them betray their own biases.” The tradition is founded in American Calvinism and in the classical heritage of the Founders and can be summarized as an awareness on the part of the makers of America of that old- fashioned thing the human condition : “The idea of America as an experiment, undertaken in defiance of history, fraught with risk, problematic in outcome. . . .”

This tradition came in time to vie with a more rhapsodic, redemptive counter tradition of Americans as a chosen people with a manifest destiny, a mission that lifted them above the ordinary ground rules of history, rules the tradition always kept in mind. Schlesinger places our history within the shifts between these outlooks. Schlesinger himself suggests that inspiring as the counter tradition is, “Americans can take pride in their nation, not as they claim a commission from God and a sacred destiny, but as they fulfill their deepest values in an enigmatic world.”

The revisionist critics of the Cold War, the Carter human rights activists and the Reagan conservatives now in power all tend, in Schlesinger’s view, to ignore the “enigmatic world” to the detriment of their arguments, their cause and our survival respectively. The world must be seen for the complex, global, dangerous human place that it is. Schlesinger worries that Americans tend to want to restrict the world to a place over which they can cast their own shadow, tailored to fit our image. “Moral values do have a fundamental role in the conduct of foreign affairs,” he writes, “but, save in extreme cases, that role is surely not to provide abstract and universal principles for foreign policy decisions. It is rather to illuminate and control conceptions of national interest. The righteousness of those who freely apply their personal moral criteria to the complexities of international politics degenerates all too easily into absolutism and fanaticism. The assumption that other nations have legitimate traditions, interests, values, and rights of their own is the beginning of the true morality of states.”

The most important change in Schlesinger’s views of foreign policy is the importance he now attaches to the danger of nuclear annihilation.

Each essay takes a thematic instance of American history. A major issue is stated: the origins of the Cold War, the relative importance of the vice presidency, the status of government action in the economy. Schlesinger then examines both the history of the issue and the vicissitudes of opinion about the phenomenon. This makes each chapter an adventure, because we see a broad story through the shifting lenses of opinion about it. Although a determined advocate of his views, Schlesinger always leaves the reader with plenty to make up his own mind about, enough evidence to do it and, most important, with the motivation to have a mind made up about an important issue.

The essays about American domestic politics argue for a liberal activist federal government. One of the blessings of this book is its historical clarity about the role of government in the economy and indeed throughout American life. Schlesinger recognizes that we are not faced with a choice about whether there will be a government with a strong affirmative presence in American life but whose interests the government’s actions will affirm. And he is open about his preference:

“Our politics flows in cycles. In the 1980s, private interest displaced public purpose as the animating national motive. The themes of the Kennedy presidency seems exotic in the self-congratulatory America of Ronald Reagan. We hate being nagged to think about the humiliated and the dispossessed. We hate being reminded of nobler and more demanding days. We hate the idea that we should not ask what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country. . . . But complacency in the end is as tiresome as idealism.”

This excerpt is from an essay about presidential reputations in which Schlesinger openly and eloquently defends his friend, John Kennedy. But he is also judicious in that defense, as he is in maintaining his skeptical attitude toward Hoover and Eisenhower in the teeth of the current vogue for them.

Schlesinger knows that his own liberal views have suffered eclipse once again. This book is written, in part, from the point of view of that eclipse. As always in his writing, Schlesinger’s power comes as much from his experience of the world as from his prodigious learning. Here the power stems from his candid and unflinching experience of the fate of his opinions as an active participant in political life and his recourse to scholarship for the understanding of his experience. He is himself a liberal who owes as much to Hamilton as he does to Jefferson, if not more. Emerson, Tocqueville, James Bryce, Henry Adams, William James and Reinhold Neibuhr seem especially to have inspired him in this book, and they share a chastened sense of life together with a reliance on human intelligence and action that finally comes down to the effort to live life fully, while as little deceived by its temptations as possible. Schlesinger writes this book from that hard-earned knowledge. And yet he also quotes Whitman as if to court the hope he restrains. Schlesinger’s theory of American cycles is conceived in terms of a “dialectics between past and future.” He has always been fearless in admitting the past into the future. He has gone most historians one better by writing his books not only from the catbird seat of historical scholarship, but also from the exposed ground of engagement in life’s pressing public business. He has brought the battery of learning and intelligence into the history of democracy, made and in the making. He has entered the lists with the weapons of his formidable intelligence and his historian’s art.

If Schlesinger has defied the false barrier between past and present, he has been criticized for his blending of present and past. Each of these essays concerns the history of a burning contemporary issue, and he makes it clear that the interest in history is often motivated by those issues and that the status of the vice president, the present state of the party system, the proper role of the government in the economy of the United States in world affairs will be illuminated by a history of the issue grounded in present concern. Schlesinger is proud to write history that helps explain the things that need explaining. He reasserts the claim of history to its traditional role as a policy science in human affairs and yet writes as always in the parallel tradition of history as literary art. There has always been in Schlesinger’s career a challenge to the academic definition of the historian as detached from the present and more scientist than artist. His mastery of the historical scholarship and his adeptness in debate challenge the complacency of his profession.