Reflections on "Terrorism and the American Experience"

Beverly Gage's illuminating account is remarkable for its comprehensiveness and suggestions for overcoming obstacles to making terrorist history a useful academic subject. I will continue that discussion, focusing on similar difficulties among social scientists, addressing her comments on the four-waves theory, and describing my efforts to overcome the indifference of social scientists to history. J. B. S. Hardman's article in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1934) was the initial effort to deal with the history of modern terrorism, and he was not a historian. He concluded that terrorism had no future because terrorists failed to generate necessary support from “classes” and/or “masses.” He acknowledged that terror helped achieve Irish independence but did not explain why that was the only success. Did his argument convince the editors of the encyclopedia's second edition (1968) to eliminate the entry on terrorism? Perhaps, but it is difficult to understand why they ignored their more recent history: after World War II, Western colonial empires experienced a variety of successful terrorist campaigns, including those in the Palestine Mandate, Cyprus, Aden, and Algeria. The editors may have felt the disappearance of overseas empires meant that terrorist campaigns had no contemporary relevance. Whatever the reason, they seemed oblivious to political violence beyond the subject of war. Assassination, a significant entry in the earlier edition, was also scrapped even though President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963 and presidential assassination attempts have been an important part of U.S. history. The topic of election violence from the first edition, also an important subject in American history, met the same fate. Subsequently, the study of election violence largely disappeared in the United States, and although “no subject attracts political scientists more than elections,” we remained oblivious to election violence for forty more years. That changed in 2010, largely because of events in other countries, as a United Nations Human Rights Council report shows.1