This is an idiosyncratic, thoughtful and at times frustrating book that contributes powerfully to the current tendency to upgrade Ronald Reagan's presidency. A prominent intellectual historian, Diggins has assigned himself the challenging task of elucidating Reagan's moral philosophy and presenting it in the tradition of Western political thought. While the frequent invocation of such authors as Tom Paine, William Ellery Channing, Friedrich Nietzche and Max Weber can bemuse, Diggins does make a fascinating case for the “Emersonian” cast of Reagan's mind, with his belief in the essential, divinely inspired goodness of human beings and his confidence that America was the ever-evolving “country of tomorrow.” In this Reagan was an unusual conservative, convinced – like many liberals – that human desires needed to be unleashed rather than constrained. This optimistic belief in human nature was allied to a conviction that people could make a difference, that history was not predetermined. Such an outlook increasingly distanced the President from his more conservative and fatalistic advisers and propelled him into his determined negotiations with the Soviet Union, the objective of which was not to destroy Soviet communism but to put an end to the arms race and give the world a meaningful peace. As it happened, after he had achieved an accord with Gorbachev, the Soviet system did dissolve, largely because of its own weaknesses, and the American ideals for which Reagan spoke helped to free the peoples of Eastern Europe.

Diggins is not an unqualified admirer of Ronald Reagan. He clearly regards Reagan's belief in human goodness as naive, and is scathing about many of his policies in the Third World – abetting brutal attempts to stamp out the spectre of communism in developing countries even as he was wooing Soviet leaders in Moscow – and about his endorsement of domestic policies of questionable value. Reagan berated “welfare queens” while seeming untroubled by the rip-offs by the rich and the financial scandals that punctuated the 1980s. Further, if he was associated with rescuing Eastern Europe from a totalitarian embrace, his crusade against big government and bureaucracy at home largely failed. But at the end of the day, even as Diggins concedes that Reagan did not reach the first rank of Presidents, he claims for him a “greatness of soul.” Reagan's great vision was that the threat of nuclear annihilation could be removed, and he – with Gorbachev and others – changed the course of history. Others who might have been President in the 1980s, so it is implied, trapped in Cold War verities, very likely would not have achieved the extraordinary goal of ending the Cold War peacefully.