I

In October 1986, Arthur Schlesinger Jr sent John K. Fairbank a copy of The Cycles of American History, published that month. Fairbank was glad to discover a name remembered from long ago. “You cite W. B. Cannon’s suggestions concerning homeostasis for the body politic,” he noted to Schlesinger. Nostalgic, Schlesinger reminisced further about Walter B. Cannon, who had been a physiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School until his death in 1945. “Our father-in-law was a very nice man,” he wrote back Fairbank, “though politically naïve, despite admonitions from his sons-in-law.” In those days, when these doyens of the US historical profession were still ambitious young professors at the Harvard History Department, Fairbank and Schlesinger were at odds with their mutual father-in-law, particularly over his advocacy of communists as friends of American liberals. Despite “Mr. Cannon’s political naivety,” Fairbank recalled, both he and Schlesinger had seriously discussed Cannon’s concept of homeostasis, the human body’s automatic mechanism for maintaining its internal stability. Though largely overlooked in later scholarship, Fairbank’s analysis of the dynastic cycle in Chinese history and Schlesinger’s discussion of cycles in American politics were critically indebted to Cannon’s insights on biological homeostasis.Footnote ¹

Although they were conceived in different temporal and disciplinary contexts, these three cyclical theories—Cannon’s on the human body, Fairbank’s on Chinese history, and Schlesinger’s on American politics—embodied one salient sentiment in American liberalism: hope. All these cycles expressed a deep faith in the vitality and resilience of American democracy during its perceived crises. In the midst of the Great Depression at home and the rise of fascism abroad, Cannon articulated the theory of homeostasis with the intent of establishing “social homeostasis” in the United States and beyond. Likewise, when US global prestige was at its nadir after the Vietnam War, Fairbank rediscovered the dynastic cycle in China, which reminded him of the peculiarity of American democracy as well as its potential to be a paragon for China and other undemocratic nations. Similarly, sensing the triumph of unbridled capitalism during “the Reagan Revolution,” Schlesinger expected the return of a new era of democratic reform based on his calculation of the political cycle in America: “TR in 1901, FDR in 1933, JFK in 1961, ??? in 1993.”Footnote ² Before even being theories, these cycles represented their originators’ hopeful outlook on the future of American democracy in their country and the world.

This article argues that Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger had in common a distinctive understanding of democracy, which was embedded not only in their hopeful worldview but also in their discussion of homeostasis, China’s dynastic cycle, and the American political cycle. Each, to varying degrees, drew on John Dewey’s vision of democracy—not as a fixed system established in their country, but as an open-ended, evolving process through which individuals continually reshape their shared future. Specifically, my narrative traces one crucial continuity in liberal thought, demonstrating how Dewey’s democratic experimentalism informed two major paradigms of post-World War II US historiography: Louis Hartz’s “liberal tradition” and J. G. A. Pocock’s “republican synthesis.” Fairbank, observing China’s political culture through the lens of its dynastic cycles, adopted Hartz’s framework of exceptionalism and sharply contrasted liberal America with authoritarian China. Schlesinger, grappling with the conservative ascendancy and the decline of liberalism in US politics after the 1970s, drew on Pocock’s view that all republics are subject to cycles of growth, corruption, and decay. In seeking alternatives to Hartz’s “Lockean” consensus and Pocock’s “Machiavellian” moment, both Fairbank and Schlesinger revisited Dewey’s democratic vision, as echoed in Cannon’s theory of homeostasis.Footnote ³

This argument contributes to a deeper understanding of American liberalism. Interpreting the trajectory of twentieth-century liberalism—its “protean character,” in Gary Gerstle’s terms—has long been central to the field of US intellectual history.Footnote ⁴ That interpretive debate has often been organized around a powerful declension narrative in which liberalism’s postwar ambitions culminated in disillusionment and, as Allen Matusow famously framed it, “the unraveling of America” in the aftermath of the tumultuous 1960s.Footnote ⁵ For decades, historians have attributed this trajectory to the hubris of postwar liberalism: its naive faith in social engineering at home and modernization abroad, which ultimately revealed the fragility of its core assumptions.Footnote ⁶ More recently, scholars across the ideological spectrum have emphasized the anti-utopian strand in postwar liberalism. Joshua Cherniss offers a defense of what he calls a “politics of limit,” claiming that postwar liberals sought to resist the tendency of all ideologies to slide “from humanitarian idealism to ruthlessness.” Samuel Moyn, by contrast, criticizes Cold War liberalism as a “betrayal of liberalism itself,” marked by its abandonment of the universalist aspirations it had once championed. As Andrew Hartman observes, despite their opposing assessments, both Moyn’s “liberalism of fear” and Cherniss’s “tempered liberalism” reflect a shared anti-perfectionist sensibility.Footnote ⁷

My interdisciplinary study of Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger’s intertwined intellectual journeys demonstrates how the Deweyan vision of democracy as an ongoing experiment charted a middle path between the liberalism of hubris and the liberalism of fear throughout the twentieth century. Borrowing from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Schlesinger once described liberalism in American history as “the party of hope” and defined it not as dogmatic or utopian but as “humane, skeptical, and pragmatic.”Footnote ⁸ This pragmatic hope—skeptical and optimistic at once—drew from Progressive Era liberals who believed that democracy’s promise lay in its openness to uncertainty. As historian James T. Kloppenberg discusses, Dewey and like-minded thinkers “accepted the unpredictability of the democratic project as an integral part of its value in a world where truth and justice are to be carved from culture rather than found already etched in reason.”Footnote ⁹ This ethos, in turn, underpinned “the American experiment”: a long, unfinished endeavor in which generations of politicians, activists, and citizens have collectively shaped and reshaped the democratic project amid uncertainty.Footnote ¹⁰ This experimentalist understanding of democracy places the declension narrative in dialogue with a cyclical liberal temporality—one that could acknowledge liberalism’s setbacks while still holding open the possibility of renewal, rather than treating that trajectory as irreversible.

II

“Are there not general principles of stabilization? May not the devices developed in the animal organism for preserving steady states illustrate methods which are used, or which could be used, elsewhere?” pondered Walter B. Cannon in his 1932 The Wisdom of the Body.Footnote ¹¹ These questions echoed the anxieties of his era. At that time, America was in crisis—apparently on the brink of collapse. The Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism abroad threatened American democracy by challenging the legitimacy of its founding principles, including individual freedom, popular sovereignty, constitutional government, and the belief in social progress. Unless Americans restored their vitality, their cherished democracy—already shaken—seemed doomed.Footnote ¹² In response to this challenge, Cannon, through his research on “biological homeostasis,” proposed a parallel notion of “social homeostasis” to revitalize American democracy. As one of the most influential physiologists of the twentieth century, Cannon left a lasting legacy during the forty years of his academic career. The theory of homeostasis was arguably his most significant and original contribution to his field and society. For him, understanding “the wisdom of the body” was inextricably linked to the task of saving his country.Footnote ¹³

The development of Cannon’s thinking about homeostasis paralleled the shifting trajectory of American liberalism from early-century progressivism to the New Deal—from a quest for social progress to a search for social stability, from a movement to reshape America to a reform to restore it, and from a “strenuous life” to “freedom from fear.” When he began his professorship at Harvard medical school in 1902, Cannon had a deep conviction in the vitality of American society as “a progressive civilization.” Born in 1871 in rural Wisconsin, he nurtured this conviction through his rise to success in life, beginning as a middle-school dropout working in a local railroad office and eventually becoming a medical doctor and Harvard professor. More fundamentally, his conviction was grounded in the Whig–Enlightenment belief in humanity’s upward trajectory. As he stated in one of his lectures, history was the story of “expanding freedom,” propelled by science, which revealed “nature’s rules” and liberated humanity from ignorance, oppression, and dogma.Footnote ¹⁴ The theory of evolution, as articulated by Charles Darwin and his followers, reinforced this belief, portraying humanity not as fallen from a state of perfection, but as having risen “from the brutish state to higher and higher degrees of civilized development.”Footnote ¹⁵

Cannon’s engagement with the social and intellectual currents of his time, broadly defined as progressivism, reinforced his faith in the potential for American social progress. That society was afflicted with countless problems: poverty, corruption, monopoly, class conflict, and race and gender discrimination, to name a few. The harsh realities faced by “the other half” in industrial cities might have contradicted his optimistic view of humanity’s advancement. Yet that progress, if not inevitable, was still attainable. William James, Cannon’s undergraduate mentor at Harvard, had taught that science was not a set of unchanging truths, but an ongoing process of trial and error. The lesson proved formative. So taken with James’s pragmatism, Cannon even considered a career in philosophy—an idea that James, with characteristic wit, discouraged: “Don’t do it. You will be filling your belly with east wind.” Cannon took the advice, but James’s teaching left a lasting mark, grounding his view of science as a living, self-correcting process.Footnote ¹⁶

John Dewey extended James’s pragmatism to democracy, advocating that “the scientific habit of mind” was inseparable from “the democratic way of life.” Just as scientists collaborated in laboratories to generate provisional but useful knowledge, citizens could work together in a democracy—through education, communication, and participation—to address collective problems and improve society. Like Cannon’s physiology, Dewey’s philosophy carried an organic conception of society. Having been infected, as he put it, with the “Hegelian bacillus” during his early career, Dewey never entirely abandoned a neo-Hegelian, holistic view of the social order even after his turn to scientific pragmatism. During the Progressive Era and beyond, the metaphor of the body politic remained central to his political philosophy, which envisioned American democracy “growing” toward a “Great Community” through cooperative action. Here, the logics of organic democracy and pragmatic experimentalism worked in tandem: by embracing uncertainty as the essential condition of human life, Dewey could regard democracy not as a system to be perfected but as a regulative ideal to be continually renewed. In the Deweyan vision, the progress of American society, neither preordained nor linear, was an endless project to be achieved gradually by the collective actions of individual women and men.Footnote ¹⁷

Like many other progressives, Cannon embraced Dewey’s vision of democracy.Footnote ¹⁸ At the height of the Progressive Era, the American public seemed to practice this vision. Cannon did not have to look far for examples of such citizens: his wife, Cornelia James Cannon, was a self-proclaimed Deweyan progressive who believed that “the world is ours to improve” and “the sciences provide us with the expertise to do so.” An “all-purpose reformer,” as Schlesinger later described her, she was involved in numerous social reforms—women’s suffrage, temperance, settlement houses, and birth control. Cornelia’s reformist zeal often led her into troubling areas, particularly her advocacy for eugenics, reflecting the racial biases of some progressives at the time. Though Cannon was critical of his wife’s pseudoscientific racism, his collaboration with her on various reform projects, such as the Milk and Baby Hygiene Committee of Massachusetts, revealed both a blind spot in addressing these biases and a genuine commitment to progressive causes. As Cornelia’s biographer noted, their work together “exemplified the progressive and pragmatic ideals of informed and effective citizen participation,” embodying Dewey’s democratic vision in practice.Footnote ¹⁹

World War I, which marked the end of the Progressive Era, also challenged Walter Cannon’s faith in human progress. From the outset of the war, he had contemplated “alternative satisfactions for the fighting emotion,” envisioning something between Theodore Roosevelt’s militaristic remedy for the “mollycoddle” of timid peace and William James’s “moral equivalent of war,” which Cannon believed underestimated men’s inclination toward “the excitement of conflict.” Cannon’s proposed “physical substitutes for warfare,” however, betrayed a certain naivety about modern combat, which he initially imagined as a harsher—but still exhilarating—version of a football game.Footnote ²⁰ This view was shared by many progressives, including John Dewey, who saw in the war, despite its brutality, an opportunity to invigorate national purpose and catalyze social reform.Footnote ²¹

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Cannon, then in his late forties, volunteered with the Harvard Hospital Unit, anticipating the “turmoil and distress and the excitements of battle areas.” Upon his arrival at a field hospital on the Western Front, however, the war revealed its true horrors. The scene was “so awful,” he recalled, “that it seemed to me almost beyond belief that in the midst of it were men, with eyes and ears and sensitive nerves, being ripped open and mangled as they endured the maelstrom of tumult and terror.” Surrounded by the bodies of the dead, Cannon confronted the stark frailty and cruelty of humanity. Amid this devastation, he found himself questioning, “Could it be possible that light might break and the world be gay and joyous again?”Footnote ²²

Cannon’s research after the war deepened his distress. Over the two decades since his time in medical school, his understanding of physiology had evolved in parallel with social changes. Initially, his focus was on digestion.Footnote ²³ In the 1910s, as reformist fervor swept across America, his focus shifted to the bodily effects of “strong emotional states.” Just as agitation and demonstrations disrupted social order, intense emotions like fear and rage interfered with animals’ normal functions, such as digestion. Yet Cannon viewed these emotions, much like his perspective on social activism, positively: fear and rage were signs of vitality, raising blood sugar levels to prepare the body for “fight or flight” in response to external threats.Footnote ²⁴ His wartime research on “wound shock” or “traumatic shock,” however, dampened this optimism. The fear and rage of battlefields were not mere temporary disruptions; they inflicted lasting damage on soldiers’ emotional systems.Footnote ²⁵ Subsequent research painted an even bleaker picture. His laboratory discovered that the brain’s subcortical “center” responsible for emotional outbursts lay outside the cerebral cortex—the domain of rationality and consciousness in the brain. This implied that reason could not fully govern emotions. In other words, the Deweyan “scientific habit of mind” might not control the Freudian “unconscious mind.”Footnote ²⁶

Through the 1920s, Cannon’s theory of homeostasis arose at this intersection of confidence and anxiety as a device with which to retain his long-held belief in progress in the face of increasing concern about stability. At the heart of his concept of homeostasis—“the ability of living beings to maintain their own constancy”—was a reciprocal relationship between progress and stability, with each reinforcing the other. Cannon illustrated this idea by proposing a hierarchy among animal classes as he perceived it. Reptiles, amphibians, and other “lower” cold-blooded animals, he claimed, were “unfree” from their environment—dependent on factors like temperature and humidity—because they had “not yet achieved the level of control over stability seen in more highly evolved forms.” In contrast, “higher animals,” such as mammals, had developed a complex homeostatic mechanism while “engaging in free exchange with the outer world.” They sweated, shivered, and continuously adjusted levels of oxygen, water, sugar, salt, fat, and calcium in their blood to respond automatically to external changes. “The perfection of the process of holding a stable state in spite of extensive shifts of outer circumstance,” noted Cannon, “is not a special gift bestowed upon the highest organisms but is the consequence of a gradual evolution.”Footnote ²⁷

By the 1930s, Cannon was ready to share the insights he had gained from “the wisdom of the body” with an American public confronting the challenges of economic depression at home and the rise of totalitarianism abroad. His discussion of “social homeostasis” combined old and new principles of American liberalism. The older—and abiding—principle was political pluralism. According to him, autocracies—whether old monarchies or emerging totalitarian regimes—were inherently unstable, like “one-cell organisms,” governed by “the personal pride, ambition, or whim of a single man.” In contrast, democratic societies were capable of maintaining stability through constant adaptation, driven by the healthy competition among “diffused functional groups.” “A display of conservatism excites a radical revolt and that in turn is followed by a return to conservatism,” wrote Cannon. The consequences of minimal or inattentive government, in turn, “bring the reformers into power.” This homeostatic cycle was evident in the recent decade: “The noble enthusiasms and sacrifices of war are succeeded by moral apathy and orgies of self-indulgence.”Footnote ²⁸ The American people of the 1920s, weary of reform and scarred by war, understandably craved “not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy.”Footnote ²⁹

However, as the challenges of the Great Depression and rising totalitarianism indicated, this was a time for reform. Cannon’s idea of “social homeostasis” embraced a new liberal principle that would shape American politics for decades: “stability is of prime importance. It is more important than economy.”Footnote ³⁰ He argued that American society could not achieve homeostasis until it guaranteed all citizens access to their “essential needs.” To support this claim, Cannon pointed to the “liberal mode of construction” in the human body. Most human organs, he noted, were designed with generous—and even redundant—capacity: one kidney could function in place of two, significant portions of the lungs could be removed without harm, and four-fifths of the thyroid could be excised with no serious effect. These forms of “margin of safety” were built for emergencies. In a similar vein, Cannon suggested, society required this kind of liberality—what would later be called a “social safety net.” Regardless of circumstances, all citizens needed access to necessities such as food, jobs, housing, medical care, and welfare provisions to guard against economic depressions, natural disasters, and other emergencies. Providing these essentials, he contended in 1932, “would bring freedom from fears, worries, and anxieties concerning livelihood.” In essence, Cannon was advocating for something akin to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, just before its inception.Footnote ³¹

If the New Deal proved that social homeostasis was attainable in a Depression-stricken America, the rising totalitarian threat made it imperative on a global scale. Since the mid-1930s, Cannon had been actively involved in efforts to support democratic republics across the world under the threat of totalitarianism, convinced that “the responsibilities of citizenship may not be restricted to one’s own community, state, or nation.” He was particularly engaged in backing the Spanish Republic, led by Premier Juan Negrín, in its civil war against Francisco Franco, as well as the Chinese Republic in its anticolonial struggle against Japanese imperialism. More controversially, Cannon helped found the American–Soviet Medical Society, promoting the Soviet Union as the only nation aligned with the “freedom-loving peoples” of Spain and China in the spirit of a “free brotherhood of people.” These activities exposed him to the charges of being a communist sympathizer from many Americans.Footnote ³² Despite—or rather because of—his sanguine view of Soviet Russia, he was certain that a pro-democracy alliance of Western liberal democrats and Soviet-style “revolutionary” democrats was sure to defeat the “real” totalitarian enemies: Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. When World War II erupted in 1939, Cannon welcomed it, for he had anticipated it—even called for it—for years.Footnote ³³

By the time of his death in October 1945, Cannon had reaffirmed his earlier Deweyan belief in American democracy, which he saw as essential to achieving social homeostasis during crises like the Great Depression and World War II. It was this view of democracy that distinguished Cannon’s cyclical theory of homeostasis from other conceptions of stability circulating at the time. As its lexical meaning suggests, the steady state of living organisms could imply a tendency toward social conservatism. Indeed, many contemporary sociologists interpreted homeostasis in this way. L. J. Henderson, for example, endorsed the idea while rejecting the possibility of social progress.Footnote ³⁴ Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, who drew directly on Cannon’s physiological model in his theory of “social systems,” treated functional equilibrium primarily as the preservation of an existing normative order.Footnote ³⁵ Cannon, by contrast, fused the organic vision—just as Dewey himself had done—with pragmatic experimentalism, envisioning homeostasis as compatible with, and even dependent on, change, conflict, and reform. Compared to the conservative, status quo-oriented implications associated with the social organism, Cannon’s theory of homeostasis was more dynamic, grounded in a vision of stability not as the opposite of progress, but as its necessary condition—and vice versa.

This reciprocal relationship between progress and stability in Cannon’s theory of homeostasis was rooted not only in the organic analogy but also in his Deweyan view of democracy, nurtured since the Progressive Era. With this faith, he believed that the stability of the human body was the product of evolutionary progress, and that human society was still “in an early stage of that process.” For Cannon, social homeostasis would be achieved through democratic politics, which he defined as “the form of government in which everyone is free to do his best for the public welfare.” As he wrote in 1945, “the wisdom of the body” had taught him that democracy, like all living things, is unfinished: “it must grow, it must be kept alive, and it must be guarded.”Footnote ³⁶

III

“I incline to optimism about the survival of the democratic republic,” wrote John K. Fairbank to Schlesinger in 1986, reflecting on the future of democracy in America. His optimism stemmed from one of the nation’s oldest ideologies: the liberal tradition. “I’ve been a Louis Hartzian for a long time,” he admitted, believing that democracy in America, through “a dispensation of Providence,” was firmly grounded in the country’s distinctive liberal heritage. He then addressed Schlesinger’s question about the prospects for democracy in China under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. His skepticism was based on China’s ancient historical concept, dating back to Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shiji) from around 94 BCE: the dynastic cycle. “The dynastic cycle is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” observed Fairbank. “The dramatic shift from Mao’s idealism to Deng’s pragmatism can be understood in cyclical terms.” Despite the apparent differences between the two leaders, China’s authoritarian political culture remained unchanged, continuing to impede the development of democracy. In Fairbank’s view, political change in China was merely cyclical rather than structural, marked by the transfer of “the Mandate of Heaven” from one ruler to another. “Perhaps this reflects,” he concluded, “a tradition of conformity to leadership examples.”Footnote ³⁷

Since World War II, Fairbank’s views on US–China relations evolved in parallel with the shifting contours of Cold War liberalism—from containment to détente, from the optimism of modernization to a growing sense of disillusionment, and from the assertion of American universalism to the post-Vietnam era’s soul-searching about the peculiarity of that way of life. Fairbank’s intellectual journey began where Cannon’s ended: with an encounter between two stable, “homeostatic” civilizations. Throughout his long and prominent career, Fairbank embraced America’s unique liberal tradition, as framed by Louis Hartz’s interpretation of American history. In The Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz famously claimed that the absence of feudalism in the United States created a lasting liberal consensus centered on civil liberties, personal rights, equal opportunity, and political pluralism. This Hartzian view of American exceptionalism shaped the foundation of Fairbank’s understanding of US–China relations. As both a historian and a liberal intellectual of the Cold War era, Fairbank wrestled with a provocative question Hartz raised at the end of his 1955 book: “Can a people ‘born equal’ ever understand people elsewhere that have to become so?” Could liberal Americans, in other words, truly establish constructive and peaceful relationships with authoritarian China?Footnote ³⁸

Cannon’s theory of homeostasis, with its Deweyan emphasis on democracy as a form of open-ended experimentation, offered Fairbank a critical lens through which to explore the possibility of a modus vivendi between liberal America and authoritarian China. Homeostasis, the idea that societies keep internal stability through self-correcting systems, both reinforced Fairbank’s reliance on Hartz’s framework of American exceptionalism and prompted him to revise it. The Chinese political traditions, rooted in millennia of authoritarian rule, appeared fundamentally at odds with the Hartzian model of liberal America. Yet Fairbank still believed that some form of harmony between the two countries—his own nation and his scholarly focus—was not entirely unattainable. Inspired by Cannon’s theory, Fairbank saw China’s dynastic cycle as a manifestation of its own form of homeostasis. Over centuries, Chinese civilization had developed “self-righting mechanisms” that maintained equilibrium through cycles of rise, and renewal, beginning with its first unification in 221 BCE. This cyclical stability, Fairbank argued, had entrenched an enduring authoritarian tradition in China, which modern political developments continued to reflect. This perspective allowed Fairbank to navigate the ideological tensions between American liberalism and Chinese authoritarianism through the Cold War period.Footnote ³⁹

When Fairbank became the first professor of Asian history at Harvard in 1936, he was convinced that the United States could—and should—transplant the American way of life to other nations, and China in particular. Born in 1907 in Huron, South Dakota, he inherited the can-do spirit of Midwestern progressivism from his mother, a suffragist and a friend of Senator Robert La Follette Jr. The La Follette family’s reform politics in Wisconsin deeply impressed Fairbank, demonstrating how active leadership, intellectual guidance, and popular participation could transform a state “in the cause of the common people against the interests of the few.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The New Deal inspired him further. He saw President Roosevelt, his “brain trust,” and the mobilized “forgotten men” working together to defeat the “economic royalists” and reshape American society. If the Wisconsin model worked nationally, why not apply the American model globally? Before long, Fairbank could find an opportunity for globalizing the New Deal. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and Roosevelt asked Americans to join the battle to save democracy, Fairbank joined gladly.

Remaking the world following the American model—this was the logic of modernization.Footnote ⁴¹ Stationed in China as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, Fairbank urged Americans to see that beyond defeating Japan, the greater task was “to help this area to modernize in time to fit into a world society.” Modernizing China involved a range of efforts, including land reform, industrialization, the liberation of individuals from patriarchal family structures, and improving living conditions for the masses. However, the most pressing need, as Fairbank cabled to the State Department, was to support Chinese intellectuals who “think and speak and teach as we would.” He saw China in the midst of “a cultural struggle” where “modern-democratic-western-ideal ways” were in direct conflict with “old-authoritarian-Chinese-opportunist ways.” These Western-minded intellectuals, Fairbank contended, were America’s greatest assets, capable of shaping a future democratic government and transforming the ignorant peasantry into democratic citizens. China, of course, would “always be different,” as he acknowledged in another cable, but he emphasized nonetheless that in “the values of our own culture, which we now call the democratic way of life,” we must find “principles of universal application.”Footnote ⁴²

However, it was not long before Fairbank realized that the universality of the American way of life was a chimera. In 1949, when Mao Zedong declared victory in the Chinese Civil War and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it became clear that China had no intention of following America’s path—and that America had no power to compel it. “The fall of China,” the first major diplomatic setback for Cold War America, led many US policy makers and scholars to develop, as one historian puts it, “a more rapid, radical vision of modernization.”Footnote ⁴³ Among the most anxious was Walt W. Rostow. In reclaiming the universality of the American model of liberalism, Rostow drafted two case studies on China and its neighboring countries that foreshadowed most of his characteristic arguments, including one for economic growth as the engine of modernizing society as a whole.Footnote ⁴⁴ Fairbank was less appalled by the communist victory. His strong anticommunism notwithstanding, he had surrendered all hope in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, which he considered a party of secret police, landlords, gentries, moneylenders, and reactionaries. In these years, Fairbank’s reflections on US policy became more introspective, focusing on the flaws in American society that had been overlooked within the Hartzian framework, such as “our racial practices” and the contradictions of imperialism “within the free world.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Fairbank, however, did not give up his hope of modernizing China in line with the Hartzian framework of American liberalism. In seeking an alternative path to China’s modernization, he introduced the “impact–response” dynamics as the modern era’s counterbalance to the nation’s age-old dynastic cycle.Footnote ⁴⁶ He insisted that since the nineteenth century, the “western impacts,” however unfair and brutal they had been, had consistently driven this once-secluded “Middle Kingdom” toward liberalization through trade, treaties, and wars. The “Chinese responses,” though often anachronistic and tragic, nonetheless pushed the country in that direction, evident in the establishment of the republican government in 1911 and the intellectual lineage of liberal thought from Liang Qichao to Hu Shi.Footnote ⁴⁷ As many of his students, including Paul A. Cohen and Philip Kuhn, pointed out later, Fairbanks’s impact–response formula was flawed, reflecting a bias that, to borrow Cohen’s words, “equated modern with western and western with important.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Moreover, since the 1990s, scholars have shown that his view of China’s modernization overlooked its non-Western roots—domestic developments, Inner Asian frontier dynamics, and wider Eurasian connections—exposing the hubris of America’s Cold War liberalism, which ultimately contributed to the miscalculations that led to the Vietnam War.Footnote ⁴⁹

In the Cold War context, Fairbank’s view of China’s modernization was unorthodox, even heretical, as he openly advocated for rapprochement with the PRC, asserting that the communists had established thus far “the best government” in modern China. He acknowledged that “Western-trained liberal reformers” had failed in their attempts to remake China according to the American model of liberalism, leaving the communists their turn to drive a “necessary and desirable modernization.” This communist version of modernization included land reform, the liberation of women, challenges to Confucian dogma, and the dismantling of the gentry–peasant hierarchy. These reforms, he admitted, were better suited to China’s historical path and social realities than the liberal reformers’ programs.Footnote ⁵⁰ Fairbank still maintained that the current communist regime “should not be accepted as the final phase of our relationship with China.” Once friendly relations were resumed, America, “a symbol of western democracy in Chinese eyes,” could gradually convince them, not by words but rather by deeds and goodwill, of the superiority of democracy.Footnote ⁵¹ Nevertheless, amid the hysteria of McCarthyism and its aftermath, such arguments were perceived as dangerously “un-American.” Many Americans—most notably John F. Kennedy, a pro-McCarthy senator from Fairbank’s home state—accused him of being a traitor to his country.Footnote ⁵²

In the 1950s and 1960s, at the intersection of his commitment to the Hartzian version of American liberalism and the recognition of its challenges in China, Fairbank revisited his father-in-law’s insights and introduced the concept of “cultural homeostasis.” This led him to reinterpret the ideological implications of the “dynastic cycle.” Fairbank argued that the rises and falls of dynasties had provided the “rhythms and pulsations” of Chinese history. Each dynasty emerged from chaos by restoring imperial power with the support of Confucian scholar–officials and the tacit acceptance of the peasant masses. In turn, each dynasty lost the “Mandate of Heaven” when its rulers fell into vice and failed to safeguard the people’s welfare. Since no dynasty had allowed organized opposition, each was doomed to collapse, often through elite defection and peasant rebellion.Footnote ⁵³ Fairbank asserted that this dynastic cycle, which fostered a “self-equilibrating stability” for over two millennia, continued to influence modern China. Guided by their historical belief that only absolute despotism could ensure national unity and social order, China’s modern rulers—from Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Zedong—sought monopolies of power rather than adopting American-style liberal democracy. This “cultural homeostasis” in the authoritarian tradition, Fairbank concluded, had set a tortuous path for democracy to take root in China.Footnote ⁵⁴

With this awareness of China’s “cultural homeostasis,” Fairbank shifted his self-assigned role from missionary of modernization to “missionary in reverse,” advocating among his fellow citizens for a modus vivendi with China. The Vietnam War pressed him to reassess his country’s relations with the world. In Vietnam and other places, Americans boasted about their inherited ideals of liberal democracy, but Asians saw this rhetoric as a thin veil for US hegemony or even imperialism.Footnote ⁵⁵ Meanwhile, reports of political oppression, mass executions, and totalitarian control in Mao’s China revealed that communist modernization had not freed the country from its authoritarian legacy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Instead, Mao’s attempt to modernize the world’s oldest civilization posed a paradox: “the more he seeks to make China new, the more he seems to fall back on old Chinese ways of doing it … China’s long history has him in quicksand—as he struggles, he becomes more immersed in the attitudes and dreams inherited from China’s past.” Consequently, Fairbank urged that America, bound by its own liberal tradition, must learn to coexist with China, another “culture-bound” nation. This coexistence would be marked by mutual disagreement, yet with the enduring hope that democracy might eventually take root in China through its own spontaneous growth.Footnote ⁵⁷

In the 1980s, the twilight of the Cold War and of his life, Fairbank had come to embrace a Deweyan understanding of democracy: democracy could not be transplanted by others; it had to be planted and cultivated by the Chinese themselves. The task that Americans could and should perform in this process was to reform their own society into a model of democracy worth emulating. This lesson was clearly articulated in the opening of China: A New History, Fairbank’s work posthumously published in 1992. Through China’s course of “modernization without democracy,” Mao had “killed millions and millions of Chinese,” and even the more pragmatic Deng Xiaoping had ordered the shooting of hundreds of “unarmed petitioners for democracy” in the Tiananmen Square in 1989. Despite these tragedies, most Chinese remained reluctant to break from “the world’s longest tradition of successful autocracy.” Their reluctance was, at least partly, due to the shortcomings of the American alternative. In their eyes, Fairbank noted, American freedom merely meant “the drug and gun industries and shooting in the streets.” Human rights fostered zealots who sought to “save every fetus as a sacred human being, never mind its mother and its future.” And American democracy seemed to be a system that had elected a “president from Hollywood” who “lived a fantasy life, lying to himself and the public … while creating an underclass beneath our democracy.”Footnote ⁵⁸

By the time of Fairbank’s death in 1991, China had survived—and, in important respects, was ascendant—amid the ashes of the collapsing communist world. Capitalism had undeniably defeated communism. Did democracy win over authoritarianism? Sensing that “China and America are now major centers of the coming world struggle,” Fairbank, in his memoir, called for another battle—one not between the two nations but rather “between mechanists and humanists” in each nation. Mechanists in America, armed with ideological righteousness and arrogance about their might, sought to change China by force and in a hurry. Conversely, humanists were more flexible and self-reflective, knowing that America was not invincible or infallible.Footnote ⁵⁹

Through his intellectual journey since World War II, Fairbank had come to realize that no single action—not revolution, not modernization, not even the end of the Cold War—would ensure democracy in China. The dynastic cycle, which had maintained “cultural homeostasis” in China for two thousand years, had rendered the country’s political culture fertile for autocracy and barren for democracy. Accordingly, Fairbank asked for humanism. The growth of democracy in China would take unthinkable amounts of time and blood. Americans, sympathetically and patiently, should move along with the Chinese people. And in this process, they must be reform-minded, making their society a model of democracy and themselves living up to their democratic principles. This task would be unfinished for as along as China’s struggle for democracy remained unfinished.Footnote ⁶⁰

IV

“American politics has a cyclical pattern,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr to Israeli diplomat Shimshon Arad in January 1992. “The Reaganite 1980s were a replay of the Eisenhower 1950s, as the conservative 1950s were a replay of the Harding–Coolidge–Hoover 1920s.” “Similarly,” he continued, American politics “moves into a reform phase of the cycle: Theodore Roosevelt ushering in the Progressive Era in 1901; Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in 1933; John Kennedy and the New Frontier in 1961.” Schlesinger’s idea of political cycle, which was allegedly derived from his father, Arthur Schlesinger Sr, was indebted to his father-in-law as well. Schlesinger agreed with Walter Cannon that the logic of American politics was basically “physiological,” swinging between action and inaction, excitement and relaxation, and “fatigue and recuperation.” This cyclical mechanism of “social homeostasis” allowed him to retain hope for the coming of a brighter dawn of liberal reform through the dark night of conservative ascendancy in the 1970s and 1980s. “If the rhythm holds,” he noted, “the 1990s should see the republic re-enter the progressive mode.”Footnote ⁶¹

Schlesinger’s thinking of political homeostasis evolved through his observations of the rise and fall of the “New Deal order” in post-World War II America—from “the Roosevelt revolution” to “the Reagan restoration,” from “the age of reform” to “the age of fracture,” and from “freedom from fear” to “free market.”Footnote ⁶² If there was anyone who could have been called the orthodox interpreter of the New Deal order, Schlesinger was surely one of the best-qualified candidates. His early masterpieces—from The Age of Jackson (1945) to The Age of Roosevelt trilogy (1957–60)—explicitly aimed to provide the historical grounds for the Democratic Party’s reform agendas of the postwar era. Conversely, his later major works—from The Imperial Presidency (1973) to The Cycles of American History (1986)—were dedicated to breaking the Republican dominance and defending the legacy of the New Deal. Through these endeavors, Schlesinger developed a cyclical theory combining wishful thinking, quasi-historical determinism, and unusual insights into American history. At the core of the theory was the cyclical oscillation in national trends “between public purpose and private interest,” which he believed characterized the inherent balance, or “social homeostasis,” in the American political system.Footnote ⁶³

Just as Fairbank drew on Cannon’s theory of homeostasis and its Deweyan implications to rethink both Chinese history and the Cold War, Schlesinger applied their father-in-law’s insights to reconsider the history of American politics as well as its future. However, Schlesinger’s perspective diverged fundamentally from his brother-in-law’s. While Fairbank approached China’s “dynastic cycle” through a Hartzian lens, Schlesinger explicitly rejected this view. Instead, as a historian of progressive reformism culminating in the New Deal, he sought to uncover an alternative political tradition beyond the prevailing ideological consensus, which rested on what Hartz termed “Lockean liberalism.”

Schlesinger found this alternative in republicanism. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Republican Party gained momentum in national politics, the “republican synthesis” began challenging the Hartzian paradigm of liberal tradition in historical scholarship. Yet republicanism posed a dilemma for Schlesinger’s vision of “useful history” for postwar reform politics—particularly with its premise that all republics, ancient and modern, are subject to cycles of growth, corruption, and inevitable decay. Confronted with the dual challenge of Republican ascendancy and republican historiography, Schlesinger formulated his own cyclical concept: “social homeostasis,” rooted in Dewey’s interpretation of democracy as an ongoing process of experimentation.Footnote ⁶⁴

In 1946, when Schlesinger became a professor of history at Harvard, he was confident that liberalism—the ideology of the public good—would ultimately prevail over entrenched private interests in America. Born in 1917, Schlesinger inherited his historical outlook from the early-century progressive historians, who interpreted American history as the eternal struggle between “the people” and powerful vested “interests.” His father, Arthur Schlesinger Sr, taught him about the cyclical alternation of a national mood of “private interest” and one of “public purpose.”Footnote ⁶⁵

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson, Schlesinger applied this framework, portraying “the Jacksonian revolution” as a class struggle in which “the humble members of society” fought against “the rich and powerful.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This narrative clearly echoed what Schlesinger called the “Roosevelt revolution,” in which “the forgotten men” rose up against “economic royalists.” To be sure, this analogy was problematic. Contemporary historians offered sharply different views. Most notably, Richard Hofstadter characterized Jacksonian democracy not as a precursor to the New Deal but as a vehicle for laissez-faire capitalism that shifted economic power from the centralized state of the Hamiltonian–Whig tradition to western frontiersmen and southern slaveholders.Footnote ⁶⁷ Nevertheless, as one reviewer wryly put it, readers unmistakably found in Schlesinger’s book “a brilliant justification of the New Deal disguised as a history of the age of Jackson.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Schlesinger, too, hardly concealed his characteristic presentism. The Jacksonian movement, he argued, represented just one phase in America’s “enduring struggle between the business community and the rest of society.” He positioned the “Jackson–Populist–Progressive–New Deal tradition” in opposition to the Republican–capitalist tradition, seeing it as the foundation of “the basic meaning of American liberalism.”Footnote ⁶⁹

In the 1950s, American politics appeared derailed from that “Jackson–Populist–Progressive–New Deal tradition.” Dwight Eisenhower easily defeated Adlai Stevenson twice in succession, ending the Democratic Party’s two-decade monopoly on the White House. In retrospect, Eisenhower, an elderly war hero promising relaxation and stability to a nation weary from reform and war, embodied the conservative role of maintaining America’s social homeostasis.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, having yet to witness more aggressive alternatives in the decades to come, Schlesinger, who served as an adviser to Stevenson’s ill-fated campaigns in 1952 and 1956, saw Eisenhower’s victory as a resurgence of Gilded Age politics.Footnote ⁷¹

His monumental The Age of Roosevelt trilogy represented an attempt to revive the New Deal order from its apparent dormancy during “the Ike interregnum.” Spanning nearly two thousand pages, the trilogy recounted the cycle of public good and private interest: the “golden age” of progressivism had given way to “the reign of business” in the 1920s, which encountered its nemesis with the Great Depression; FDR’s New Deal, in turn, rekindled the public purpose, triumphing over the Republican Party and the “economic royalists.”Footnote ⁷² The political implication of this narrative was clear: liberals, as they had in the 1930s, could lead a new era of reform—if they could find their own FDR, a new guardian of public good.Footnote ⁷³

Then Schlesinger met John F. Kennedy, who possessed many of FDR’s qualities—wit, urbanity, a practical mind, oratorical brilliance, and political charisma. Yet Kennedy’s politics did not neatly align with his expected role as a liberal hero. In the presidential election of 1960, Kennedy equivocated on his past involvement with McCarthyism, adopted a hawkish stance on the Cold War by accusing Eisenhower of allowing a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union, and distanced himself from the liberal wing of his party.Footnote ⁷⁴ After the election, Schlesinger joined the White House as the president’s special assistant, hoping to draw out “the liberal Kennedy” hidden within this calculating—and at times devious—politician.

Before long, however, Schlesinger had to admit that Kennedy’s presidency betrayed that hope. To Schlesinger, Kennedy seemed overly cautious on issues of civil rights and indifferent to most domestic reform agendas. On the Cold War, Kennedy appeared no less aggressive than his Republican predecessor, as epitomized by the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961—a covert operation designed under Eisenhower and carried out under Kennedy’s administration. Schlesinger was further disappointed at Kennedy’s “reactionary” fiscal policy, particularly his drive for tax cuts in 1962–3. “In area after area,” lamented Schlesinger in July 1962, “we have behaved exactly as the Eisenhower administration would have behaved.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Kennedy’s tragic death in November 1963 marked a decisive turning point in Schlesinger’s thinking about American politics. Despite his admiration of Jackson and FDR, they were distant, historical figures. He wrote about them primarily because he believed that their legends served to bolster the Democratic Party’s position in his own time. Kennedy was different; he was an intimate and beloved friend. In his hagiographic A Thousand Days, Schlesinger lauded Kennedy’s New Frontier not as just another phase, but as the culmination of the progressive–New Deal tradition of liberalism. Kennedy’s modest domestic reforms and mixed foreign-policy record were downplayed as peripheral; Schlesinger argued that the martyred president’s true legacy lay in his style and spirit, rather than his achievements. “Lifting us beyond our capacities, he gave his country back to its best self,” Schlesinger noted. “He re-established the republic as the first generation of our leaders saw it—young, brave, civilized, rational, gay, tough, questing, exultant in excitement and potentiality of history. He transformed the American spirit.” According to Schlesinger, this legacy was so sublime—and so subtle—that no one could emulate or replicate it. With Kennedy’s death, therefore, Schlesinger’s political cycle was suspended abruptly—and indefinitely.Footnote ⁷⁶

The tide of liberalism certainly did not subside with Kennedy’s death, but Schlesinger remained unappreciative of it. To him, Lyndon Johnson was an unqualified usurper, and the Great Society was seen as the delayed realization of JFK’s vision, achieved despite—not because of—LBJ’s presidency.Footnote ⁷⁷ Schlesinger defended Kennedy’s increased US involvement in the Vietnam War, insisting in 1965 that by the time of Kennedy’s inauguration, “choices had already fatally narrowed.” Just one year later, he shifted blame entirely to Johnson, claiming that “Kennedy’s profound insight was forgotten when his successor plunged ahead with the foreign policy of overkill.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In the 1968 presidential election, Schlesinger had several liberal candidates to support, but he rejected Hubert Humphrey, a staunch advocate of civil rights and New Deal liberalism, for his complicity in Johnson’s Vietnam policy. He dismissed Eugene McCarthy as well, despite McCarthy’s firm opposition to the war. Instead, Schlesinger backed Robert Kennedy as the only genuine liberal, even in the face of intense criticism from old friends like pro-Humphrey Walter Reuther and pro-McCarthy John Kenneth Galbraith. In the end, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, liberals remained divided, Humphrey lost the election, and Schlesinger would later describe the 1960s—arguably the climax of American liberalism—as “the worst and saddest decade” of his life.Footnote ⁷⁹

The political tide of the 1970s, which saw conservatism regain momentum, was even more disheartening for Schlesinger. He considered Richard Nixon “the greatest shit … ever elected President of the United States,” and described Nixon’s extension of the Vietnam War as “the most shameful and tragic thing in American history.” Domestically, “Tricky Dick,” though not directly opposing the New Deal order, incited a “white backlash” across the country by using “code words” like crime, welfare, schools, and quotas to stoke racist sentiments. While Nixon’s resignation during the Watergate scandal briefly gave Schlesinger a sense of satisfaction at the downfall of “the bad guys,” the state of his own party sobered him again.Footnote ⁸⁰ To Schlesinger, Jimmy Carter’s presidency represented not only the Democratic Party’s abandonment of its long-standing commitment to active government, but also the rise of evangelicalism in politics. For the first and only time in his life, Schlesinger left the presidential ballot blank in the 1976 election—unable to vote for Republican Gerald Ford or for the Democratic candidate who, in Schlesinger’s words, believed that “Eve was literally made out of Adam’s rib.”Footnote ⁸¹

Confronted with the seemingly unstoppable rise of conservatism after the 1970s, Schlesinger turned to history for answers and found renewed faith in what he saw as the core of American democracy: the commitment to experimentation. This belief was most clearly expressed in his 1977 article “America: Experiment or Destiny?”, later republished as the introduction to The Cycles of American History. For Schlesinger, the American republic was not built on the optimistic assumptions of Locke’s natural rights or the Puritan conviction of divine favor. Neither Louis Hartz’s liberal tradition nor Perry Miller’s New England mind could explain the intellectual roots of “the first and noblest expression of free men aspiring to govern themselves.” Rather, the foundation of the American republic lay in classical republicanism, as emphasized by Gordon S. Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, and other historians of the “republican synthesis.” The American founders inherited a worldview shaped by belief in the fragility of republics: “the perishability of republics, the subversion of virtue by power and luxury, the transience of glory, [and] the mutability of human affairs.” This perspective reflected what Pocock famously termed the “Machiavellian moment,” where the survival of a republic relied on the vigilance and virtue of its citizens to resist inevitable cycles of growth, corruption, and decay.Footnote ⁸²

Schlesinger believed that the Deweyan notion of democracy as a process of experimentation—along with its emphasis on civic virtue and active participation—enabled the nascent American republic to break through its Machiavellian moment. In his view, unlike the fatalism that characterized classical republicanism from Cicero to James Harrington, the American founders embraced a forward-looking, experimental approach to governance. They saw their republic not as an ideal to be perfected, but as “the test against history of a hypothesis”—an experiment capable of adapting through continuous self-examination and reform. This experimental spirit, Schlesinger argued, allowed the United States to escape the historical cycle of inevitable decay that had doomed earlier republics, from ancient Rome to Renaissance Florence. “Experiment,” he wrote, “was the way of escape from classical republican doom.” This Deweyan conception of democracy as a dynamic, uncertain, and evolving process, rather than a static system, became central not only to Schlesinger’s understanding of American political history but also to his soul-searching on the future of liberalism in the face of the conservative ascendancy of the late twentieth century.Footnote ⁸³

This belief in democracy as an ongoing experiment led Schlesinger to revisit Walter Cannon’s cyclical theory in The Cycles of American History, published in 1986. Reflecting on “the past and future of the American experiment” during the height of the “Reagan Revolution,” he was certainly unsettled by what he viewed as the era’s “reactionary” politics that assaulted the hard-won achievements of liberalism—from equal rights to the welfare state—under the guise of promoting the “free market.” Despite this, he was more optimistic about the future of liberalism than he had been since Kennedy’s death.Footnote ⁸⁴ Schlesinger now embraced Cannon’s teaching that sustained public experiments often exhausted social organisms, which then required time for “digestion” and “recharge.” The phase of private interest, he observed, played “its function in the systole and diastole of society,” acting as a form of corrective action—homeostasis—within the body politic, balancing the excesses of public intervention. At the same time, such periods of private interest served as “times of preparation” for the next wave of reform in the unending experiment of American democracy. Schlesinger held that the American people, never satisfied with the status quo, would soon recognize the excesses of free-market policies and resume public action to curb them. Private interest and public purpose, he concluded, were “indissoluble partners in the great adventure of democracy.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Schlesinger, as he confessed in 1983, had “always been troubled by the contradiction between the determinism of the cycle and [his] belief in the reality of historical choice.”Footnote ⁸⁶ While liberalism had seemed robust and triumphant during the New Deal and the New Frontier, this contradiction remained latent. It became more pronounced after Kennedy’s death, which left Schlesinger politically retrospective, clinging to the memory of the glorious “thousand days.” Had he fully embraced determinism—as he was often tempted to do—his cyclical theory would have crumbled under the pressure of an increasingly harsh reality. By the 1990s, Schlesinger had admitted that this had “plainly not been the liberal era forecast by the cyclical hypothesis.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In fact, such an era would never materialize before his death in 2007. As historian Jefferson Cowie contended, the New Deal order may have been “the great exception” in American history, which otherwise centered on social conservatism and unregulated capitalism.Footnote ⁸⁸

Yet Schlesinger’s recognition of American democracy as an unfinished and open-ended experiment allowed him to retain hope in liberalism without denying the contradiction he confessed. For him, the cycle functioned less as a law of historical necessity than as a way of registering constraint—the recurrent rhythms of reaction and reform that shaped the terrain on which choices could be made. Democratic experimentalism, by contrast, insisted on responsibility: the contingent work of citizens and reformers to redirect politics toward public purpose. In this sense, democracy resisted the lure of fatalism, refusing to treat the “fall of the New Deal order” or the “unraveling of America” as a final verdict. As long as American society continued to confront challenges—from race and gender relations to education, health, and the environment—that could not be resolved by self-interest alone, Schlesinger believed that the American people, driven by a spirit of experimentation, would persist in their democratic pursuit of the public good. Thus the cycle of American politics, though frequently derailed, was not dead.Footnote ⁸⁹

V

“On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord,” Barack Obama stated at his inauguration in January 2009. The leitmotif of his inauguration address—like his campaign chant, “Yes we can”—was hope for a new era of public action. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the new president pledged “bold and swift” measures to meet the public demands for better education, affordable health care, a sustainable environment, and equal relations and opportunities among citizens. Whether his presidency truly inaugurated the new era that many liberals anticipated remains open to debate. But Obama—a serious reader of philosophical pragmatism and American history—undeniably rekindled a long-standing liberal faith in the progress of “ourselves, our nation, and the world” toward a better future.Footnote ⁹⁰ This hope echoed the message that Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger sought to convey through their reflection on the human body, Chinese history, and American politics. That hope also has guided generations of liberals through crises and continuously inspired them to engage with a complex and unpredictable world.

The hope embodied in the cyclical theories of Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger was grounded in their shared view of democracy as an ongoing project. My interdisciplinary study of their intellectual journeys highlights how Cannon’s theory of homeostasis, particularly its Deweyan emphasis on experimentation, influenced both Fairbank’s and Schlesinger’s understanding of historical cycles. Fairbank, inspired by the concept of homeostasis, introduced the notion of “cultural homeostasis” in China. This allowed him to explore the possibility of coexistence between liberal America and authoritarian China, modifying Hartz’s exceptionalist framework and recognizing the ideological implications of China’s dynastic cycles as the country’s long-standing self-correcting mechanisms. Schlesinger applied Cannon’s insights to American politics, addressing the historical questions raised by Pocock and other scholars of republicanism, and formulated his own idea of “social homeostasis” as a means to navigate the cycles of reform and conservatism in US political history. Through this examination, my has article provided deeper understanding of the trajectory of American liberalism, showing how these intellectuals’ cyclical views were grounded in Dewey’s pragmatism and democratic experimentalism.

Admittedly, this article has not offered a comprehensive account of twentieth-century American liberalism or its democratic ideals. Framing the story through the lives of three white male Harvard professors inevitably yields a selective—and at times distorted—perspective. Few Americans shared their privileged circumstances in affluent—and de facto segregated—suburban enclaves near one of the nation’s wealthiest and most liberal cities.Footnote ⁹¹

One omission in this narrative, I hope, points toward a fruitful direction for future research: gender. Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger gave little sustained attention to the place of women in a democratic society—a striking absence given their familial ties to wives and daughters who were, like their male partners, deeply engaged in reform and public life. Cornelia James Cannon, Wilma Cannon Fairbank, and Marian Cannon Schlesinger each pursued notable careers as reformers, writers, artists, and intellectuals, sharing their father’s and husbands’ liberal politics and Deweyan democratic convictions. These women shaped the Cannon family’s intellectual climate and often dominated its conversations.Footnote ⁹² Precisely because their voices were excluded from the men’s reflections on cycles and democracy, their ideas and activities merit serious scholarly attention in their own right within US intellectual history.

Another promising avenue for research lies at the intersection of religion and cyclical theories. Cyclical ideas inherently carry metaphysical—and, to some degree, providential—overtones, positing a unifying purpose that imparts order to an otherwise chaotic empirical world. Cannon described homeostasis as “teleological,” while his sons-in-law wrestled with the deterministic cast of cycles in Chinese and American history. Yet, unlike other cyclical theorists—such as Pitirim Sorokin, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee—the liberals in this study were avowedly secular, seldom invoking Christianity or other religions as sources of ethical authority.Footnote ⁹³ How, then, did their secular outlook shape the structure and substance of their cyclical thought, and how did religious and secular thinkers alike negotiate the metaphysical residue embedded in cyclical theories? Exploring such questions would illuminate overlooked relationships between liberalism, religion, and the cyclical imagination in modern intellectual history.Footnote ⁹⁴

Over the decades, the cyclical visions of Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger—once emblematic of liberal confidence—have not withstood the test of time. Cannon’s theory of homeostasis has yielded to the notion of “allostasis,” which emphasizes the cumulative burden of predictive adjustment—the “allostatic load”—over the maintenance of stable equilibrium.Footnote ⁹⁵ Fairbank’s dualistic view of the modern West versus dynastic China has been challenged by recent historiographical trends, such as the Eurasian turn and the new Qing history.Footnote ⁹⁶ Likewise, in the wake of the new social history and “the cultural turn,” few scholars now accept Schlesinger’s views of FDR, JFK, and other “great men.” Their optimistic vision of liberalism, too, has faded amid the turmoil of the Trump era. American historians—shocked by his rise, disturbed by his presidency, and terrified by his return—have underscored the illiberal currents running through the nation’s past. “Illiberalism,” Steven Hahn observes, “is not confined to the margins of American society … it has long constituted a central field of political and cultural force.”Footnote ⁹⁷ As their cyclical frameworks have unraveled facing the passage of time, so too has their hopeful liberalism facing the crisis of democracy.

Yet the current predicament of democracy in America—and indeed across the world—calls for serious reflection on what insights might still be drawn from their outdated frameworks and shaky optimism.Footnote ⁹⁸ Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger articulated their cyclical theories at moments when they saw American democracy in crisis—during the Great Depression, the world wars, the Cold War, and the collapse of the New Deal order. In doing so, these liberals turned to Dewey’s vision of democracy as an endless, open-ended experiment, which enabled them to retain and revive optimism. Just as what one day is built can be undone the next, what fails today may yet succeed tomorrow. Democracy’s indeterminacy offers no guarantees, yet it sustains the ever-renewable possibility of hope. This, I suggest, is the common insight behind Cannon’s homeostasis, Fairbank’s Chinese dynastic cycle, and Schlesinger’s American political cycle. Though often overlooked and frequently challenged, this insight has never been entirely forgotten and remains a source of inspiration for liberals today. Obama was one such example. In 2017, the former president remarked that “the values and the progress that we cherish are not inevitable … they are fragile, in need of constant renewal.”Footnote ⁹⁹