- What if Alperovitz is right --
then what? What would be the larger implications? Would this make the
United States more inhumane in its approach to war and/or diplomacy than
other 20th Century great powers have been? If so, what would be the basis
for such a judgment? If not, then what's the point?
[Comment?]
- Are there questions in history that --
for whatever reason -- should neither be asked nor answered? Bruce Cumings,
for example, has insisted that "who started the Korean War?" is such a
question; and the issue recently surfaced in a different way -- "should the
question be answered?" -- in a debate between Alan Sokal and the editors of
SOCIAL TEXT regarding Sokal's spoof on post-modernism (see the November
11th NEW YORKER). Should we just stay away from certain controversies, and
if so how do we know which ones?
[Comment?]
- How do we know that future generations
are going to share our assessment of what's important in history? Tony
Smith, for example, has argued that in the long run historians will
consider the democratizations of Germany and Japan, not anything that
happened in Soviet-American relations, as the most important events of the
second half of the 20th century. Are there tricks we can use to try to
anticipate 21st century revisionists, or do we just have to fly blind?
[Comment?]
- Whatever happened to the old C.
Wright Mills argument that a narrow elite runs American foreign policy?
Doesn't corporatism broaden out responsibility to the point that one can't
continue to claim elitism is a problem?
[Comment?]
- Whatever happened to the old Kennan-
Lippmann- Morgenthau argument that democracies weren't equipped to survive
in a cold, cruel, and realist world? How does this look now in the light of
the end of the Cold War?
[Comment?]
- If, as the new sources are strongly
suggesting, ideology really was important in shaping the behavior of
Marxist-Leninist states; and if, as the Cold War's outcome equally strongly
suggests, Marxism-Leninism was an egregiously flawed method of interpreting
reality; then doesn't this make Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao romantics
rather than realists?
[Comment?]
- Norman Naimark's discussion of the
rape issue in his new book, THE RUSSIANS IN GERMANY, provides a wholly
convincing argument for the centrality of gender in shaping geopolitics.
Are there other such instances?
[Comment?]
- The current issue of DIPLOMATIC
HISTORY features a series of articles on African-Americans and U. S.
foreign relations. To what extent do these make the case for giving greater
attention to issues of race in writing diplomatic history?
[Comment?]
- A recent issue of ECONOMIST, in
reviewing Sam Huntington's new book, had an excellent discussion of the
methodological difficulties involved in using "culture" as an analytical
framework. Implications, if any, for our field?
[Comment?]
- How, indeed, does one balance the
demands of openness as against those of civility in a discussion forum like
this one? Does an editor or moderator simply run whatever comes in without
regard to length, coherence, or flaming? If not, what should the rules be?
[Comment?]
--John Gaddis
