seen as part of the same general crisis made people yet more determined to construct a
new peaceful order in their aftermath.
We identify the three great wars with those presidents whom historians in opinion
polls regularly call our greatest--George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D.
But perhaps a different sequence symbolizing the lessons drawn from them
would run from George Washington (1789-97) to Ulysses S. Grant (1867-77) to Dwight
D. Eisenhower (1953-61). Each of these soldier-statesmen was a participant in the two
great wars of their epoch yet were devoted deeply to peace in their latter careers as
president. That sequence suggests that alongside the thirst for war, strong as it has
sometimes been, stands the command that regularly emerges in the aftermath of war: “Let
us have peace.”
Recognition of the “catastrophist” and revolutionary effect of these three great
wars sits uncomfortably alongside the emphasis on meliorism and gradual progress
typical of the liberal sensibility. What distinguishes the liberal tradition is the aspiration
to escape the world of force, to instantiate in the internal governance of states and in their
mutual relations with one another a formula that will push “mere brutal force” to the
sidelines. Realists and Marxists, not liberals, are the usual purveyors of “catastrophist”
theories of historical change.
One of the most famous passages in American politics is
38
For similar speculation, see Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of Wars, New York: Free Press, 1988.
39
Scholarly Presidential “ratings” polls, from Arthur Schlesinger’s in, Life XXV, 1 November 1948,
pp. 65-66, to the Wall Street Journal and the Federalist Society’s, Presidential Leadership: Rating the
Best and the Worst in the White House, New York: Free Press, 2004, have generally upheld
Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt as America’s “greatest.”
40
See Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment, New York: Doubleday,
1984; Brooks D. Simpson, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and
Reconstruction, 1861-1868, Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press, 1991, and David
Fromkin, In the Age of the Americans.
41
See the discussion in Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1980. Michael Lind notes in Next American Nation, New York: Free Press, 1995, p.
10, that a catastrophist interpretation views American history as a sequence of regimes, “each
assembled by the victors in a cataclysmic and violent struggle.”
29
Convention