Innocence and Triumph at the End of the Yellow Brick Road: John Lewis Gaddis in the Land of Oz

• In Event: Sovietology at the End of History: Academics Respond to the Soviet Collapse

Abstract

“There exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates, following up on James Baldwin’s declaration many decades earlier that “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” The Cold War field, which has endured as one of the most conservative in the history discipline since its inception, has certainly been a cog in that apparatus. This paper will offer an assessment of one of its leading figures, so-called “Dean of Cold War Historians” John Lewis Gaddis. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gaddis led a field-wide drive toward what Fredric Jameson in a different context called a “world-reduction,” recovering moralizations and other narrative techniques that had once been used by those American officials who gave birth to the field. The excisions that characterized Gaddis’ world-reduction, the “radical abstraction and simplification” that characterizes Cold War literature after the collapse of the Soviet Union, are never more apparent than in the place of political economy in those narratives. At the very moment of origin in the economic inequalities that characterize our present, Gaddis and colleagues reduced the world to a morality play that continues, thirty years on, to insist on an abiding American innocence.

Author

• Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, U of Hong Kong (China)