Diggins, John Patrick 1935- (John P. Diggins)

PERSONAL:

Born April 1, 1935, in San Francisco, CA; son of James J. (a gardener) and Anne Diggins; married Jacy Battles, February 17, 1960 (divorced, September, 1976); children: Sean, Nicole. Education: University of California at Berkeley, A.B., 1957; San Francisco State College (now University), M.A., 1959; University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1964. Politics: Democrat. Religion: "Ex-Catholic."

ADDRESSES:

Office—Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 5th Ave., Rm. 5114, New York, NY 10016. E-mail—jdiggins@gc.cuny.edu.

CAREER:

San Francisco State College (now University), San Francisco, CA, assistant professor of American intellectual history, 1966-69; University of California at Irvine, associate professor, 1969-72, professor of history, 1972-90; City University of New York, New York, NY, Graduate Center, Distinguished Professor of History, beginning 1990; acting director of Graduate Center, 1996-97. Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1975-76; visiting professor, Princeton University, 1977-78; chair of American Civilization at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1988-89; University of London, Commonwealth lecturer, 1991; speaker at Lionel Trilling seminar, Columbia University, 1992. Lecturer and consultant.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, American Studies Association, American Council of Learned Societies, Americans Philosophical Society.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Prizes from Society for Italian Historical Studies, 1965, and American Studies Association, 1966; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1972-73, for Up from Communism; John H. Dunning Award, American Historical Association, 1972; Guggenheim fellowship, 1975-76; residence scholar, Rockefeller Foundation, 1989; grants and fellowships from American Philosophical Society, Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, Rockefeller Foundation.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1972.

The American Left in the Twentieth Century, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1973, revised and updated as The Rise and Fall of the American Left, Norton (New York, NY), 1992.

Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American History, Harper (New York, NY), 1974, reprinted with new introduction, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory, Seabury (New York, NY), 1978.

(Editor, with Mark E. Kann) The Problem with Authority in America, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1981.

The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1984.

The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941-1960, Norton (New York, NY), 1988.

The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1994.

Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1997.

Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1999.

On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2000.

John Adams, Times Books (New York, NY), 2003.

(Editor and author of introduction) The Portable John Adams, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire under Democracy, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2007.

Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of articles to periodicals and journals, including American Historical Review, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, Historian, Journal of Contemporary History, and other journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

John Patrick Diggins is an intellectual and political historian whose books range widely through American history to explain patterns of thought and behavior from the nation's founding to the present day. New York Times Book Review correspondent Alan Ryan called Diggins "one of the liveliest and most interesting of contemporary intellectual historians," adding: "Over the past twenty-five years, he has written about a great many subjects in American political and intellectual history, but in particular about the dilemmas of the 20th-century American left." Indeed, Diggins has explored both radical and pragmatic impulses in American thought, and his work "is nuanced with insights and judgments that will pain any true believer in a pure, essential American way," to quote Alan Tra- chtenberg in the New York Times Book Review. According to Commentary essayist Wilfred M. McClay, Diggins is "a congenital dissenter … an old-fashioned liberal ironist, convinced that it is humanity's inescapable calling to struggle valiantly for the achievement of goods that can never be achieved—or which, if achieved, tend to turn sour or even into their polar opposites."

Diggins has been active in the academic community since the late 1960s. His reputation as a scholar began to grow with the 1973 publication of The American Left in the Twentieth Century, a book that he later expanded and updated as The Rise and Fall of the American Left. The revised work is "a highly readable account of American radicalism and the liberal impulse that resulted in major reforms in this century," to quote Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times. Diggins defines four sometimes overlapping groups—the Lyrical Left, the Old Left, the New Left, and the Academic Left—and shows how these movements have shaped, in fact altered, the landscape of American politics. Mitgang concluded: "Child-labor laws, safety in the workplace, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, Social Security, environmental concerns: all were once denounced as Socialistic and un-American…. Professor Diggins's Rise and Fall of the American Left deserves to be read and pondered to understand the evolution of once radical ideas into accepted reforms."

Other widely reviewed Diggins works include The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941-1960 and The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. With The Proud Decades, Diggins became one of the first historians of note to question and revise the simplistic views of post-World War II America, presenting ambiguities and defining anxieties that beset the American people even as they seemed to be affluent and in conformity with one another. Trachtenberg felt that the author "impressively combines responsible coverage with sharp commentary in clear, bright, readable prose," and that he "reads the past with an eye drawn to the paradoxes of an age whose cultural values seemed at odds with its social reality, its ideals with its facts." Trachtenberg concluded that "Mr. Diggins recovers a neglected past and sets it before us provocatively, intelligently and with poise. Raising more questions than he answers may be a deliberate ploy, to begin debate about what are and what might be the ‘steady norms’ of American life."

The Promise of Pragmatism offers a history of American pragmatic thought through an analysis of the writings of authors such as William James and Richard Rorty, as well as the framers of the United States Constitution, Henry Adams, and Reinhold Neibuhr, to name a few of the thinkers he surveys. Calling the work "a timely and impressive book," William Connolly in the New York Times Book Review continued: "Mr. Diggins … does not pummel pragmatists into shape by reinvoking truth as correspondence to an independent world, historical explanation as a rational calculus or morality as a set of rational imperatives. Indeed, he finds the pragmatist dissolution of those themes to be compelling."

In Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy, Diggins examines the life and writings of the noted German scholar, with emphasis on the American influence in Weber's work. McClay observed: "Diggins is right to assert that Americans generally do not know Weber himself, and the absence of biographical context does render his writings strangely detached and remote, as if they were impersonal dicta that had dropped from the sky. And so it is not surprising after all that an American historian who elsewhere has stressed the significance of Calvinism in the moral and economic formation of American society should eventually have been drawn to the German author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."

In the New Republic, Richard Wolin praised Max Weber as "a lucid and inspired intellectual portrait of Weber," adding: "One can only admire the fluency with which Diggins moves between American and European idioms. And although the interpretive tack of Diggins's study might not be entirely new—again it is Weber the tragedian, the theorist of the contradictions of modern life, who occupies center stage—his attempt to reevaluate Weber's importance in the light of American circumstances is extremely interesting, and merits careful scrutiny." Ryan also found Diggins's approach refreshing. "The originality of the book lies in its larger, underlying purpose," Ryan wrote. "That purpose is an essentially uncomfortable one. It is to get readers to take Weber's distaste for the brashness, vulgarity and general foolishness of modern democratic societies as seriously as he, John Patrick Diggins, takes it. In that he is rather successful, not in showing that Weber's distaste was right, but in demonstrating that Weber made a case that needs to be answered—and today, surely, more urgently than ever."

The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past, which Diggins edited, is a festschrift in honor of the eminent liberal author/historian. Society correspondent Irving Louis Horowitz declared of the work: "In a truly outstanding set of essays one learns a great deal about Arthur Schlesinger and our times, almost instinctively many of the writers acknowledge the special place of presidentialism in his thinking." Horowitz concluded: "I greet the arrival of this work as an entirely appropriate review of Schlesinger at Eighty."

Always a controversial scholar, Diggins offers a critique of the status of his profession in On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History. The book explores Lincoln's political philosophy and relates its emphasis on self-reliance, selfdetermination, and the sanctity of private property to the basic tenets that inspired the revolutionary generation of 1776. Diggins uses this continuity of consensual liberalism to challenge the prevailing academic trends toward poststructuralist and multiculturalist views. He traces Lincoln's vision both backward and forward as the animating principle of the American experience. A Kirkus Reviews critic characterized On Hallowed Ground as "a bitter, perplexing, and eccentric work," and a Publishers Weekly critic likewise stated: "Polemical and erudite, this book is bound to ruffle a lot of feathers."

Diggins considers the ways in which the ideals upon which the United States was founded underwent a transformation during the first eighty years of the nation's history in his book The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism. The author states that there is a sharp divide between the language and ideals of the Declaration of Independence and that of the U.S. Constitution. While the former document emphasizes the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right, the latter is more concerned with property and how to acquire it. The pragmatism of the framers of the Constitution was at odds with the more religious outlook expressed by Abraham Lincoln many years later. According to D.J.R. Bruckner, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, Diggins's "exploration of the politicial, religious and social ideas that were powerful when the nation was formed, and still dominate it, raises so many intriguing questions about who we are and where we came from that his book has a value far beyond academic argument."

In The Lost Soul of American Politics, he comments that while the term "liberalism" has stood for many things over the years, the underlying meaning has generally involved property and pleasure rather than ideals that appeal to humanity's higher nature. He states that in the present day, there is little real difference between liberalism and conservatism. "Diggins offers a richly textured narrative that is sometimes distractingly luxuriant in literary and historical detail. His judgments are frequently revisionist to the point of seeming eccentric. Yet even while unconvincing they are almost unfailingly provocative," stated Richard Neuhaus in National Review.

Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American History is Diggins's analysis of four thinkers: Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg, and James Burnham. Each of these men originally adhered to leftist thought but broke their ties with communist philosophy during the late 1930s, for a variety of reasons; and each ended up supporting the American senator Eugene McCarthy in his campaign against communism in the 1950s. All were independent thinkers and, at times, contradictory. Stuart D. Hobbs praised Up from Communism in Historian, stating: "Diggins' prose is lucid. The careers of these writers illuminate the passions and dilemmas of American political thought in the twentieth century."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, April, 1998, Gillis J. Harp, review of Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy, p. 485; March, 1995, Michael Kaufmann, review of Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual Development, p. 168.

Christian Science Monitor, January 8, 1985, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism, p. 25.

Commentary, November, 1996, Wilfred M. McClay, review of Max Weber, p. 69.

Commonweal, January 17, 1986, Dick Howard, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 22; February 28, 1986, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 122.

Ethics, October, 1986, Raymond Seidelman, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 298.

Historian, spring, 1995, Stuart D. Hobbs, review of Up from Communism.

Journal of American Studies, August, 1995, David Seed, review of Up from Communism, p. 261.

Journal of the History of Ideas, April, 1987, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 325.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2000, review of On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History, p. 1161.

Library Journal, November 1, 1984, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 2064.

National Review, July 12, 1985, Richard Neuhaus, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 50.

New Republic, June 10, 1985, Michael J. Sandel, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 37; September 2, 1996, Richard Wolin, review of Max Weber, p. 34.

New York Times, April 29, 1992, Herbert Mitgang, review of The Rise and Fall of the American Left.

New York Times Book Review, December 29, 1984, D.J.R. Bruckner, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 12; January 3, 1985, Benjamin R. Barber, review of The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 9; October 9, 1988, Alan Trachtenberg, review of The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941-1960, p. 3; March 8, 1992, Maurice Isserman, review of The Rise and Fall of the American Left; April 10, 1994, William Connolly, review of The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority; August 4, 1996, Alan Ryan, review of Max Weber, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2000, review of On Hallowed Ground, p. 65.

Society, July-August, 1998, Irving Louis Horowitz, review of The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past, p. 88.

ONLINE

Columbia University Web site,http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ (November 7, 2007), biographical information about John P. Diggins.