Arthur Schlesinger junior knew that he was frozen in the past. His thought had stopped, he admitted in old age, half a century before–around 1946, the year when, at 29, he had won a Pulitzer for his book on Andrew Jackson and had been made a professor of history at Harvard. He had no particular need to revise his thinking after that, because the shape of American history was now clear to him. It moved in cycles. In some ages–the 1880s, the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s–men’s motivations were nothing but their own comfort and profit. But after sating themselves on selfishness and letting plutocrats run things for a while, Americans would recover their true virtue and passion, and work for the good of society and their country.
— obituary from the Economist