Intellectual historian

John P. Diggins, an intellectual historian who brought a provocative, revisionist approach to the history of the American left and right, and to figures as varied as Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 73 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was complications of colon cancer, said his companion, Elizabeth Harlan.

Mr. Diggins, who taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, roamed widely as he traced the intellectual contours of American political thought from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the present day. His interest in the twists and turns of ideology, and the evolution of ideas, led him to explore pivotal thinkers all along the political spectrum whose preoccupations and struggles led him to the deeper questions of American identity and self-definition.

John P. Diggins in 1992.

He was fascinated, for example, by a fault line in American thought: the great divide that he perceived between the Declaration of Independence, whose language of self-fulfillment presupposed the golden rule of civic virtue, and the Constitution, whose careful attention to property rights and the pursuit of gain reflected the harsher American value of “power, struggle and self-assertion,” as he put it in his book on Lincoln, “On Hallowed Ground” (2000).

It was Lincoln’s mission, he wrote, and a continuing challenge for Americans today, to revalidate the language of the declaration.

“He was the most philosophical-minded of the American historians,” said the political historian Paul Berman, a writer in residence at New York University. “He was always trying to get at the big questions, about heroism, virtue and the conflict between utopian aspirations and the disappointments of life. His work was a kind of ongoing meditation.”

John Patrick Diggins was born in San Francisco, where his father, an Irish immigrant, was a gardener for the city. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957, he earned a master’s degree at San Francisco State College (now University) and a doctorate at the University of Southern California in 1964.

He taught intellectual history at San Francisco State College and the University of California, Irvine, before accepting a post at the Graduate Center in 1990.

After writing “Mussolini and Fascism” (1972), a study of that leader’s surprising popularity in the United States before World War II, Mr. Diggins established his reputation as a historian of ideas with “The American Left in the Twentieth Century” (1973) and “Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American History” (1975).

In his study of the left Mr. Diggins proposed a taxonomy of lefts — the Lyrical Left of the 1920s and early ’60s, the Old Left of the Depression, the New Left of the late ’60s and the post-’60s Academic Left — and identified some characteristics linking these distinctive movements.

They drew philosophical sustenance from purely American roots, for one thing, and exhibited a peculiarly American blend of “radical innocence” and “wounded idealism,” he wrote. Revised and updated, the book was republished in 1992 with the title “The Rise and Fall of the American Left.”

“Up From Communism,” by contrast, described the intellectual journey of four doctrinaire leftists — Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg and James Burnham — who shook off their original faith and embraced conservatism. Mr. Diggins, resisting the facile explanations often assigned to these figures by both left- and right-wing writers, restored complexity and nuance to their stories.

The tension between liberal ideals, pragmatism and authority ran like a leitmotif through books like “The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest and the Foundation of Liberalism” (1984), “The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority” (1994) and “Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy” (2007).

A practiced contrarian, he outdid himself in “Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History” (2007). After poring over Reagan’s writings, he discovered, in a figure he had treated dismissively, a Reagan pulsating with virtues that could only be called liberal. He was, in this version, an Emersonian at heart.

Mr. Diggins’s three marriages ended in divorce. Besides his companion, his survivors include a son, Sean, of San Francisco; a daughter, Nicole Diggins Locher of Lexington, Mass.; his sisters, Rose Parodi of Orinda, Calif., and Anne Keenan of Potomac, Md.; and two grandchildren.

At his death he had nearly completed a book on the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Politically elusive, Mr. Diggins described his own position as lying “to the right of the Left and to the left of the Right.” He nourished a sneaking fondness for the Lyrical Left but declared Ronald Reagan to be “one of the two or three truly great presidents in history.”

“His great virtue was not to occupy a place on the political spectrum,” Mr. Berman said. “He occupied a different kind of space. Readers sometimes found this perplexing, but after a deeper reading it became clear that this was what gave him his unique value.”

January 30, 2009
John P. Diggins, 73, Historian, Dies
By WILLIAM GRIMES