Making sure we don't learn the lessons of history

[Update: My wife Meliah helpfully re-wrote this content in a more compelling way here. If you want the boring version, keep reading.]

In a previous post, I wrote about a once popular branch of history that was focused on historical analysis and comparative civilization study, and how the entire field was snuffed out in the 1960s.  I will here refer to this snuffing out as "the history coup,"  and I will try to provide more description of how it happened. It turns out to be a bigger deal than I thought.

A main motivator of comparative civilization studies was the desire to contextualize our own society, including gaining a better understanding of common forces acting on civilizations, and how those might illuminate the potential future and fate of the West.  For example, this line of inquiry asked how civilizations in general start, grow, decline, and fall; and then the scholar asked how the West is similar and different from other civilizations, how the West become what it is now, and what forces might cause it to lose momentum and start to decay. Naturally, this sort of analysis led to the conclusion that Christianity and capitalism contributed to the relatively advanced state of human rights, pro-social morality, law, science, technology, and art in the West. I say "naturally" because the uniqueness of the West became self-evident through a comparative civilizations analysis, and either Christianity and capitalism contributed to the West's development or were entirely coincidental to it.  The latter seems unlikely. 

After the history coup, from the late 1960s, comparative civilization studies and pro-Christian or pro-Western historical analysis essentially disappeared in academia except on the fringes, and is nowhere to be found in public education (at least in my experience). And even beyond that, the very way academics conceived of history was fundamentally changed to preclude almost any sort of comparative analysis at all.  As I read more about it, I am more and more astounded at what a complete and amazing victory this was. 

As I did some research on the issue, it became clear that the history coup came about through a philosophical movement called Critical Theory that had its origins in the 1930s and gained critical mass in academia around the 1960s. This movement has, if anything, gained in relevance since the 1960s in various forms, including the influential and controversial “Critical Race Theory” at the heart of the “anti-racist” phenomenon today. (Just to be clear, the term “anti-racism” as used today refers to a specific concept, and is not to be confused with general opposition to racism). Critical theory, or at least certain aspects of it, were also incorporated into what we now refer to as "postmodernism."

Honestly, I did not start out with the idea to write on current political controversies, but I was very surprised to see the connections that came up as I did more and more reading into the history question. I will do my best in this blog post to avoid sensational political controversies by citing from the primary sources themselves, from the point of view of the proponents of Critical Theory and its philosophical foundation, and by focusing on what let to what I have termed the “history coup” of the 1960s. I will try to make the case that Critical Theory and its proponents deliberately set pro-Christian and pro-capitalist historical analysis in their sights starting in the 1930s and worked gradually to influence academia, government and culture. In the 1960s, having gained sufficient influence in academia (though not in society more broadly), scholars influenced by Critical Theory acted swiftly and concertedly to displace and reject pro-Christian and pro-capitalist modes of thought. This rejection was primarily enacted by force of power and influence rather than by force of persuasion and reason.

As I see it, it’s important to first understand the roots of Critical Theory. The mode of reasoning it employs is peculiar and confusing to outsiders. Understanding its origins helps to make its nature more understandable. The philosophical trail leads back through Marxism and beyond to the earliest critiques of modernity, including Kant, but the key taking-off point is Hegel. Any early and even more recent work in Critical Theory is steeped in Hegel. Hegel proposed the “dialectical” critique of society, which Marxists love. The core idea of the “dialectic” is to compare the ideal society (the abstract) with some aspect of the real or current society, and by identifying the contradictions (negation) come to a better understanding (concrete) of the question. Hegel took this “abstract-negation-concrete” formula (also seen as “thesis - antithesis - synthesis”) as a system of reasoning to replace formal logic. I am not clear why he thought this made sense, other than his belief that philosophy was or should be a hard science like math or physics. Because Hegel is notoriously difficult to understand, I am going to cite Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy," which gives the best explanation I have seen for the meaning of Hegel's dialectic. 

A few examples of Hegel’s dialectic method may serve to make it more intelligible. He begins the argument of his logic by the assumption that “the Absolute is Pure Being”; we assume that it just is, without assigning any qualities to it. But pure being without any qualities is nothing; therefore we are led to the antithesis: “The Absolute is Nothing.” From this thesis and antithesis we pass on to the synthesis: The union of Being and Not–Being is Becoming, and so we say: “The Absolute is Becoming.” This also, of course, won’t do, because there has to be something that becomes. In this way our views of Reality develop by the continue correction of previous errors, all of which arose from undue abstraction, by taking something finite or limited as if it could be the whole. “The limitations of the finite do not come merely from without; its own nature is the cause of its abrogation, and by its own act it passes into its counterpart.”
The process, according to Hegel, is essential to the understanding of the result. Each later stage of the dialectic contains all the earlier stages, as it were in solution; none of them is wholly superseded, but is given its proper place as a moment in the Whole. It is therefore impossible to reach the truth except by going through all the steps of the dialectic.

This new form of holistic reasoning focused on a search for social action that would give rise to an ideal society. In turn, the Young Hegelians (one of several schools of interpretation of Hegel) saw their contemporary culture (generally 1820s-1840s Prussia) as far from the ideal, and they began to write critiques of the modern west. Viewing Christianity as the foundation of the modern state, it became their first and primary target. Feuerbach wrote in The Essence of Christianity that God was just an imaginary reflection of man. Strauss gave the gospels a non-supernatural, materialist explanation in his Life of Jesus. Marx was influenced by the humanism of Feuerbach and rational materialism of Strauss, but had his own view, summed up in his famous quip that religion was the "opiate of the masses." Marx was an atheist like the other Young Hegelians, but his view was more nuanced. Marx believed that Christianity served the purpose of consoling the miserable masses enslaved by capitalism. Marx believed that only in a post-capitalist ideal society could religion be erased for good, and that naturally in such a society Christianity would melt away as it would no longer be needed. For Marxists, the primary target ends up being capitalism, but an attack on capitalism is a veiled and implied attack on Christianity, as the two go hand in hand.

Marx was focused on revolutionary overthrow of the established order, including capitalism and Christianity. The functional piece of Marxist theory is called Historical Materialism. Like the later comparative civilizations scholarship, Marxist Historical Materialism was also a "scientific” analytical approach to history, drawing generalizations from history of other societies and applying the derived analytical tools to our own society in order to make hypotheses for the future. The Historical Materialism analysis looked only at material conditions, ignoring ideals and values, in contrast to the comparative civilizations approach. Historical Materialism also took for granted that there is no God or objective morality and treated religions as oppressors (the ultimate evil in the Marxist value system). For Marx, historical analysis suggested that a socialist revolution is inevitable, and that the industrial revolution was bringing about the conditions for revolution. Marxists believed a Socialist revolution would overthrow the repressive chains of capitalism and bring about a more just society. 

Unfortunately for the Marxists, predictions made by Theoretical Marxism about the West and Europe after the industrial revolution - ever expanding misery of the working class leading to mass uprisings and the end of capitalism - did not come to pass.  Instead, the hard conditions of factory labor were softened, and the "managerial revolution" resulted in a growing middle class. All levels of society began to experience greater wealth and improved living conditions than ever before. On top of that, the places where Marxist revolutions did occur very quickly became human rights catastrophes (Lenin/Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Castro in Cuba, etc.), and certainly not equitable or admirable utopias. After these theoretical and practical failures, Marxism as a popular revolutionary movement became a hard sell in Western Europe and the US, though it retained a niche following especially among academics. 

About the inadequacies of Theoretical Marxism, Theodore W. Adorno observed:

In terms of living-standards and consciousness, class differences have become on the whole far less visible in the Western states in question than in the decades during and after the industrial revolution. The prognoses of class-theory such as immiseration and economic crisis have not been so drastically realized, as one must understand them, if they are not to be completely robbed of their content; one can speak of relative immiseration only in a comic sense. Even if Marx’s by no means one-sided law of sinking profit-rate has not been borne out on a system-immanent level, one must concede that capitalism has discovered resources within itself, which have permitted the postponing of economic collapse ad Kalendas Graecus - resources which include the immense increase of the technical potential of society and therein also the consumer goods available to the members of the highly industrialized countries. At the same time the relations of production have shown themselves to be, in view of such technological developments, far more elastic than Marx had suspected.

Around this time (1920s to 1960s) the comparative civilizations scholars like Toynbee gained a lot of influence with their own analysis which was antithetical to Marxist philosophy in that Christianity and capitalism are said to play an important positive role in the historical development of the West. 

For their goal of overturning the capitalist system and Christianity in the West to stay relevant (and for some reason this did remain the goal despite the previous atrocities that occurred when capitalism and Christianity were overthrown elsewhere), 20th century Western Marxists needed to pivot away from the now tarnished Theoretical Marxist and Communist frameworks to something new. The most influential "neo-Marxist" movement is known as the Frankfurt School, originating in the 1930s at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Key influences to this movement were essays by Gyorgy Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci. Lukacs published a series of essays in History and Class Consciousness (1923), arguing that Marxists could downplay the Historical Materialism and Marxist economic analysis and change the focus from the pragmatic to the philosophical Hegelian roots of Marxism. Gramsci, in essays from the Prison Notebooks (1929-1935) argues that social change can be achieved through "cultural hegemony," regardless of the policies of the political and military elite. Key arbiters of culture for Gramsci include services formerly mediated by the church including "religious ideology, that is the philosophy and science of the age, together with schools, education, morality, justice, charity, good works, etc.," as well as secular positions such as scholars, artists, journalists, bureaucrats, and administrators. He has a series of essays devoted to education, stating that the goal is "to produce a new stratum of intellectuals, including those capable of the highest degree of specialisation," particularly from the working classes (which were the focus of traditional Marxism).

Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno were two early thought leaders of the Frankfurt School. Though committed to the Marxist goal of overthrowing capitalism and Christianity, but they took the hint from Lukacs to abandon Historical Marxism and frame their work in terms of dialectical Hegelian reasoning. They took the hint from Gramsci to make cultural hegemony the goal rather than work through overt political action. The discredited Marxist theories on historical interpretation and revolutionary Socialism were radically changed by the Frankfurt School. In effect, the new theory was no theory at all, and was called by Horkheimer "Critical Theory." 

According to Horkheimer's 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory, "Critical" refers to "the dialectical critique of political economy" - in other words criticism of the modern capitalist system. From the same essay, in which Horkheimer lays the groundwork for Critical Theory, he rejects the idea of evaluating social structures against any sort of value system:

Although it [Critical Theory] itself emerges from the social structure, its purpose is not, either in its conscious intention or in its objective significance, the better functioning of any ele­ment in the structure. On the contrary, it is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood in the present order, and re­fuses to take them as nonscientific presuppositions about which one can do nothing.

In contrast to Traditional Marxism, Horkheimer's Critical Theory flatly rejects any analytical study of history or historical narrative, reducing history to disconnected names, dates, and events:

Previous history thus cannot really be understood; only the individuals and specific groups in it are intelligible

While Marxism promoted a positive replacement of capitalism in communism, Critical Theory is not striving for any specific future state, and elaborates on no positive vision beyond the idea of gaining influence around its negative critique of Capitalism. There is also a prophetic hint here that the expected changes to be brought about by Critical Theory would be sudden and would occur only once a critical mass of elite disciples is in place (emphasis mine):

Traditional theory may take a number of things for granted: its positive role in a functioning society, an admittedly indirect and obscure relation to the satisfaction of general needs, and participation in the self-renewing life process. But all these exigencies about which science need not trouble itself because their fulfillment is rewarded and confirmed by the social position of the scientist, are called into question in critical thought. The goal at which the latter aims, namely the rational state of society, is forced upon him by present distress. The theory which projects such a solution to the distress does not labor in the service of an existing reality but only gives voice to the mystery of that reality. However cogently absurdities and errors may be uncovered at any given moment, however much every error may be shown to be taking its revenge, yet the overall tendency of the critical theoretical undertaking receives no sanction from so-called healthy human understanding; it has no custom on its side, even when it promises success. Theories, on the contrary, which are confirmed or disproved in the building of machines, military organizations, even successful motion pictures, look to a clearly distinguishable consumer group, even when like theoretical physics they are pursued independently of any application or consist only in a joyous and virtuous playing with mathematical symbols; society proves its humaneness by re­warding such activity.

But there are no such examples of the form consumption will take in that future with which critical thinking is concerned.  ... 

Above all, however, critical theory has no material accomplishments to show for itself. The change which it seeks to bring about is not effected gradually, so that success even if slow might be steady. The growth in numbers of more or less clear-minded disciples, the influence of some among them on govern­ments, the power position of parties which have a positive atti­tude towards this theory or at least do not outlaw it—all these are among the vicissitudes encountered in the struggle for a higher stage of man's life in community and are not found at the beginnings of the struggle. 

These three elements combine to form the basis of the new neo-Marxist "Critical Theory" argument against the mostly pro-Christian, pro-capitalist field of comparative civilizations: 1) no objective value system for making comparative judgements, 2) illegitimacy of any sweeping historical narratives, 3) no positive vision of its own to put forward. In essence Critical Theorists don't just reject the comparative civilizations analysis, they now profess to reject ALL historical/social judgement, comparison, analysis, and/or future predictions of any kind. By basing their dialogues on the Hegelian dialectic, Critical Theory doesn't even hold itself accountable to logic in the traditional sense. While Marxism could be assailed for the failures of historical materialism and Communism, Critical Theory is a cynical improvement because it proposes no positive vision to be subjected to criticism.

A further point here is that Critical Theorists right from the start knew they didn't have a convincing argument for how to replace capitalism or how to explain the capitalist West’s rise to middle class prosperity, but they knew that they could gain influence among cultural elites in the long game (a la Gramsci) and win without a solution or explanation. That's a little bit chilling for me, especially because they were right. The new perspective also explains why Adorno would not support Marxist student protests in 1968. His Critical Theory is not, like traditional Marxism, dependent on popular uprisings against authority to implement change from the ground up. Rather, Critical Theory counted on quietly placing its disciples into positions of authority in universities, governments, and cultural institutions until there is sufficient support to implement change from the top down. Until such support is in place, chaotic demonstrations attract negative attention and are counterproductive. (As a side note, the encouragement of chaotic demonstrations by supporters of Critical Theory in the last year or so may indicate their belief that they now have cultural hegemony and won't be hurt by coming out from the shadows.)

How could this cynical approach have gained enough adherents to take over academia in the 1960s and eventually spread into culture more generally? This essay gives some description, but it mostly boils down to this:

Many of the students taught by the School became teachers and professors themselves in the US and Europe. Who, in turn, taught another generation of teachers and professors. And so on.

That sounds kind of anti-climactic. So what was it that would make this approach attractive and spread? I have several not mutually-exclusive thoughts on this. These are mostly my ideas but may reflect thoughts I have picked up along the way in my reading.

• There was a nucleus of very dedicated Marxists in academia in the late 1930s, waiting for the right approach to bring about the revolution. And sometimes it is more important to have a smaller number of religiously dedicated supporters than to have a larger number of half-hearted supporters, especially when it comes to elite support and funding early on.
• Christianity has been on the retreat for a long period of time even before the 20th century, especially in academia. But humanity craves a greater vision to strive for. Critical Theory gives atheist scholars and cultural elites a narrative, ethical system (oppressors vs oppressed), and a "greater good" to work toward (activism, cultural hegemony and revolution) without any of the personal demands and constraints of religion.
• Timing. Modernity had seemed like the solution to poverty, had created strong institutions and stable governments, and had led to technological improvements that every day seemed to bring progress toward stability, peace, and progress.  However, the World Wars disillusioned many in the West. It became clear that the advances of Modernity brought with it dangers and challenges as well. This opened the door for intellectuals to look for an alternative.
• There are real critiques to be made. No one would deny that materialist consumer capitalism has a lot of ugly aspects and consequences.
• Critical Theory is strategically brilliant. It shields itself from criticism by having no positive vision but just pure critique. It is also hard for outsiders to understand the jargon, so it flew under the radar for a long time with most outsiders having little or no understanding of its goals or methods, which made it hard to attack other than as a curiosity. For devoted insiders, Critical Theory is also immune to rational scrutiny because of how it preaches Hegelian reasoning.
• Psychology.  As we now know clearly from social media today, negativity can just feel cathartic, and is a great tool for dividing "us" from "them" and gaining followers if the goal is not ultimately to come to a common understanding with the outgroup.
• Critical Theory first found a home in the universities which have long leaned more to the left than society at large, then spread to education. Once these arenas are won, the rest was just a matter of time through indoctrination of young minds. From there other institutions fell in line.

To get back to my question of analytical history / universal history theories including Toynbee and Quigley, it is clear from Horkheimer that attacking this type of theory was a central point of Critical Theory right from the start. The first volume of Toynbee’s Study in History came out in 1934, and the first published mention of Critical Theory by Horkheimer was in 1937 and directly attacked the concept of understanding history over long time spans or between cultures. Adorno further discussed the relationship between Critical Theory and universal history in his influential Negative Dialectics (1966). Now, before I get to the quote in question, I want to go on a tangent to say that most of this book is written in such an esoteric style that it is almost impossible to draw any meaning from it whatsoever. I will give you this lovely quote from the Translator’s Note of the 1973 English translation by E. B. Ashton to start the book:

This book—to begin with an admission—made me violate what I consider the Number One rule for translators of philosophy: never to start translating until you think you know what the author means by every sentence, indeed by every word. … In the early stages of translation I wondered now and then what one sentence might have to do with the preceding one and that with the one before. But other readers told of the same experience, and Adorno’s own Preface promised that what seemed baffling at first would be clarified later. Besides, I felt, there was no mistranslating his text. His sentences were clear. The words (his own, that is; his discussions of other men’s words are a different matter) were unequivocal. Their English equivalents were beyond doubt. I plodded on, oblivious of my Number One rule. But the enigmas piled up. I found myself translating entire pages without seeing how they led from the start of an argument to the conclusion.

Here is a sample under the heading "Noncontradictoriness not to be hypostatized" that I think is an important part of his argument, but it is hard to tell for sure:

The only way out of the dialectical context of immanence is by that context itself. Dialectics is critical reflection upon that context. It reflects its own motion; if it did not, Kant’s legal claim against Hegel would never expire. Such dialectics is negative. Its idea names the difference from Hegel. In Hegel there was coincidence of identity and positivity; the inclusion of all nonidentical and objective things in a subjectivity expanded and exalted into an absolute spirit was to effect the reconcilement. On the other hand, the force of the entirety that works in every single definition is not simply its negation; that force itself is the negative, the untrue. The philosophy of the absolute and total subject is a particular one. The inherent reversibility of the identity thesis counteracts the principles of its spirit. If entity can be totally derived from that spirit, the spirit is doomed to resemble the mere entity it means to contradict; otherwise, spirit and entity would not go together. It is precisely the insatiable identity principle that perpetuates antagonism by suppressing contradiction.

From what I gather, Adorno's concept of “negative dialectics” refers to a focus on the negative of something without a positive concept in opposition - as in, Critical Theory solely focused on attacking capitalism without providing a counter-argument. Adorno appears to be in favor. In the midst of 400 pages of obfuscating language in Negative Dialectics, Adorno becomes very lucid when talking about universal history, the method of the comparative civilizations school of thought (emphasis mine):

Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it. Not to be denied for that reason, however, is the unity that cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history-the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men's inner nature.

In a 1964 lecture on the topic, Adorno clarifies (emphasis in original):

The task of a dialectical philosophy of history, then, is to keep both these conceptions in mind—that of discontinuity and that of universal history. This means that we should not think in alternatives: we should not say history is continuity or history is discontinuity. We must say instead that history is highly continuous in discontinuity, in what I once referred to as the permanence of catastrophe. ...

Thus the task is both to construct and to deny universal history or, to use yet another Hegelian term, one used to refer to public opinion in the Philosophy of Right, universal history is to be respected as well as despised. The domination of nature—which incidentally is mentioned in one of Benjamin’s theses—welds the discontinuous, hopelessly splintered elements and phases of history together into a unity while at the same time its own pressure senselessly tears them asunder once more.

This becomes the Critical Theory answer to universal history. They stress the "discontinuity" of history - each society and time period exists in its own framework, and any comparison across cultures or analysis across time periods is illegitimate. The only continuous, at least for Adorno, is in nature and man's subjugation of nature. Thus, academic history becomes a field for specialists, with no room for generalists or comparative analysis.

When Adorno speaks of the need to "deny" universal history, when he expressly does not mean is that the work of universal history proponents should be logically examined and disproven. As far as I can tell, Adorno never specifically cites Toynbee, the most prominent contemporary scholar in the field of civilizational studies. Presumably "deny" means to use the weight of institutional authority to displace the "despised" ideas from the mainstream.

Another scholar who took up the charge to "construe and deny" universal history was historian Michael Focault, often considered a key thought leader in Postmodernism. His influential book The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) takes aim directly at traditional historical analysis of the Toynbee or Quigley style (without mentioning any historian specifically or addressing their ideas, as is apparently the norm in Critical Theory). The opening paragraph in the introduction makes his target clear:

For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events. The tools that enable historians to carry out this work of analysis are partly inherited and partly of their own making: models of economic growth, quantitative analysis of market movements, accounts of demographic expansion and contraction, the study of climate and its long-term changes, the fixing of sociological constants, the description of technological adjustments and of their spread and continuity. These tools have enabled workers in the historical field to distinguish various sedimentary strata...

Focault's approach to "construe and deny" universal history is particularly audacious.  He proposes that not only is history discontinuous and inscrutable (in agreement with Adorno and Horkheimer), but that knowledge itself is discontinuous. Focault proposes an "archeology" model of knowledge. Just as archology focuses on unearthing monuments which are each individual and discontinuous, even so are individual bits of knowledge due to the complexities of thought and language. Contextualizing knowledge or providing a narrative that connects individual statements may not be justified in this model:

1. Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. ...

2. Archaeology does not seek to rediscover the continuous, insensible transition that relates discourses, on a gentle slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows them. It does not await the moment when, on the basis of what they were not yet, they became what they are; nor the moment when, the solidity of their figure crumbling away, they will gradually lose their identity. ...

3 . Archaeology is not ordered in accordance with the sovereign figure of the reuvres; it does not try to grasp the moment in which the reuvre emerges on the anonymous horizon. It does not wish to rediscover the enigmatic point at which the individual and the social are inverted into one another. It is neither a psychology, nor a sociology, nor more generally an anthropology of creation. ...

4. Lastly, archaeology does not try to restore what has been thought, wished, aimed at, experienced, desired by men in the very moment at which they expressed it in discourse; it does not set out to recapture that elusive nucleus in which the author and the reuvre exchange identities; in which thought still remains nearest to oneself, in the as yet unaltered form of the same, and in which language (langage) has not yet been deployed in the spatial, successive dispersion of discourse. In other words, it does not try to repeat what has been said by reaching it in its very identity. It does not claim to efface itself in the ambiguous modesty of a reading that would bring back, in all its purity, the distant, precarious, almost effaced light of the origin. It is nothing more than a rewriting: that is, in the preserved form of exteriority, a regulated transformation of what has already been written. It is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description of a discourse-object.

This Focaultian Structuralist or Post-structuralist analysis serves to connect Critical Theory with postmodernism, where it is diffused through academia and education and through culture. I wasn't previously aware that postmodernism was so concerned with history, but Wikipedia has this to say (emphasis added):

The basic features of what is now called postmodernism can be found as early as the 1940s, most notably in the work of artists such as Jorge Luis Borges. However, most scholars today agree postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s. Since then, postmodernism has been a powerful, though not undisputed, force in art, literature, film, music, drama, architecture, history, and continental philosophy.

The primary features of postmodernism typically include the ironic play with styles, citations and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a "grand narrative" of Western culture, and a preference for the virtual at the expense of the Real (or more accurately, a fundamental questioning of what 'the real' constitutes).

At this point I feel pretty confident that what I originally called the "history coup" consists of the ascendency of Critical Theory / postmodernism. 

Another of the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, Herbert Marcuse, became influential in the more recent developments on the Left. Marcuse worked to engage a number of new oppressed categories such as homosexuals, women, and minorities in radical politics, moving beyond the traditional Marxist focus on class. This has of course been tremendously successful. Inspired by Marcuse's ideas of Critical Theory starting in the late 1950s a new field called "Cultural Studies" arose. Here is the Wikipedia description:

Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation.

The Wikipedia article on Cultural Studies contains a long list of fields and theories influenced by Culture Studies, many of which became their own specialized graduate programs starting in the 1990s. In essence, Critical Theory and Postmodernist approaches now dominate academic Social Sciences and the Humanities.

When I first asked the question, "Whatever happened to Toynbee and Quigley?", I really didn't know what the answer would be. My term "the history coup" now seems quaint to me, since it is a cog in a much bigger and more audacious scheme. The answer to the history coup mystery in short is that proponents of Critical Theory / postmodernism don't want you and me to look too closely at history, because if we did we might see how unique Western Civilization really is, and we might see that capitalism and Christianity actually look pretty good. The radical neo-Marxists who took over our Universities and schools want to make sure that we never learn the lessons of history, so that they can achieve cultural hegemony (I think they are there now for the most part) and bring about the revolution to overturn Western Civilization, rationalism, capitalism, and Christianity. While there is a lot that is concerning, the optimistic take is that the revolution is not complete yet. With greater awareness of what is happening maybe we can start to fight back.