Notes & Comments: April 2001.

On "moral equivalence" ...

The American Historical Review is widely considered the preeminent English-language journal for the discipline of history. The journal, a publication of the American Historical Association, is also conspicuously a captive of the left-wing bias that has permeated the teaching of history in Western universities. The American Historical Review is to the discipline of history what the Publications of the Modern Language Association is to literary studies: a repository of trendy, left-leaning, anti-American attitudes.

Of course there are exceptions: even the PMLA occasionally publishes something without obvious parti pris. But no reasonable observer can miss the bias. Thus it is business as usual that the lead article in the current number of the AHR (February 2001) is by the Marxist Eric Foner, this year's president of the American Historical Association. Entitled "American Freedom in a Global Age" the essay argues that really, when you come right down to it, American freedom is tantamount to a lack of freedom. "'Freedom'" Professor Foner argues--note the scare quotes--"continues to occupy as central a place as ever in our political vocabulary, but it has been largely appropriated by libertarians and conservatives of one kind or another, from advocates of unimpeded market economics to armed militia groups insisting that the right to bear arms is the centerpiece of American liberty." Really? What about the freedom to publish presidential addresses for prominent academic organizations while safely perched in the comforting bower of academic tenure? Professor Foner omits dilating on that freedom, possibly because it would spoil his fantasy about America the Enemy.

Nor is Professor Foner's contribution the only evidence of doctrinaire academic leftism in the AHR. Far from it. This number also includes, inter alia, an attack on the United Fruit Company's operations in Central America and praise for a book that "contributes to the history of sexuality ... by standing outside the normative status of heterosexuality and examining its construction as an ideal and a practice." A teaspoon of Marx, half-a-cup of Foucault. It is, as we say, only business as usual in the contemporary academy.

But with one article, the AHR really outdid itself. That is "Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place." The title says it all. Written by Kate Brown, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, the essay argues that Karaganda, a labor camp in the former Soviet Union, and Billings, Montana, are morally similar because both were laid out on a grid, and "can serve as an apparatus for conquest, as a way to dominate space." It sounds preposterous. It is preposterous. But it is also indicative of what passes for serious scholarship in the discipline of history today.

Professor Brown is canny about testing the credulity of her readers. She acclimatizes them gradually to absurdity. Thus she begins by frankly allowing that in one case we are dealing with a prison camp while in the other we are dealing with a pioneer city. "People were deported to Karaganda against their will.... [I]n the American Plains ... they bought their own train tickets. Is that difference of free will essential?" Well, yes, you might say, if that is not essential, nothing is. But the burden of Professor Brown's long essay is to dissolve that difference--the difference between servitude and freedom--in a solvent of abstraction about the enslavements perpetrated by certain forms of city planning. If only, she says, we can get beyond the parochial, Cold-War idea that there is some crucial difference between Communism and capitalism, between democracy and totalitarianism, we will see that "the history of cities in Montana and Kazakhstan ... tell not two stories but one--the history of gridded space." Actually, Professor Brown does believe that there are some important differences between the two. For although she equates "the American booster press and Soviet propaganda" it turns out that "the grief for what has been paved over ... is a sign that in the United States, more than in the former Soviet Union, the destruction that accompanies a successfully expanding modernity has been far more complete." In other words, things might have been bad in a Soviet labor camp, but not nearly as bad as they were in the Wild West.

We suspect that Professor Brown's article will garner a lot of sympathetic attention from her colleagues. It is exactly the sort of work that is thought "brilliant" by the powers that be in the contemporary academy. The thesis is ridiculous; the arguments are tendentious; but the political position is irresistible. "Gridded Space" belongs firmly to the hoary genre that argues for a moral equivalence between the United States and totalitarian powers. It works like this: yes, of course, people in the Soviet camps "starved, froze, and worked until they dropped from exhaustion." But then we mustn't forget that "on the Great Plains people also ...