Do the Consensus Historians Still Matter?

When I first started reading, for example, Richard Hofstadter (if memory serves the first of his books I picked up was Anti-Intellectualism in American Life) I had either never heard or failed to recognize any significance in the term "consensus historians." The awareness I was to develop of that bigger context came much later, consolidated as I found myself approaching the matter of "centrist" ideology in a serious way.

Naturally reading up on all that I became aware of how the consensus historians belong to another generation, since superseded by other views--with some of those historians, in fact, contributing to that process themselves with displays of renewed attention to what their visions of consensus missed. (Thus did consensus historian Hofstadter produce the volume American Violence; A Documentary History, a reminder of just how conflict-ridden the history of a country whose history was supposedly defined by "consensus" actually was.)

Still, there is no question of those historians of mid-century having left their mark on American intellectual life, and much more besides. This is, in part, because of the ways in which they helped shape that centrist outlook that I think few understand much in any conscious way, but which is so much a part of American political culture--determining thelimits of the "legitimate" ideological spectrum and with it what people are allowed to talk about or even expect, the conduct of mainstream politicians, the operation of the media, the "political language" we use, etc..

However, it may also be because academic historiography since that time, shaped by the continued tendency to specialization, the influence of postmodernism, and the widening gap between the scholarly and the popular in a culture which is on the whole fragmenting while becoming less and less literate, has simply not had the same potential for broad vision, or broad influence. Indeed, considering the situation I find myself recalling their fellow centrist theoretician, the sociologist Daniel Bell, in The End of Ideology, in which, in a deeply lachrymose passage, he remarks the inferiority of the more prominent public intellectuals of his time in comparison with those of the prior generation (a Veblen, a Beard, a Dewey)--and think that today there are grounds for saying the same of the last generation or two as against those we had at mid-century.