Diggins taught history at
San Francisco State University until 1969, when he accepted a position at UC Irvine. There, he served as an associate professor. In 1990, Diggins moved to City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY), where he stayed for two decades. He served as acting director of the Graduate Center from 1996 to 1997. For a year, Diggins held the chair in American Civilization at the
École des hautes études, Paris, and was also a visiting professor at Cambridge and Princeton Universities. Additionally, Diggins was a consultant and frequent lecturer at the
University of London and
Columbia University. Diggins' first book was
Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, in which he described the popularity of the Italian dictator prior to
World War II and the reaction to him in the U.S. The book won Diggins the 1972
John H. Dunning Prize. He then wrote
The American Left in the Twentieth Century (1973), which was later revised in 1992 as
The Rise and Fall of the American Left. In this book, Diggins was critical of the
New Left and even tougher on the academic left, which had to a considerable extent inspired the New Left. He was also dismissive of the postmodernist ideas of
Michel Foucault and
Jacques Derrida. His next book was
Up from Communism, which described four prominent doctrinaire liberal thinkers who changed their ideology to embrace conservatism. In the best-selling
Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, Diggins asserted that
Reagan was treated dismissively, and that his virtues were truly liberal. That view had been contrary to Diggins's original view of Reagan as governor of California during the
1960s Berkeley protests, in which Reagan, as Diggins remembered, seemed to be "standing for tear gas and police." Diggins declared Reagan to be "one of the three or four truly great presidents in U.S. history." He stated that his view of Reagan changed upon reading Reagan's writings that were released after
Reagan's death. Diggins concluded that Reagan was, in fact, "far from conservative" and more on the liberal side of the ideological spectrum. He stated, "I am left of right and right of left." Diggins was a consultant on various documentary films, including
Between the Wars,
Reds,
John Dos Passos,
The Greenwich Village Rebellion,
Emma Goldman,
Arguing the World,
The Future of the American Left, and
Il Duce, Fascismo e American (Italian television). Diggins also appeared in numerous interviews with
C-SPAN. Diggins earned a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, became a resident scholar at the
Rockefeller Foundation in 1989, and was nominated for the National Book Award for History. == Criticism ==