"Government they understood as a necessity, but as a product of human intentions...When Americans thought of rights or the consent of the governed, therefore, they had in mind the actualities of their own experience," the Handlins write.
Such an interpretation of the shaping of the American ideology is not new. Indeed, most every high school sophomore has learned a simpler, not-so-well documented version of it.
What the Handlins' approach lacks is a look at the material basis of the "actualities" of colonial experience. There is little sense of social structure or social relations except as conveyed by ocassional anecdotes. If we learn about family, church and enterprise in the book, we learn about them in a haphazard way, in sharp contrast to the way, for example, Mary Ryan illuminates social and ideological change in her book Cradle of the Middle Class. The social structure was the framework in which the colonists developed their new society, and without fully reveling in it, the Handlins miss the mark.
THE HANDLINS' BOOK offers flashes of insight and occasionally masterful prose. As a pure, academic history book, however, it has major faults. At times the writing is amateurish. For example, some passages are so breathy and frothily silly that it is difficult to believe they were written by an historian:
Enters a new word--EXPLORE, find out, uncover what had been hidden. The languages receive it; people speak and write it in awareness that out there in space promises lie concealed; and in that consciousness the thought glimmers of alternatives to the narrow, known, closed world. In choice, hope lies.
His reasoning convinced the jury, which returned an acquittal.
What a victory that was!
Or was it?
Well, in fact, not really.
But, in truth, yes indeed.
This is the Handlins' vision of change in social consciousness? Such stuff is poor historical analysis. And the book is littered throughout with such marshmallows of historiography.
Liberty and Power seems to be torn by two impulses. On the one hand, Oscar Handlin, who retired last year, may have felt compelled to write it as the definitive version of his view of the main themes in American history. But on the other hand, as the rather overblown subtitle suggests, this book may have been meant for the bookshelves of Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. As the latter, it may succeed. But as the former, it would never have won Handlin tenure.