The provocative title of Harvey Kaye’s Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History?, and Other Questions is what first caught my attention. This collection of essays and book reviews, all written by Kaye, is divided into three sections, History and Memory, Education and Democracy and Intellectuals and Politics. All of the sections are, in their own way political. And that is the works strength and weakness. This collection was put together at the height of the “Culture Wars” when the Radical Right was blaming all of the problems that twelve years of Republican administrations could not solve on academia. They even invented a few problems that, according to the corporately owned media, were a result of leftwing “tenured radicals”.
I found the first section to be the weakest. Even though I agreed with almost everything Kaye wrote his attacks were, at times, to personal to be effective and may have elicited sympathy rather than the contempt the actors under discussion deserved. The last two sections were much stronger.
The national standards for humanities education developed by the National Endowment for the Humanities under the direction of Lynne Cheney but released during the Clinton administration are a frequent topic in these sections. Cheney chose Kaye to take part in the earliest stages of development of the standards and we learn of his early misgivings about the process. The lack of involvement in public discourse by any actual left leaning academics is a frequent theme but over all there is more breast beating and navel gazing than problem solving to be found here on that topic.
Overall the book was worthwhile. It is very informative about the “Culture Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s and enlightening on why the radical right was so successful. They were unopposed. ( )