At its most innovative, Michael E. Brown's The Historiography of Communism perceptively considers why historical study of the American left is important. A long introductory essay and two-chapter reflection on “Issues in the Historiography of Communism” raise a number of signal issues. Commentator–historians such as Theodore Draper and Irving Howe are foregrounded as exemplars of an “anticommunist” mode of historiography (8), ultimately subject to the logic of the Cold War, and useful only because it indicates how “certain claims to know everything that needs to be known about socialism and communism were made plausible” (89). In opposition, Brown offers the notion of a “critical” historiography of the American left, practiced by historians wary of Werner Sombart's 1906 question, “why is there no socialism in the United States?” (4)

He suggests that there have always been portions of the American population ready to embrace radical politics, the historical significance of which should not be judged purely by their inability to capture power within the institutional structures of the “nation” (91–92). Instead, Brown recommends that historians emphasize “extra-institutional forces and processes,” thereby foregrounding the experience of “the people” within “society” (93). As such, the left is registered as “a constant manifestation of something immanent to society,” rather than a waxing and waning social force capable of ideological confrontation with the state only in moments of crisis (7). However, it is this opposition to “generational” conceptions of left history that raises the first of a number of problems. Brown encourages scholars not to categorize “deaths,” “births” or “interim periods” in the history of radical struggle, suggesting that to see certain movements as episodic is to deny their “rationality” (23–25). Surely, though, historical writing is an essentially periodizing process, and each and every left that emerges attempts to define itself (however truthfully) in opposition to its forbearers? To suggest, then, that scholars must be doing radical politics a disservice by mapping generational vicissitudes seems gratuitously idealistic.

Another drawback stems from the fact that the essays collected in The Historiography of Communism were originally written in the period 1978–95. Whilst occasional nods to work undertaken in the intervening fourteen years are included, it is hard to excuse a text on this subject published in 2009 that barely engages with the work of Michael Denning, Van Gosse or Maurice Isserman, amongst others. Furthermore, there are formal problems with Brown's writing that are impossible to ignore. First, he composes jargon-heavy, overly circuitous prose that renders comprehension unnecessarily difficult. Second, the term “communism” is never accurately defined. Often it appears to be synonymic with “left.” However, its use sometimes appears to emanate from the author's proclivity for a radical politics less encumbered by opposition to the Soviet Union than the majority of post-1960s leftist thought. Whilst there is nothing inherently wrong with such a position, its linguistic manifestation leads to a sense that Brown never quite lays his political cards on the table.

Overall, then, The Historiography of Communism manages to offer persuasive evidence that the history of the American left should be taken seriously precisely because any reflection on the future of progressive politics in the US (or elsewhere, for that matter) will have to reckon with its multifarious and often contradictory past. But the book should ultimately be seen as a missed opportunity. There is much more to be said about this significant topic, and many clearer ways in which to communicate that significance.