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This chapter examines the historiographical debates inspired by the French Revolution, discussing how the impact of the Revisionist attack on the social (or Marxist) interpretation led to a richer, but ultimately more confused picture as historians pursued a wide variety of political, cultural, and intellectual approaches to the origins of 1789. It argues that current historiography has reached something of an impasse and that in order to understand the breakdown of the absolute monarch it is necessary to reconsider the central political preoccupations of the absolute monarchy, that is to say its military, diplomatic, colonial, and financial policies, and to examine how these interacted with broader social and cultural issues, such as the need to manage social elites, to cope with the expectations of public opinion, and to cope with the broader intellectual changes that were undermining deference for a monarch still officially justified as reigning by the grace of God.

The objective of this book is to analyse the historiography of US Cold War foreign policy. It examining traditionalism, revisionism, post-revisionism, corporatism, world-systems theory, and post-structuralism. It aims to show how the most influential diplomatic historians have sought to explain US Cold War foreign policy and what the key differences between their perspectives are. It clarifies and analyses these perspectives at a theoretical level to determine which explanatory frameworks fit the empirical data.

This chapter explores the post-revisionist perspective of the history of the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War. It explains that post-revisionism is currently the dominant interpretation of American foreign policy and this may be because of its use of the dominant theory from the discipline of international relations in its interpretation. It analyses the works of John Lewis Gaddis and Melvyn P. Leffler and suggests that their emphasis on the systemic resource of American foreign policy and the importance of placing the US within an international geopolitical system is the most important theoretical contribution of post-revisionism to the understanding of US foreign policy. However, they failed to integrate the strongest elements of traditionalism and revisionism into a coherent synthesis.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on various interpretation of US foreign policy during the Cold War, which include traditionalism, revisionism, post-revisionism, corporatism, world-systems theory, post-structuralism, culturalism. They all provide valuable insights into US foreign policy but they are all inadequate as complete explanations of that policy. These various perspectives show that American foreign policy during this period had geopolitical, social, cultural, linguistic, and ideological dimensions.

The Introduction offers an overview of the historiography of the English Civil Wars and Revolution, situating the present study within several recent trends in scholarship on early modern England. The approach and methods adopted in the book are outlined. The central category used—“radical parliamentarians”—is delineated and discussed. The goals of the study are then defined. The book aims to trace and illuminate the processes whereby a society, bound by custom, monarchical institutions, the ancient constitution, and orthodox Christianity, unraveled, cascading into constitutional and religious innovation, and, ultimately, regicide and republicanism.