The word “revisionism” in the academic world most often refers to cold war revisionism, the idea that the West was mainly or exclusively to blame for the cold war because of its refusal to deal fairly with the Soviet Union after World War II. The object of this revisionism was to overturn the earlier scholarly consensus that the cold war arose as a result of the Western nations bracing themselves against a tide of communist aggression.
If scholarly debates were decided by popular vote in the academy, cold war revisionism would have to be rated a success. Large numbers of faculty members in a variety of disciplines adopted what Jeane Kirkpatrick famously called in her keynote speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention “the blame America first” doctrine. It didn’t seem to matter a great deal to the proponents of
Get access to this article, plus the entire archive, by subscribing.