Telling no tales.

The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, by Sean Wilentz (Norton, 1,044 pp., $35)

SEAN WILENTZ is a scourge of sentimentality in American historical writing, a refuter of pieties, both those in the triumphalist vein of David McCullough and those of Rainbow Coalition history, the kind that concentrates on everything other than triumphant political figures. How interesting, then, to find Wilentz himself playing the sentimentalist in his new book The Rise of American Democracy. Rise is written in the conviction that there was once a Golden Age in American historical writing, that it is now, alas, no more, and that Wilentz alone can redeem his craft by showing how political history ought to be written.

Wilentz's golden age began with Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson in 1945. It ended in the 1980s--a convenient denouement for one seeking a restoration today. There were many giants in those days--Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward among them--but it is Schlesinger who haunts Wilentz's pages. In The Age of Jackson, Schlesinger toppled older schools of interpretation, Wilentz writes, "by placing democracy's origins firmly in the context of the founding generation's ideas about the few and the many, and by seeing democracy's expansion as an outcome of struggles between classes, not sections." In RiseWilentz follows Schlesinger in attempting to explain the "most profound political transformation in modern history," the collapse of the aristocratic assumptions of the early Republic.

The principal emotion underlying both Schlesinger's and Wilentz's histories is antipathy to undemocratic forms of privilege and mastery. But for neither man is the solution Jeffersonian liberalism--limited government, free trade, states' rights. Much as they admire Jefferson for his faith in the people, both Schlesinger and Wilentz regard the Virginia School as naive in its approach to private enterprise. Both discern in Andrew Jackson's war against the second Bank of the United States the seeds of a more intelligent government role in the economy. "Too rarely have historians appreciated," Wilentz writes, "the [Jacksonian] Democrats' perfect willingness to wield federal power forcefully, over economic issues no less than over [states'-rights issues such as] nullification, when they thought doing so was necessary to protect the democratic republic."

Yet Jackson himself portrayed his attack on the crony capitalism of the Bank (a private institution with exclusive state-sponsored powers) not as an effort to regulate the private sector but as an old-fashioned liberal thrust against "exclusive privileges" granted by the state. Old Hickory acted less like Franklin Roosevelt, with his ambition to administer the national economy, than like Queen Elizabeth I when she abolished royal monopolies. In the "full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue," Jackson said, "every man is equally entitled to protection by law"--a credo not easily reconciled with such subsequent exercises in federal forcefulness as the progressive income tax.

Still, as Schlesinger and Claude Bowers demonstrated, compelling history can as easily be written from the anti-aristocratic, class-struggle perspective as from that of sectional differences (the starting-point of David Hackett Fischer's work). And Wilentz's ambition, to write a historical narrative that does justice to both high politics and grass-roots politics, is laudable. The interest of his book lies in the way he fails to write the engrossing political history he set out to write.

Rise, Wilentz explains, was written "as a narrative." Yet he eschewed techniques that narrative historians since Thucydides have used to make their work readable. The art of historical narrative requires something more than the arrangement of facts in chronological order. A narrative must have vividly drawn characters, and these must be seen to struggle with one another in a dramatic way. Wilentz has written contemptuously of David McCullough, whom he dismisses as a "teller of tales." "Narrative, narrative, narrative," Wilentz complained in his review of McCullough's John Adams. But if one sets out to compose a narrative, one is obliged to be a teller of tales. It is not enough for the narrative historian to refer, as Wilentz does, to "conflicts," "disturbances," "tensions"; he must dramatize them. If the conflicts the historian seeks to portray involve entire classes of men, he must, by means of historical synecdoche, find individuals whose stories typify the struggles of the larger group. His villains must be engagingly evil, his heroes personally sympathetic. Sentimental touches are de rigueur. Thus Schlesinger, a master of narrative, began his chapter on Jackson's Bank veto: "Jessie Benton knew she must keep still and not fidget or squirm, even when General Jackson twisted his fingers too tightly in her curls. The old man, who liked children ..." Narrative, narrative, narrative.

Wilentz is right to say that a historian's fascination with the character of statesmen becomes unhelpful if it leads him to slight their political labors. But to ignore the influence of character on the political work of statesmen is to substitute one vicious practice for another. Remove, from Macaulay's narrative of the Revolution of 1688, the sketches of James II and William III, and what remains ceases to live. Wilentz, however, renounces this tradition. His sketches of personality are perfunctory. Enamored though he is of the demos in the abstract, when it comes to particular people, something in him dies. He averts his gaze and resorts to fill-in-the-blank adjectives ("the indefatigable William Duane," the "deft political self-promoter" William Jones).

Nor do Wilentz's protagonists acquire any more substance in their collisions with one another. Scene-painting he regards as another sentimental vice. What ought to be the most dramatic confrontations in the book--Jackson's struggle with Nicholas Biddle over the Bank, for example--take place in a vacuum. The shadowy dynasts grapple obscurely with one another. A single perspective, that of the omniscient narrator, prevails. Nothing is seen through the eyes of the protagonists; the reader is never invited to feel their emotions. Rise is altogether relentless in its reduction of the variousness of experience to the narrow limits of thesis. It is perhaps too much to ask of a historian that he force his reader to feel, as Stendhal does in his picture of Fabrice at Waterloo, that the calcified past was once an ambiguous present. But the techniques with which Gibbon and Macaulay heightened the suspense of their narratives might have inspired Wilentz to restring his lyre.

The apathy of the writing in Rise is in contrast to the angry lucidity of Wilentz's essays in The New Republic, in which he has lamented the "denigration of politics" in historical writing. But the articulate rage that enables a writer to diagnose flaws in other people's methods cannot sustain him in the pursuit of a solution of his own. The savagery of Wilentz's New Republic essays suggests, too, a deeper problem. So devoted is Wilentz to an ideal of historiographic purity that he has lost the sanity of detachment. Lincoln cracked jokes during the Civil War, but for Wilentz the writing of history--unlike its making--is too solemn for levity. The Rise of American Democracy is funereal. Wilentz has no eye for the illuminating foibles of his protagonists, no interest in the idiosyncratic qualities of their imaginations. This is a drawback in a historian of the 19th century, an age when both supporters and opponents of democracy were perplexed by the question of what kind of men the new and freer forms tended to produce. Even sympathetic observers (such as John Stuart Mill) wondered whether democratic reforms really liberated--or rather created different kinds of oppression, modes of conformity that impoverished the human spirit quite as much as the moribund hierarchical forms.

Had Wilentz attempted to show his protagonists' characters in action, he might have shed light on democracy's ability to foster fresh types of human excellence. But character, for Wilentz, is sentimentality; he is less an evoker than an embalmer of historic personages. As such he is unable to revive the humane methods of Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson, the ideal of his maudlin golden-age elegies. Schlesinger imported the old artistic techniques into a work that nevertheless withstood the scrutiny of the professors. Wilentz's own gestures in the direction of narrative are empty. So faithful is the Princeton professor to the sanctimonious canons that emerged when the discipline of history was professionalized (at the end of the 19th century) that such art as he possesses is rendered impotent.

The object of those who professionalized history was to facilitate the systematic collection of historical facts. The facts, when assembled, would yield a "scientific" picture of the past, superior to the artistic masterpieces of the amateurs. The techno-positivist aspirations that presided at the birth of academic history have long since faded, but the paraphernalia remains--the cardboard monographs, the sawdust surveys, the instinct to overwhelm Clio's delicate structures with a load of abstract data, the insubstantial pageant of "convergences" and "historical arcs" that disfigures Wilentz's pages. His book fails, not on account of its populist aversion to aristocracy, but rather from its scholastic sins against historical art, which can only frustrate his efforts to recreate a golden age of political history.

Mr. Beran is the author of Jefferson's Demonsand The Last Patrician, a study of Robert Kennedy.