Expanding the Historical Argument without End

Peter Loewenberg is a pioneer in the field of psychohistory, or, perhaps more accurately, he is “the” pioneer in this field. His huge record of publications on a great variety of topics, from German cultural history to Freud to the rise and flourishing of psychoanalysis around the globe, has made him the world’s leading expert on psychohistory. At a personal level, I can say that we had a special friendship as colleagues. He encouraged me to apply for admission to the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, where I spent four years in the early 1980s learning about the field. It has been of considerable benefit to me in understanding the various 20^th century U.S. presidents I have written about, and it has also been especially useful in allowing me to expand upon my understanding of cultural politics in the United States. As a student of Richard Hofstadter’s, who did so much groundbreaking work in exploring the undercurrents of modern American politics, I was able to use my psychoanalytic training to probe more deeply into the sources of both presidential and broader political actions that have shaped so much of the last century.

The great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was surely right when he said that history is argument without end. But a principal objective of any significant historian is to expand the argument. This is Peter Loewenberg’s greatest achievement. He has nourished historical studies in ways that will endure. What greater tribute could there be for a professional historian?

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