Academic discourse in the humanities and social sciences is everywhere much the same: mostly it is the result, as Pierre Bourdieu has noted, of compromises between those who have an interest in saying something and those who would censor it. The pursuit of knowledge as an organized social system functions East and West in much the same way. The brotherhood of those already initiated first decides on a ritualized set of criteria and next on a fundamental scale of values. The result is the awarding of "reputation," on the basis of which individuals are then either received into the ranks of the learned or rejected. The discovery of truth is a peculiar and almost accidental by-product of this usual sort of academic productivity. And actually proclaiming that discovery is regularly rewarded with the loss of reputation.

Just as irritating to the academic profession as the search for truth is the insistence of a few on addressing the people directly. The intended audience of academic writing is not the public, but rather the community of academics. To be sure, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that there is some sort of rationalization process at work here. For most academic authors -- especially the historians--dream secretly of just once having a best-seller and getting rich, or at least rising above the commonplace to a modest degree of fame. In most cases, this dream shatters on the restrictions that envelop the academic world, especially that which requires a specific point of view to be given adequate expression.

From the standpoint of a system's theoretical structure, both the search for truth and the attempt to give expression to that search in clear, everyday language are seen as disruptions of the academic operation. The coded verdict for the former is "too one-sided" and for the latter "too popular." However, the system is capable of compromise: those who are determined to be "one-sided" can make up for it by applying obfuscation--those, on the other hand, who wish to be perfectly clear and concise are permitted to do that, so long, that is, as they pay careful attention to the propriety of what it is they have to say. Explicit sanctions are only pronounced against those who want to do both at the same time: to write clearly and speak the truth.

Now and then someone succeeds in establishing a scholarly reputation even while dedicated both to the search for truth and its clear expression. One such rare person was the American historian William Appleman Williams, who died recently at age 68.

Williams is known not only in the U.S., but also throughout the world as the father of the "revisionist school" of American diplomatic history. This was the new direction, taking shape in the sixties, that questioned the orthodox portrayal of the origins of the Cold War--thereby holding up a mirror in which to reflect a critical image of the self-righteous liberalism of the times. Diplomatic history in the socialist states also made good use of the revisionists, for the most part as a quarry in which to mine for evidence of "progressive, bourgeois" accomplishments, these to be used to strengthen Marxist-Leninist interpretations.

But the significance of Williams for the political culture of the United States is much, much greater and more subtly rich than that which derives from his having been a courageous and early critic of American foreign policy. For he was soon to be followed by others, whose position was then considerably strengthened by the growing opposition to the Vietnam war. These were to bring into circulation a series of iconoclastic analysis of American global strategy. Thus Williams's work has been brought to bear directly on the struggle to achieve national self-understanding, with obvious results for a definition of the American role in the modern world.

This struggle began with the Progressives. For Charles Beard, the great chronicler of The Rise of American Civilization, America was unique in the world because of its democratic traditions. These Beard saw founded in the agricultural resources of this continent and the use made of them by its English settlers. Thus, according to Beard, was created the perfect economic basis for the unfolding of a democratic political life. But this democracy was increasingly threatened--beginning in the second half of the 19th century--by the growth of heavy industry. Nevertheless, Beard maintained, the democratic traditions would be strong enough to prevent the misuse of economic power. The means to that end he saw in a strong central government, which could defend what might be called the public democratic interest against the anti-social individualism of the capitalists.

In order both to protect this exceptional American democracy and to be able to realize the goal of a democratically centralized and regulated capitalism, committed to full employment -- the "Open Door at home" --it was necessary, argued Beard, to preserve the isolation of America from the undemocratic societies of Europe. For him, just by definition, there was no such thing as an American diplomatic history. Diplomatic history was by its very nature thoroughly un-American. And, consistently for Beard, the entrance of the U.S. into the Second World War--already accomplished for practical purposes in 1940--was a betrayal by Roosevelt of America's democratic principles. All this was to be seen as the dark work of Old World capitalists, who would draw the New World into the machinations of Europe and in this way remove the differences between the two.

This conception of world and self within an isolationist framework had--and not only because of the fame and prestige of Charles Beard--a remarkable influence on the educated public. The result was that it made more difficult the acceptance of Roosevelt's preparations for war. It was essentially the Protestant theologian and political writer Reinhold Niebuhr who provided a congenial counter-paradigm--one that moved dialectically beyond Beard's thesis, keeping its idealism but not the isolationist derivatives.