The Politics of Hope, Democracy in Crisis: Cycles in the Human Body, Chinese History, and American Politics

This interdisciplinary study discusses the political implications of three interrelated cyclical theories articulated in twentieth-century America: Walter B. Cannon’s notion of homeostasis in the human body, John K. Fairbank’s analysis of the dynastic cycle in Chinese history, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s view of cycles in American politics. By intertwining the theories with the trajectories of early-century progressivism, Cold War liberalism, and the postwar New Deal order, this article argues that these three liberal intellectuals expressed in common a faith in the vitality of American democracy during its successive crises. Their hopeful worldview rested on their understanding of democracy. Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger upheld democracy not as a specific political system built in their country but rather as an endless and open-ended project by which individual women and men would reshape their common destiny.