The New Left & the Origins of the Cold War

by Robert James Maddox

Book Overview

As more and more people are questioning the assumptions of present U.S. foreign policy they are reexamining the roots of these policies in the diplomacy of the Cold War. This scrutiny has made the origins of the Cold War the most controversial issue in American diplomatic history. Now a complete new dimension has been added to the debate by the charges leveled by Robert James Maddox in The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War . How did the Cold War begin? Who or what was responsible? Could it have been avoided? Was it a temporary condition created by a combination of individual personalities and historical factors, or did it represent the clash of fundamentally irreconcilable political systems? The orthodox explanation of the Cold War is that it was "the brave and essential response of free men to Communist aggression." A number of scholars more or less identified with the New Left have challenged the conventional explanation by asserting that the U.S. bears the major responsibility for its onset. One group of revisionists sees this as the result of a failure of statesmanship on the part of Truman and the advisors around him, the other that the Cold War was the inevitable result of the American system as it developed over the years. Their conclusions have often been challenged in matters of interpretation. Robert Maddox, however, believes that an examination of the manner in which new interpretations are reached should precede dialogues over the ideas themselves. Consequently he has examined seven of the most prominent New Left works: The Tragedy of American Diplomacy by William Appleman Williams; The Cold War and Its Origins by D. F. Fleming; Atomic Diplomacy by Gar Alperovitz; The Free World Colossus by David Horowitz; The Politics of War by Gabriel Kolko; Yalta by Diane Shaver Clemens; and Architects of Illusion by Lloyd C. Gardner. After detailed comparisons of the evidence they present with the sources from which it was taken, he concludes that these books are based on pervasive misuse of the source materials and fail to measure up to the most elementary standards of good scholarship. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691010692
• ISBN13: 9780691010694
• Release Date: June 1974
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.

Customer Reviews

I Cannot Believe I am the first to Review this Book!

I Cannot Believe I am the first to Review this Book! This is a seminal book about the academic historians who framed the debate for the Cold War during the period of cultural, political, and social unrest beginning in the late 1950s through the 1960s. The book is a fascinating story about a young professor of history who discovers that the so-called "new left" historians, particularly of the Cold War, had created a revisionist version of reality that was grounded, mostly, in ideology and not in the evidence. He proceeded to do what very few scholars do, look at the citations (if they existed, in one book there were no citations). He then went to the sources to examine, in an exercise of careful textual criticism, the truth claims. What he found shocked him. Quotations were cited out of context. Additionally, the use of ellipses (...) were inserted into key passages to change the entire meanings of things. Worse, outright hypotheses were presented as evidentiary, substantiated theses. He published his findings in 1973 as this book. He argued, with considerable skill and evidence, that the New Left interpretation--that the Cold War was an invention of paranoid capitalist Americans that need not have happened--was in the realm of supposition only, with almost no facts in the historical record to support it. That professor, Robert James Maddox, was instantly propelled into the academic spotlight, negatively, since he had dared to challenge the new orthodoxy. Almost single-handedly he had turned the word 'revisionist' into a bad word with a pejorative meaning. Time has been kind to Bob Maddox's thesis, especially the opening of the former Soviet Archives and other American classified sources after the end of the Cold War (e.g. Venona Project). It seems clear, now, that the real "architects of illusion" were the new left historians themselves. Because textbooks like Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States reside firmly within this tradition (the new left), and because for most secondary and undergraduate syllabi these are still the most common interpretations, this book remains essential reading for those who want to understand why a fringe interpretation became the common orthodoxy for the Cold War. John T. Kuehn, Ph.D., Fort Leavenworth, KS.