What the notes foresaw was American firms establishing the same relations of dominance over markets in Asia or Africa as the European powers had, but without establishing formal colonies. They would buy up farms and factories, extract raw materials, build railroads, and sell consumer goods. On their behalf, Washington would exercise influence over these countries’ Treasuries and Foreign Ministries, and if absolutely necessary, send in the Marines. It was imperialism without colonies. Sklar used the term “non-annexationist imperialism.” The Wisconsin School interpreted the Cold War itself as at least partly the result of the United States wanting to maintain a similar “open door” against Soviet domination in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The United States didn’t want to colonize Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, or later Vietnam; it wanted to prevent them from becoming part of a closed system that would block American investments and trade.

Sklar’s Master’s degree thesis, which Williams cited, concerned Wilson’s policy toward American banks in China. His essay on Wilson in Studies generalized from the extensive research he had done. Sklar described how Wilson’s “thought in matters of political economy embraced a body of moral concepts, just as his moralism presumed certain principles of political economy and corresponding social relations.” Wilson, Sklar wrote, believed that

with the end of the continental frontier, expansion into world markets with the nation’s surplus manufactured goods and capital was … indispensible to the stability and prosperity of the economy. It was ... in no way morally invidious since in his view, the nation’s economic expansion was a civilizing force that carried with it principles of democracy and Christianity ... Given the United States’ superior industrial efficiency she would assume supremacy in the world’s markets providing artificial barriers were removed.

Sklar rejected the prevailing view, however, that in opposing outright colonialism—whether in China or in his Fourteen Points—Wilson had turned his back on imperialism. “The essence of open door expansion involved an international system of economy identical to that established by England and the European industrial nations with their colonies and agrarian areas,” Sklar wrote. The new imperial powers played the role of capital and the agrarian country’s population the role of labor and of suppliers of raw materials. “Control over, and investment decisions affecting decisive sectors of their economies were to become … integrated within the United States corporate economy.” American corporations were to become an “imperium in imperio” [state within a state] within the agrarian nations.

In the Studies essay, Sklar never used the term “imperialist” to describe Wilson’s foreign policy. He merely suggested that Wilson and others were being disingenuous in claiming that they had abandoned imperialism. But over the next decade, Sklar repeatedly asserted in essays and political manifestos that the United States in the twentieth century was engaged in imperialism. In his Radical America essay, he described “the current epoch of U.S. history” that he believed was drawing to a close as that of the “Imperialist Corporate-Capital order,” and cited the “coercive establishment of markets for superfluous goods through taxation and imperialism” as a prime strategy for withstanding the effects of disaccumulation. I found in my files a draft of the opening statement for Socialist Revolution in which Sklar replaced the anodyne phrase “liberal order and corporate-liberal ideology” with “the corporate-imperialist order and corporate-imperialist ideology.” In those days, Sklar couldn’t write “corporate” without adding “imperialist.”

Over the next two decades, Sklar changed his view of the “open door” and of imperialism as much as he changed his view of corporate liberalism. Sklar now conceded that America’s “open door” strategy was what it purported to be: an attempt to take the world beyond imperialism toward what he, following the lead of his brother, UCLA political scientist, Richard Sklar, called “post-imperialism.” During the twentieth century, America had become the seat of a new empire, but it was an empire that would dissolve into what a British commentator had called a “United States of the World.”

Sklar articulated this new understanding in an essay he contributed in 1999 to a book, Postimperialism and World Politics, co-edited by his brother, and in a longer paper that he wrote for Diplomatic History, but that he withdrew when the editor asked him to alter its style, which was written as a numbered outline rather than essay. (I tried myself to edit the piece for publication in The New Republic, but editing Sklar turned out to be like bending light. I told Sklar that the “Euclidean style of propositions” was “pompous” and gave the paper a “stuffy professorial air.” He wrote back, “Thanks for the August Company, but: Not Euclid: 1) Proposition not postulates, 2) Not geometric in any real meaning of the word.” That ended my attempt at editing the piece.)

To make matters worse, Sklar presented his revised views of foreign policy obliquely. He first summarized the “thinking” of leading foreign policy officials, economists, and bankers at the turn of the last century, and then showed that their ideas turned out to be a good guide to the century to come. He didn’t specifically endorse their views, but still suggested they had been right all along. These thinkers, Sklar wrote, had a generally favorable view of European imperialism. They appreciated its effect on the countries it colonized. It had introduced modern science and technology—and in some cases, liberal governance—to backward areas of the globe. Imperialism “meant the global spread of modernization to and within less developed nations, with or without their consent and under Western controls and tutelage.”

But these American thinkers also recognized that the attempt by Western powers to divide up the globe had led to imperial rivalries between the sea-based open empires that stood for “free trade, liberty, individuality and democracy” and the land-based closed empire that stood for “protected trade, state command, conformity and centralized-autocracy.” And these rivalries had led to World Wars I and II and to the Cold War. America’s strategy as a sea-based power was Hay’s Open Door Notes, which Wilson amended with his Fourteen Points. It was a strategy for going beyond imperial rivalries eventually toward a post-imperial world in which countries no longer vied for colonies, and in which the giant transnational corporation steadily transplanted the nation-state as the agent for economic development.

By going beyond imperialism, America would also go beyond the cycle of empires that had begun millennia ago. Since ancient times, the known world had gone through a cycle of empires, and America, the thinkers believed, would succeed Britain as the “seat of empire,” and assume its “global pacifying and stabilizing capacities.” Sklar argued that after World War II, the “American Century,” a term popularized by Time founder Henry Luce, had finally come into being, but that its achievement was leading to its own “negation” as the “World Century.” That had begun to occur, Sklar argued, with the dissolution of the Soviet empire, which Sklar attributed to the failure of its Stalinist relations of production to keep pace with the new capital-mobile international economy. The United States then achieved global dominance, but in an open system in which “domination by the United States or any single nation or group of nations would be so difficult as to be practically impossible.” “Transnationalism and international cooperation” would replace “imperial rivalry.”

“The tendency is growing,” Sklar wrote, “for a pluralism of cultures, societies and nation as, contributing to, and enriching, an increasingly common global society-type .. acknowledging principles of a universal humanity, while adapting them to a various cultures and historical traditions.” The key to this global culture is the transnational corporation. “As anticipated in early twentieth century America’s thinking development investment (‘capital’) has been and remains the driving force in 20th century would affairs, and its principal agency has been and continues to be the large corporation operating transnationally, increasingly with international staffing, and decreasingly with a singular national identity.”

Just as Sklar’s view of disaccumulation leading to a “social revolution” was shaped by the late ‘60s, his view of the “World Century” seems to have been a product of the “new economy” utopianism fueled by the boom of the late ‘90s. Sklar’s views were also shaped by the apparent acquiescence of Russia and China in a new American-led world system and the pacification of the Middle East in the wake of the first Gulf War and the Oslo agreement. That heady optimism would dissolve several years later with September 11, the dotcom crash followed by the Great Recession, the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the growing hostility of China and Russia to American hegemony, the Eurocrisis, and the Arab Spring-turned-Winter. But as with Sklar’s theory of disaccumulation, Sklar’s utopian musings can be put to one side, leaving important truths contained in his analysis of American foreign policy.

Williams, Sklar and the Wisconsin School had unearthed the economic basis of American diplomacy in the twentieth century. But their original analysis was clouded by the presumption that a socialist revolution could have altered the trajectory of American foreign policy. Williams presumed that the United States, instead of seeking foreign outlets for its surplus, could have created a “cooperative commonwealth” at home. Sklar cited imperialism as one of the means by which the capitalist class was holding back the liberatory possibilities of socialism after disaccumulation took hold. In his later work, Sklar abandoned these utopian alternatives as a framework for assessing American diplomacy. Instead, he argued that Hay was right, and so was Wilson in his Fourteen Points, to seek an alternative to imperialism that would not involve colonization and national rivalry, but that would open countries to trade and investment, leading eventually to a postimperial world order.

In his later view of corporate liberalism, Sklar no longer posed socialism as a practical alternative to corporate liberalism; now the choice was between positive government and statism. Similarly, in his later view of Open Door diplomacy, Sklar no longer posed the practical choice as being between imperialism (including non-colonial imperialism) and socialism, but between the older imperialism and the non-colonial imperialism that would lay the basis for post-imperialism. Sklar’s view of the present of the immediate prospects of post-imperialism was colored by Clinton-era utopianism, but he had nonetheless succeeded in describing the choices for American policy makers. Unfortunately, after September 11, George W. Bush, under the influence of Washington’s neo-conservatives, would try to revive some elements of the older imperialism.

The Mix

In Sklar’s writings from the 1950s through the mid-1970s, he had espoused a classical Marxist view of the stages of history. History passed through different stages that were based on different ways of organizing production—from feudal class relations of lord and serf to the capitalist relations of bourgeoisie and wage-laborer. The transition from one mode of production to another occurred through social revolutions that transformed these class relations. In his Radical America essay, Sklar adhered to this view of history. He contended that American capitalism was in the midst of a crisis that would lead to socialism and a new stage of history.

But in revising his view of corporate liberalism and Open Door diplomacy, Sklar suggested that in the twentieth century, the United States had overcome, or was on the verge of overcoming, the contradictions and crises that had bedeviled American and world capitalism. In a series of papers he wrote and presented in the 1990s, Sklar argued this point, but with a twist: He now maintained that the transition to socialism, which Marx had predicted could only occur through a social revolution that would wrest power from the capitalist class, had already begun, and that Americans were living in a society that artfully blended capitalism and socialism. Sklar called this society and stage of history “the mix.”

Sklar dated “socialist tendencies” from the American Revolutionary period’s idea of Americans as “citizens” who exercised “self-government” and “self-control” in their economic and political lives. But he dated the mix from the rise of the corporation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. “Corporate enterprise,” Sklar wrote, “represented a shift from individual-proprietary to associational forms of property ownership … It represented ‘private’ property ‘publicly held.’” It invited public intervention from government and internally from stock-holders and investors (who were now separate from managers) and from labor unions and consumer groups. “Socialist relations have appeared in political, associational, and contractual activity that seeks to provide an alternative to, and a means of redefining, property ownership. Such activity seeks to make the market socially accountable and responsible through political, social and economic reordering that regulates, modifies, remedies, or displaces market behavior and outcomes.”

In the Studies and Radical America essays, Sklar had presented corporate liberalism as socialism’s antagonist. Corporate liberalism co-opted it and in the process blunted and thwarted it. Now Sklar presented corporate liberalism as absorbing what was most positive, constructive and practical in socialism. Sklar now redefined corporate liberalism as “the prevalent sociopolitical movements in the United States, which since the early twentieth century have operated incrementally to combine capitalism and socialism with liberal democracy.”

Sklar did not posit a stage of history beyond the mix, but he believed that in the twentieth century, the United States had moved leftward by increasing the socialist share of the mix. “A citizen-associational stake in society increasingly supplements, refashions, and in some degree displaces the property stake, as an increasingly preponderant authority in society,” he wrote. Later, in one of the less politically charged sections of Letters on Obama, Sklar explained that the development of the mix and the response to disaccumulation went hand in hand—for instance, the expansion into health, education, and housing entailed “the socialist complement enlarging and developing in old and new ways.” But he didn’t hold out socialism as the eventual goal. Instead, he believed the mix was superior to its parts. “Capitalism needs socialism for stability and civic development,” he wrote, “and socialism needs capitalism for the wealth creation that it generates and supports an ever expanding equalitarianism and noncapitalist investment and labor activity.”

Sklar still insisted that he was echoing Marx’s views. Marx, he wrote, had “assessed” the change from individual to corporate capitalism as “transitional between capitalism and socialism.” Marx, he also wrote, identified socialism with “modern capitalist market development.” These statements indicate the degree to which Sklar remained emotionally wedded to his own Marxist past. In fact, Sklar’s concept of the mix represented a rejection of Marx’s theory of history on several fronts. That doesn’t make him wrong by any means—Marx’s predictions of social revolution in the developed West have certainly not come to pass—but it provides a way of clarifying how Sklar’s views had changed from the ‘60s.

Sklar now rejected the idea of a final socialist stage of history. There was no separate, future stage of socialism in Sklar’s theory. Sklar’s theory was an echo of Walt Whitman Rostow’s 1960 work Stages of Economic Growth, in which the economist, who later became a Lyndon Johnson advisor, foresaw modern American mass consumption capitalism as the final state in history toward which Russia’s socialism was eventually headed. What Rostow called the last stage of capitalism Sklar called the “mix.” Marx did regard the public joint-stock corporation as a transitional form between capitalism and socialism—but he meant that it laid the basis for socialism, not that it was a socialist institution. In his view of the mix, Sklar envisaged public corporations as being “as much socialist as capitalist entities.”

But the most telling departure from Marx was in his concept of historical agency. Marx’s theory was itself a departure from, but also an adaptation of, Hegel’s philosophy of history. Hegel had contended that history often proceeded by the “cunning of reason.” It was the resolution (as in physical vectors) of millions of different seemingly inconsistent, contradictory, unrelated intentions that cohered into Spirit’s singular intention and moved history forward in one direction rather than another. Marx thought the cunning of reason explained much of world history through the development of capitalism. Revolutions, for instance, were often fought on the basis of religion, but resulted in fundamental changes in the relations of production. In the transition to socialism, however, the working class, organized through a socialist party and conscious of its special role in history, would create a new society under its direction.

Earlier, Sklar had fully accepted this facet of Marx’s theory of history. In his Studies essay on Wilson, he drew a sharp distinction between Wilson’s view of history, which Wilson had inherited from Burke, and Marx’s view. Wilson’s view stressed the natural evolution of institutions and assigned to political actors a role in merely adapting society to these institutions. By contrast, Sklar wrote, “Marxism demands the understanding of objective laws of social development operating independently of man’s will precisely in order to subject social development to man’s conscious will.” In his Radical America essay, he argued that the emergence of a “variegated proletariat,” in which mental labor existed alongside manual, had laid the basis for a “modern universal class ... conscious of its historical significance” and capable of “moving into the next world-historical epoch.” The key to doing this was the creation of an explicitly socialist movement.

In his concept of the mix, Sklar jettisoned the need for an explicitly socialist party or movement. “The relative paucity of votes for a ‘Socialist Party,’” Sklar wrote, “does not mean that socialism has been absent from, or has not been a major characteristic of American society.” But then things got murky. On one hand, he suggested that corporate liberalism was the conscious movement that replaced a socialist movement. On the other hand, he reverted to Hegel’s cunning of reason and to Wilson’s natural evolutionary view of history. The mix was a mixture of socialism and capitalism, but it had developed without conscious agency. “Usually the same people,” he wrote, “have been engaged in constructing and affirming capitalism and socialism at the same time, whatever their intent” (my italics). That is Hegel’s idea of the cunning of reason, as applied to the mix, and it is a theory of historical agency that is entirely at odds with that of Marx or with Sklar’s own earlier writings.

In his concept of the mix, Sklar was returning to Wilson and Burke in another way, and stepping back over Marx to Hegel, whom he had read carefully and written about when he was at Rochester in the ‘60s. Like Hegel, Sklar suggested that his own time and country was the consummation of a historical development. The contradictions that had compelled history from one stage to another had been tamed and absorbed in the mix. And like the later Hegel, Sklar was positioning himself at the end of a period in which he had been a political participant. While Sklar asserted that the socialist part of the mix had gained power at the expense of capitalist, he no longer depicted socialism as a realm of freedom, outside capitalist exchange values. Instead, it was a current in the mix that might only be discerned analytically after the fact, as he himself was doing. “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering,” Hegel had written of philosophy.

Sklar’s theory of the mix, like his later theory of corporate liberalism or of the Open Door diplomacy, was an attempt to come to terms with the failings of his earlier theories and with Marx’s theory of history. Marx had believed that capitalism’s death knell would ring well before the twentieth century concluded. He didn’t anticipate the evaporation of American socialist politics, the rise and fall of the labor movement, the triumph of a bastardized state socialism in Russia or China, several world wars, the triumph of corporate capitalism, or for that matter the resurgence of the political right in the United States in the late twentieth century. Sklar attempted to come to terms with all these unexpected turns in the historical road.

Sklar was certainly justified in questioning Marx’s theory of the transition from capitalism to socialism. Marx, writing in the shadow of the French revolution, conceived the stages of history as being separated by a sharp revolutionary break. But capitalism had developed within feudal society, and it’s quite possible to conceive of socialism as developing within capitalism. Sklar began that discussion at a time when many Marxists had simply abandoned any attempt to comprehend the future. But he also took it to the point where socialism and capitalism became so intermingled that the terms began to lose their meaning. Sklar wrote, for instance, that “capitalism and socialism both exhibit class conflict, class complementarity and analytically distinct, yet historically intersecting modes of consciousness… the large corporation, smaller enterprise and the market in general are not simply capitalist.” But what did it mean to say that the market or a small business is partially socialist? Or that public corporation are “as much socialist as capitalist entities?”

On the least plausible level, Sklar seemed to be reverting to the old theories of “people’s capitalism” according to which public stock ownership meant that the public, or society, now owned private corporations. More plausibly, Sklar was recounting how agents of power (unions, public interest groups, government agencies, pension funds) had adapted “market relations to social goals” and fostered “corporate social accountability.” But when a union or government agency forces a corporation to adopt certain social objectives, does it transform the corporation into a partially socialist institution or does it simply force a capitalist institution to adopt certain socialist (that is, social and not merely private profit-driven) objectives without fundamentally altering the nature of the institution? When a corporation, under the eye of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, adopts certain workplace protections, does it thereby become partially socialist?

In Germany, where there is worker co-determination, one could argue that corporations are no longer simply private institutions driven by the imperatives of capitalism. In Germany, unions, representing a company’s workers, are represented on corporate boards, and major wage and investment decisions often involve private management, unions and government. But in the United States, it would probably be more accurate to characterize corporations as capitalist institutions that occasionally bow to public demands to act in the national interest.

Sklar was also reluctant to allow the federal government to be a key arena where the imperatives of socialism clash with those of capitalism. Marx had called the state “the executive committee of the ruling class,” but over the last 150 years, the state has become a contested arena where the public has sought to limit or restrict the prerogatives of private businesses, and where the public has been able to achieve lasting institutional change. In the U.S., as the labor movement has declined, conflict over state power has become even more important. It has been the focus of the struggle between the Obama administration and the Republicans and Tea Party. But Sklar, eager to assert the supremacy of society over state, was reluctant to cast the state as a particularly important repository of socialist values. In his last years, Sklar’s anti-statism would led him to sympathize with the Republican and Tea Party rejection of Obama’s policies.

Sklar’s theory of the mix goes beyond the usual idea of a “mixed economy,” which merely applies to the greater role of government in the economy and not to the adoption of social goals by corporations or to the role of unions, public interest groups, foundations and other civic organizations. It allowed Sklar to go beyond consensus history by suggesting that socialism was developing within Lockean liberalism. But in suggesting that the mix could be found everywhere –even in the very nature of the limited-liability corporation – Sklar made the concept less useful for explaining historical conflict and change.

Sklar was also on grood grounds in rejecting the idea that only a socialist party could introduce socialist elements into capitalism. And he did suggest that corporate liberal movements could do the job. But in explaining the mix in the late 1990s, Sklar also insisted that a politician like Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a stalwart foe of unions and business regulation, was moving the country "leftward" -- whatever his actual intent. That, too clouded the concept of the mix. That said, one can imagine Sklar over the next decade clarifying his concept of the mix, removing the ambiguities in his treatment of the corporation and of liberal or leftwing politics. He seemed to be headed toward a conception of liberalism (in its twentieth century incarnation) as America's special and peculiar response to the rise of the public corporation and to disaccumulation. But this final synthesis would elude him.

Over the span of Sklar’s writings—from his years in Madison through the development of the “mix” in the 1990s—he continued to think of himself as a socialist and as a man of the left, and continued to insist that history was moving in his direction. When I worked with him on In These Times, he always used to talk about interpreting events “dialectically”—which meant, in his case, seeing the underlying socialist meaning in the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision or in Pope John Paul II’s Hegelian encyclicals. In 2000, Sklar joined historian Richard Schneirov and other former students in creating he William English Walling Society, which was named after an American socialist. In 2003, the Society held a conference in Washington D.C. to honor Sklar. Sklar continued to the very end to identify himself as a man of the left. The Letters on Obama, which appeared in 2012, were subtitled “From the Left.”

Some of the changes in Sklar’s views over the last three decades were the result of his having to reconcile his own commitment to socialism, which was rooted originally in American Communism, and then in the Sixties New Left, with a long period of conservative ascendancy in American politics. That period began with Richard Nixon’s election, was confirmed by Ronald Reagan’s two landslide victories, and reaffirmed by the conservative Republican capture of the House as well as the Senate in 1994 and by George W. Bush’s election in 2000. As the New Left expired—In These Times of the ‘70s was one of its last gasps—Sklar moved away from the Marxian socialism of the Radical America essay as an alternative to capitalism or imperialism. Wilson’s corporate liberalism became a leftwing alternative to statism; the Open Door a path to postimperialism, and the mix an alternative to both laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism. Disaccumulation became the catalyst for the mix rather than for a socialist revolution.

In the 1990s, Sklar characterized those who promoted corporate liberalism, Open Door diplomacy, and the mix as socialists or left-progressives who were moving America leftward. And he believed that America had turned leftward. That included the Republican Party. That made a certain amount of sense. Clinton, for instance, advertised himself as a centrist “new Democrat,” but he took positions on health insurance or worker retraining or environmental regulation that would have been inconceivable in the early twentieth century. America had moved leftward over the century. But there was also an element of rationalization creeping into Sklar’s position.

When the conservative Republicans won control of the House in November 1994, that boded ill for the country’s continuing movement leftward. They advocated disbanding many of the social and regulatory programs of the previous ninety years. But Sklar insisted that Gingrich was his kind of leftist. “In the 1990s,” Sklar wrote in 1998, “President William Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich were the outstanding leaders of the this bipartisan leftward shift in party politics and the political culture.” By describing Gingrich in that manner, Sklar was beginning to allow his sentimental political commitments to shape his view of history. Sklar took a similar tack with George W. Bush. He supported Bush’s regressive tax cuts as being “left-Keynesian,” even though Keynes would not have backed tax cuts focused on those least likely to spend rather than save them. Sklar also supported the invasion of Iraq as a blow against “Islamist imperialism,” and continued to do so even after it had proved to be a deadly fiasco. He was casting “Islamist imperialism” in the role of fascism or Soviet communism and ignoring Bush’s own imperial pretensions. Yet it could still be said that Sklar was looking for a dialectical interpretation that demonstrated America’s continuing turn leftward. As Obama’s presidential campaign gained momentum, however, Sklar’s views took a distinctively undialectical turn.

Sklar’s Letters on Obama spanned the years 2008 to 2012. If Sklar had followed his past practice, he would have culled whatever was positive, and contributed to America’s movement leftward, from Obama’s presidency. Instead, the letters, which were primarily addressed to a roster of right-wingers, including Norman Podhoretz, Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist Daniel Henninger, and former Bush administration official or torture defender John Yoo, echoed a conservative—and in some cases, a very far rightwing—line on Obama’s president. Sklar depicted Obama’s presidency as a harbinger of an American fascism. He described Obama as a “state-command left-sectarian morphing right to fascism.” He warned that Obama’s presidency was leading to a “monolithic dictatorship or the breakup of the U.S., the latter more likely.” In foreign policy, he saw the Obama administration as

aligned with Islamist imperialism in world affairs as well as with Chavezist/Fidelist “3rd-World”-Fascist backwardness—anti-liberal democracy, anti-modern development—and is in effect (and in intent) disarming the U.S. in the war and the struggle, and dismantling its modern economy via “recovery,” “environmental,” and other such policies.

In The Corporate Reconstruction, Sklar had described a debate within the liberal tradition between Theodore Roosevelt’s statism and Wilson’s theory of positive government. But in the Letters, Sklar put Obama’s center-left politics well outside the liberal pale. “Obama and his colleagues” were the leading “sectarian leftists.” They were also “proto-fascist/communist,” “latter-day Leninists,” “Third-Worldist Sectarians” and “doctrinaire consumption Keynesians.” They appeared to be on the left, but were really on the right. Sklar even evoked Hitler’s film director Leni Riefenstahl to describe the setting of the Democratic convention in 2008.

Those who represented the left were improbably Bush, John McCain and Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party and the Tea Party. Sklar wrote that

the GOP/TP is, in my view, historically the left-progressive force still vibrant in the U.S., with a sustainable base in the half or more of the people who center their interests in the “private sector,” and in commitment to modern society, liberty, and freedom. I say left-progressive because the GOP/TP politics and policies stand for the following: pro-working-class growth and development and corresponding rising standards of living; development, not obstruction, of the modern forces of production, and the Constitutional-Republic securing the people’s sovereignty, and their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, in essence securing the cause of freedom in modem historical circumstances.

Sklar applauded the Tea Party calls for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and for the rejection of government spending and of raising the debt limit. Sklar’s letters broke off before the November 2012 election, but he wrote in May 2010 that he was backing Palin for president:

Just now, Palin is my preferred “candidate” for President and, in general, [she’s] a leader of the Liberal-Democracy cause—she calls it “Conservatism”—but [in historical perspective,] she’s a very strong Left-Progressive [pro-development, pro-growth, pro-working-class, pro-women’s equality and pro-racial equality, pro-universal education, pro-liberty & -democracy, anti-fascist in domestic and foreign affairs, conservation-wise and socially distributive management of Alaska’s resources etc.]; she knows the issues now who’s our [U.S. democracy’s] enemies & our friends -- & very bright and brave [by historical analogy, a ‘TR Progressive’]. (The brackets above are from Sklar not from me.)

There were analytical passages in the letters that were on the level of Sklar’s earlier writing. There was a discussion of disaccumulation in which he described it as a “trend” and identified it with “the transition from goods production to services.” But there were other passages that suggest Sklar went off the rails. These included his endorsement of Palin and of Beck and apocalyptic warnings about fascism and dictatorship and the end of the U.S. There were other telltale signs of disorder. Sklar had also been anything but sloppy in his writing—he wrote everything by hand, and usually wrote in complete paragraphs—but the style of the Letters was often staccato and telegraphic. There were absurd misstatements such as a warning against “Black Panther/SEIU thuggery.” The Black Panthers were defunct by 1980.

I don’t know what happened to Sklar in the last ten years of his life. Age and illness may have taken their toll. But what I read from the letters is his continued bitterness at the left—not the imagined left of McCain and Palin, but the self-identified left of the Sixties and Seventies, of In These Times, and later of the academy. By the time he wrote The Letters, Sklar’s own ties with people on the left had frayed. The William Walling Society dissolved after the 2003 conference, and Sklar fell out to various degrees with his former students, most of whom had become distinguished historians. The only historian whose correspondence he included in the letters was Radosh, who, like him, had moved sharply to the right.

Some of the accusations that Sklar hurled at Obama went back to his own critique during the ‘70s of the New Left—among these, “sectarian,” “Leninist,” and “third-worldist.” (“Third Worldist” referred to the leftwing groups that championed Cuban or North Korean or Chinese brands of socialism.) They fit the early ‘70s groupuscules, but they didn’t apply by any stretch to the cautious, center-left politician who was elected President of the United States in November 2008. Why, one has to ask, was Sklar so obsessed with the self-identified left? My guess, based on my acquaintance with him, is that it had to do at the bottom with his feeling that he had never been given due, and that the left, and particularly leftwing historians, were primarily to blame.

In writing an appreciation of Sklar’s work, I considered omitting entirely The Letters on Obama. They have some interest because they show Sklar’s lifelong determination to see himself as a socialist and man of the left, even at the expense of inverting the usual categories, but they are not part of his lasting contribution to our understanding of American history. Sklar was important because he tried to answer the big questions that most of his colleagues, and most writers about politics, have ignored or avoided. And while he didn’t provide final answers, he came as close to doing so as any other historian of his generation.

His analysis of corporate liberalism—from the Wilson essay in Studies through The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism—gets at the basic framework by which Americans over the last century have debated what government should do, and what the relationship should be between government and business. His analysis of disaccumulation—presented in almost incomprehensibly Marxist terms in the Radical America essay—delves into the transformation from industrial to post-industrial capitalism that has taken place from the 1920s to the present and that remains—witness the gobbledygook coming out of Silicon Valley—a subject of mystery. (Economist Lawrence Summers, freed from the fetters of government service, has taken up the issue in earnest.) His essays on Open Door diplomacy lay bare the assumptions of America’s post-imperial foreign policy. Would that George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives who still haunt Washington have understood and embraced these assumptions. And his discussion of the mix dwells on the question of where our history is headed and what defines left and right in American politics.

Much of Sklar’s intellectual career took the form of a debate with Marx. Even in The Letters, he attempted to show that Marx’s view of the “withering away of the state” accorded with his own the supremacy of society over state. One might argue that a continuing dialogue with Marx dated Sklar and makes his theories irrelevant. But I’d argue the contrary. Marx’s particular theories have been shown to be lacking, but not the historical enterprise that he and Hegel and other great historians have undertaken. If you look at the history of twentieth century liberalism, Herbert Croly was deeply influenced by Auguste Comte’s Hegelian theory of history; Reinhold Niebuhr and Daniel Bell by Marx. Hartz looked back to Hegel for inspiration. Many of the most compelling conservative thinkers—including James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, and Irving Kristol—began, like Sklar, with the challenge of Marx. If you look today at the Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, much of its magnetic appeal is from Piketty having taking up the large questions where Marx left off.

Americans who aspire to understand where the country is headed ignore the big historical questions at their peril. And Sklar is well worth reading because he tried to answer them. He deserves in death the recognition that he didn’t really get in life. May he rest in peace, and may his work endure.

*I received advice and comments from James Livingston, William Burr, Larry Lynn, and Richard Schneirov, all of whom studied with Sklar, and kept in contact with him over the years.