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George
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Scott
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O L U M E 4, •N
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Table
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tH
Editor's
Introduction
Jim
Sleeper, "Orwell's 'Smelly Little Orthodoxies'--And Ours"
Joseph
Lucas, "The West in Perspective: An Interview with David Landes"
Karen
E. Fields, "On Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life:
The Scholarly Translator's Work"
David
Kronstan, "The Projeny of the Warrior: Dean Miller's Epic Heroes"
Fay
A. Yarbrough, "Speaking of Books: Love and Hate in Jamestown"
Alan
Kulikoff, "Electric Ben: Franklin in Popular History"
Bruce
Kuklick, "Biography and American Intellectual History"
Anthony
D'Agostino, "The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History"
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INTRODUCTION:
OF THE WRITING OF HISTORY
by
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Of
social scientists, the great Irish-born scientist, John Desmond Bernal,
is reputed once to have said, when they “run out of things to say, they
talk about method.”[1]
A pioneer in such sciences as X-ray crystallography and molecular biology
and a dedicated Marxist, Bernal saw discussions of method as the trivialization
of science, which he equated with rational thought and credited with the
power to set civilization on its proper course. Thus he wrote in
The
Origin of Life (1967) that “We have to learn to understand nature and
not merely to observe it and endure what it imposes on us. Stupidity,
from being an amiable individual defect, has become a social crime.”
Bernal’s contempt for the trivialization of social science did not signal
opposition to philosophic questions. To the contrary, he insisted
upon the inseparability of science, history, and philosophy—and the impossibility
of divorcing productive intellectual work from a world view, which for
him was necessarily Marxist. A prolific writer, his numerous publications
in science, philosophy, and social questions included a four-volume work
on Science in History.
Bernal
belonged to a group of distinguished British Marxist intellectuals who
bore the imprint of the 1930s. Politically dedicated to the triumph
of socialism, intellectually they were—sometimes more than they recognized—heirs
to the Scottish Historical School and even to its offspring, the Whig interpretation
of history. In emphasizing the imperative of understanding nature
in contrast simply to observing it, Bernal was implicitly, if not intentionally,
criticizing Rankean empiricism and aligning himself with the propagators
of grand encompassing theories of history. At the same time, he remained
an uncompromising materialist, who never questioned the material reality
of the nature theory was to understand. Although Bernal per se
does not figure in the pages of this issue, the political and intellectual
preoccupations he shared with many of the leading members of his generation
do.
In
Britain and the United States, intellectual enthusiasm for Marxism crested
during the 1930s and thereafter came under growing suspicion, although,
for many Western intellectuals, the fire bell in the night came with the
Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1947. Thereafter, disaffection
proceeded apace, spurred by the Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1956 and
culminating in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. By then, with
a few prominent exceptions, British and American academic Marxism was slipping
into an increasingly romantic form of social history. The crushing
of the “Prague Spring” combined with ’68 student demonstrations throughout
the Western world dealt the final blow to what overnight became known as
the “Old Left.” The New Left that replaced it moved rapidly to discredit
the intellectual assumptions of previous generations, dismissing those
of Marxists together with those of the bourgeois establishment.
New
Left intellectuals did not immediately find their theoretical sea legs,
although from the start they vehemently opposed what they condemned as
the authoritarian elitism of previous historical theories and schools and
insisted that intellectual work prove its “relevance” to the present concerns
of individuals. Intent upon recapturing the voices and experiences
of the “people” over whom previous scholarship had ridden roughshod, they
especially focused on the unmediated history of working people, African
Americans, and women, adding other social, cultural, and sexual groups
as they staked their distinct claims. Eventually, even the most committed
practitioners of this new history-from-the-bottom-up began to notice the
limitations inherent in their project, notably an empiricism and attention
to the microcosm—frequently called the “community”—that permitted less
than satisfactory interpretations of their findings. Few outsiders
took advantage of that opportunity, either out of lack of interest in the
topics or out of a justifiable fear of being condemned for one of a growing
list of sins, beginning with “racism” and “sexism.” In the measure
that debates over interpretation did arise, they left no doubt that the
foundational premise of the new work was autobiographical. Each had
an inalienable right to tell his or her own story in the “voice” and for
the purposes he or she wished.
The
results were more than occasionally bizarre, and one of the more bizarre—which
may stand as an example of others—must be the determination of some feminist
historians to reclaim the writing of history for women by changing the
name to “herstory.” Obviously, they reasoned, there was no escaping
the intrinsic patriarchalism of a subject that unabashedly advertised its
maleness in the pronoun embedded in its name. Had their command of
language matched the passion of their ideology, they might have had an
argument. The argument might not have been strong and might not have
prevailed, but it would have been grounded in a recognizable complaint.
In the event, their intellectual shortcomings decisively undermined their
political case, although many of their followers have yet to recognize
the problem: History never has meant “his story.” The word derives
from the Latin “historia,” which has persisted in various Romance languages,
as in the familiar French “histoire,” which, tellingly, translates as both
history and story.
The
French includes not even the illusion of an embedded pronoun, and in any
case, the noun is feminine. The original reasons for the noun’s gender
are obscure, but the link between history and story may be more interesting
and considerably easier to explain. History was narrative long before
it was “scientific”—if indeed it ever has attained the basic criterion
of scientific rigor that materialists like Bernal claimed for it, namely
verifiable and replicable experiments. The idea of history as a story,
or cluster of stories, offers considerable comfort to feminist and other
contemporary critics of what they like to dismiss as “official” history
and which they readily charge with a variety of biases, notably claims
to objectivity.
Today,
the idea that history originated as stories is frequently taken to confirm
that it is preeminently a subjective account that reflects and reinforces
the “identity” of the person telling the story. But that comfortable
view mistakes earlier understandings of the nature and function of story
as history. The idea of history as story does point to its roots
in oral culture and even to the possibility of its special ties to the
informality and comfort of the domestic circle—chat or gossip rather than
official pronouncement. And since traditionally the domestic sphere
is that of women, who were often the custodians of their peoples’ stories—often
the only ones to attempt to chronicle their history—this view of history
permits one to view it as essentially a female project. Often, but
not always. Edward Yamauchi’s discussion of biblical history in our
last issue reveals an unabashedly patriarchal historical tradition that
primarily speaks of wars, religious organization, and state-building.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey similarly bridge oral and literate
culture with the primary purpose of elucidating the public life of peoples
and establishing an official record.
The
juxtaposition of history as science and as personal story opens fascinating,
sometimes uncomfortable, windows on the practice of what the great French
historian, Marc Bloch, called, in the book of that title, “the historian’s
craft.” At first blush, we might be tempted to see a radical opposition
between the “scientific” and the “narrative” practices of the craft.
But to do so would be uncritically to accede to the intuitive view of the
former as “objective” and the latter as “subjective,” whereas neither is
rigorously the one or the other. Critics from both Right and
Left have always been quick to charge various forms of purportedly objective
history with political or ideological bias: Conservative critics saw as
little honest science in Marxist history as Marxist critics saw in Whig
and Liberal history. By the same token, the purportedly “liberating”
history of personal stories turns out, on close inspection, to impose its
own brand of conformity at least as fiercely as its rivals.
Recent
years have spawned a flurry of discussions about the writing of history,
most of them focused on “theory,” and many invitations to recast Bernal’s
complaint as, “When historians run out of things to say, they talk about
theory.” The temptation should be resisted. Theory per se
is not the problem now any more than it has ever been. Only the naïve
claim that historical accounts, scientific, narrative, or other, are not
implicitly or explicitly shaped by theoretical assumptions and influenced
by ideological commitments. But much of the theory that has arisen
from the ashes of New Left activism is disquietingly self-referential.
It
would be inaccurate and unfair to say that writing about the writing of
history—how we do it and how we should do it—has replaced the actual writing
of history, but the former has decisively gained ground on the latter and,
perhaps more telling, it increasingly claims pride of place among the most
fashionable historians. No doubt explicit reflection upon the practice
of our craft helps us to understand where we have been, where we are, and
where we are, or hope to be, going. But without substantive scholarship
against which to measure our theories, we are increasingly drawn into what
might, with an apology to Piero Sraffa, be called “the production of theory
by means of theory.” Worse, on the basis of such inadequate theoretical
speculation, we risk slipping into “scholarship” designed solely to confirm
the theory. Thus do we lose our grasp on the independent existence
of previous societies and systems of belief. Thus do we subsume all
previous human experience to our own biases and purposes.
Previous
issues of The Journal have included reviews and articles that criticize
the excesses of much contemporary historical work, and we know that our
readers take exception to the enforced orthodoxy of what many call “political
correctness.” But we have yet to devote an entire issue, or even
the majority of a single issue, to discussions of contemporary historical
writing. In no small part, that reticence testified to our primary
commitment, namely the publication of intrinsically significant and diverse
historical scholarship as well as a variety of historical genres.
But it also reflected a reluctance to engage battles that too easily degenerate
into empty, if nasty, invective. With battle lines rigidly drawn,
the two sides in the “culture wars” are both vulnerable to losing sight
of the larger questions. By now, few of the participants seem deeply
engaged in, or even informed about, the longstanding philosophical debates
between materialism and idealism, and many might be hard pressed to identify
the specific elements that characterize a position as of the Left or the
Right—if either term still has any coherent meaning or represents a coherent
politics.
Framed
by Jim Sleeper’s discussion of George Orwell’s difficulties in securing
a publisher for Animal Farm and Anthony d’Agostino’s discussion
of the cycles of revisionism in diplomatic history, this issue engages
various aspects of contemporary historical practice and theory. A
contemporary of Bernal as well as a onetime political comrade, Orwell rapidly
became disillusioned with the Soviet example of socialism, which his Animal
Farm bitingly satirized. Today, when such phrases as “some pigs
are more equal than others” have passed into the general culture, it seems
implausible that Orwell have had difficulty in finding a publisher for
Animal
Farm, but he did. Beginning with Victor Gollancz, London’s leading
leftwing publisher and Orwell’s friend, British socialists and communists
condemned the book as treasonous to the Left, while liberals and conservatives
condemned it for its leftwing sensibility. Sleeper takes Orwell’s
experience as emblematic of the intellectual coercion democratic cultures
frequently exercise against those who challenge their pieties.
Sleeper
has had his own experiences with intellectual intolerance—the “smelly little
orthodoxies” of his title—which make him especially sensitive to Orwell’s
difficulties. But however disillusioning he finds those particular
cases, his main point transcends them. At issue, as Orwell understood,
are two troubling questions. First, Sleeper asks, may not democracy
itself prove “inherently dangerous to freedom”? Second, is not the
most important quality for a political writer the “elusive courage it takes
to see and illuminate complicated truths about freedom” that may anger
both those on the Left and on the Right, “or worse be taken up opportunistically
by both.” The courage demanded of an honest writer—or any person
of moral and political conviction—is the courage to withstand the covert
but nonetheless deadening censorship that democracies can impose on those
who depart from prevailing orthodoxies. If “we” all agree about one
idea or policy, then how can we tolerate any who would undermine that agreement?
The
problem, Sleeper reminds us, had been clearly foreseen by Alexis de Tocqueville,
who acerbically dissected it in Democracy in America (1835).
Close study of the French Revolution had taught Tocqueville the naïveté
of expecting liberty and equality to be mutually compatible. In practice,
he found a strong tendency for political self-government to become despotic;
thus, as a general rule, “The more ‘democratic’ a society in the colloquial
‘we are all equal’ sense, the less freedom its members are actually likely
to enjoy.” Like Orwell, Sleeper has experienced the intellectual
isolation and exclusion that befalls those who do not hew to the prevailing
line. But he is not writing out of a wave of self-pity. To
the contrary, he is writing to unmask the danger democracy poses to genuine
intellectual freedom. Today, Sleeper insists, “Left and right are
more than occasionally complicit in assaults on civic culture.” In
a world of “chattering” and “gramophone” minds, the liberty we have lost
is the liberty Orwell sought to defend: “to tell people what they do not
want to hear.”
It
is hardly surprising that the writing of history has fallen prey to many
of the tendencies of the larger culture. It would be surprising if
it had not. But the dominant tendency in historical studies has been
partially obscured because it originated as a revolt against what its practitioners
called “consensus history.” From the start, the promoters of the
“new” social history have emphasized diversity, the immediacy of personal
experience, and the so-called elitism of many historical topics and standards.
But the conflict between what Gertrude Himmelfarb has called the “new”
and “old” history was not just another swing of the revisionist pendulum.
The tendency of one generation to revise the conclusions, as well as the
questions and methods, of its predecessor had a venerable pedigree that,
in one form or another, has prevailed as long as history has been written.
In the measure that history has been the custodian of tradition, which,
in the Latin tradition, means the handing on of the old, the writing
of history has always been a conversation between generations and has invited
revision as central to its stewardship of tradition, for without revision,
tradition would whither and die and be lost to subsequent generations.[2]
In
literate cultures, revision preserves the integrity of the record, permitting
us to observe, evaluate, and reflect upon change—and the interpretation
of it. Oral cultures, in contrast, effectively erase all record of
change, because the revised version is always “the way things always have
been.” Oral cultures’ erasure of revision accommodates the tactics
of the new history’s emphasis on immediacy, plurality of voices, and, in
general, a spurious intellectual democracy. And, however ironic it
may seem, the “theoretical turn” of recent years has contributed to the
same result. The problem, as Orwell and Sleeper discovered, is not
so much one of Left versus Right as it is one of imposed conformity and
a widening stream of historical amnesia.
Throughout
a long and distinguished career, David Landes has never lacked the courage
to speak or write as conscience and intellectual integrity have dictated.
Here, in a new departure for The Journal, we publish an interview
he gave to Joseph Lucas. The title, “The West in Perspective,” points
to a central strand in Landes’ thought throughout his career, namely the
importance of individual initiative. From the start, he attended
closely to the importance of entrepreneurship in economic development,
insisting that successes and failures could not adequately be explained
by any purported system of historical laws. With the passage of time,
he emerged as one of the few who fought to defend economic history against
the pyrotechnics of the economists on the one hand and the subjectivism
of the social historians on the other—to preserve, that is, an intelligible
and challenging vision of economic history as central to historical understanding
as a whole. His own work, which has especially focused on the rise
of capitalism and technology in the West, has unflinchingly insisted upon
the unique contributions of the West to economic development throughout
the world.
The
interview offers a rare picture of how a distinguished historian assesses
his own work and a valuable introduction to the influences, including the
colleagues, that led him to formulate the questions that have shaped his
work. Landes’ conversation with Lucas reveals a historian who seems
not to place ideological and political questions at the center of his work.
While he has had strong extra-academic allegiances, he has balanced them
with an equally strong sense of the demands of his craft. The genre
of the interview offers a more personal sense of an historian’s perspective
on the guiding principles of his work, although this interview contains
none of the “confessional” mode that has gained popularity in some literary
and historical circles. It also contains little explicit discussion
of theory, although even a cursory glance at Landes’ work reveals his engagement
with theoretical questions and their influence upon both the structure
and conclusions of his work. Reading his work leaves no doubt about
his distaste for the encompassing scientific theory favored by Bernal as
well as for explosion of self-referential theory in recent decades.
History, in Landes’ hands, represents an unabashed commitment to objectivity
in contrast to subjectivity. What makes his oeuvre as a whole
all the more arresting is his ability to command the analysis of objective
structures and forces with a deep appreciation of the irreplaceable contribution
of the individual.
The
claims of the individual—viewed more as public actor than as private psyche—are
gaining new recognition among historians, although often for different
purposes and audiences, and reflections on the historical study of individuals
figures prominently in this issue. First, however, we must consider
another historiographical problem that, in somewhat different form than
the one presented here, is garnering new and often unfavorable attention.
Sadly, the problem is that of our basic standards of integrity for our
craft. These days, no teacher can remain innocent of the vast possibilities
for cheating afforded by the Internet, which seems to have replaced fraternity
files and other repositories of previously-authored papers. Nor are
many of us unaware of the considerable pressures that are driving our students
to view education solely through the lens of grades—the purported “port
key” to their future success in the world. But, often to the credit
of our more generous instincts, we have been less willing to acknowledge
the slow proliferation of similar problems within our own ranks.
In
the last few years, a succession of highly publicized “cases” has forcibly
opened our eyes, although even with the evidence on the table, some resist
condemning the behavior. From time to time, we hear justifications
based in claims about the practice of Baptist preachers, who, working in
an essentially oral tradition, were wont to borrow from one another’s sermons
without attribution. Bypassing the insult to the vibrancy of the
Baptist tradition, not to mention its deep roots in a venerable oral culture,
this attitude also trivializes intellectual work, which it attempts to
present as, in some way, common property, while emphasizing the “intertextuality”
of all of our efforts and, ultimately, placing a very low premium on standards
of academic honesty and intellectual property. Presumably, the latter
are to be opposed for their elitism, although few who argue this line are
quite as cavalier about their own intellectual property. But at least
the most notorious cases find their way into the public arena and benefit
from public discussion. The countless pettier cases rarely attract
any publicity at all, although they may well pose the greater long-term
threat to our profession and craft by imperceptibly eroding the standards
that have sustained it. We are in the world of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred
Prufrock, who laments, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”
Here,
we cannot pretend to solve the larger problem, although Karen Fields’ essay
on two recent translations of Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms
of Religious Life opens a discussion that others may profitably pursue.
In 1995, Fields published an arresting new translation of Forms
in which she introduced significant departures from earlier translations.
But in 2001, an abridged translation by another appeared that seemed more
closely to resemble hers than statistical probabilities would suggest.
To put the similarities in perspective, Fields has traced the treatment
of key passages through the four translations only to find disconcerting
similarities between hers and the 2001 abridgment. Her discussion
includes beautifully nuanced examples of the demands of producing an accurate
translation, with special attention to the delicate choices a translator
must always make. Thus, in one instance, Fields chose to translate
“ces obscures consciences” as “minds obscure to us” rather than
as “obscure minds,” as the 1915 translation had done. And, in another,
she translated Durkheim’s “les religions mêmes les plus inférieures”
as “even the simplest religions,” in preference to the “even the most inferior
religions” of the 1915 translation.
In
both instances, the choice of words is a genuine choice: There is no “right”
answer, although most of us would prefer the one Fields settled on.
In both instances the choice turns upon both linguistic and cultural considerations.
It is possible that Durkheim, writing at the dawn of the twentieth century,
was closer in sensibility to the 1915 translation than to Fields’.
He was working in an academic and cultural environment that took racial
stratification for granted. But the words he used invite more than
one “correct” reading, and a good translator will seek the rendition more
faithful to Durkheim’s central intent, which was to lay the foundation
for a true comparative study of religion by highlighting the persistence
of fundamental religious themes and purposes. In this perspective,
the possible racism of some of his formulations can only detract from a
modern reader’s understanding of the larger intent and must, consequently,
become a distraction.
Fields
draws us into the endlessly complex world of translation—between languages,
cultures, and historical epochs—but that discussion itself is intended
to open, however delicately, the question of inappropriate “borrowing”
from the work of others. Time after time, the abridged translation
of 2001 appears to lift directly and without acknowledgment from Fields’
translation. After following Fields’ account of the intellectual
work embodied in her translation, no reader is likely to doubt the intellectual
significance of a thoughtful translation, or to take lightly the act of
“borrowing” liberally from it without attribution or acknowledgment.
Great translations have been treated as original works in their own right:
Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,for
example, or the Samuel Putnam translation of Rabelais, or F. Scott Moncrieff’s
of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as The
Remembrance of Things Past. As Fields reminds us, scholarly, like literary,
translation is regularly undervalued, and “the translator’s active work
of reconstruction is wrongly imagined as a kind of mediumship that enables
the text itself to move seamlessly from one language to another.”
Under these conditions, the elementary norms of academic honesty easily
fade away.
The
specific problem is that translation does not flourish in isolation. Hence
a larger problem arises, encouraged by the virtually endless resources
of the Internet—namely, how to discourage and even censure academic dishonesty
in its myriad guises. Whether “scholars” invent their references,
lift whole passages from the work of others without acknowledgement, or
“merely” adopt another scholar’s carefully crafted translation as their
own, they are eroding the integrity of the craft of history. Unfortunately,
the shifting sensibility of the craft seems to encourage rather than thwart
their anti-social behavior. The emphasis upon subjectivity has opened
the door to countless abuses, including the transformation of the prevailing
standard of “how it was” into “how it looks to me.” Few are so naïve
as to cling to the belief that we can necessarily recapture the past, but
some still do still cling to the ideal of practicing the craft with integrity
and the commitment to meeting standards that can stand the scrutiny of
other scholars. Objectivity may not be what men like Bernal previously
took it to be, but its failure to obey iron laws does not justify relinquishing
all attempts to see the past as others might have seen it.
Epics,
legends, myths, and even ballads provide one of the many—and one of the
more important—links between the historical sensibilities of literary and
oral cultures. In two reviews, David Konstan and Fay Yarbrough respectively
take up scholarly discussions of heroes. Reviewing Dean Miller’s
The
Epic Hero, Konstan praises Miller’s exceptional mastery of diverse
literatures and cultures—a mastery that permits Miller to delineate the
exceptionally numerous and varied portrayals of heroes. Drawing upon
impressive learning, Miller’s depiction of the hero in his many guises
presents a varied and protean figure, who ranges from the chivalric knight
to the trickster and beyond. Perhaps the hero’s protean guises owe
something to his origins in an oral culture that preferred strong representatives
of good and bad, but the original vision seems not to have survived translation
into literate culture, for, as Konstan notes, Miller seems ultimately to
conclude, “The hero is not a ruler who nurtures his followers, nor a Weberian
charismatic leader, but a figure devoted to death—his own and others’.”
The
John Smith whom Yarbrough distills from David Price’s Love and Hate
in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation
seems to have something more in common with the trickster than the chivalric
knight. Pragmatism and disregard for hierarchy contributed decisively
to his ability to coerce and cajole his men into the establishment of Jamestown,
although gentler and more traditionally chivalric qualities may have figured
in his relations with Pocahontas, and for Price her story “presages the
larger story of the European colonization of North America.” John
Smith and Pocahontas represent the very marrow of American mythology of
heroism, frequently idealized as an alliance between the colonists and
the native born. But the myths that surround them are subject to
confirmation and refutation on the basis of historical records.
The
records have been affording scholars the possibility of increasing our
knowledge of the history of American Indians and their interactions with
Anglo American colonists. The long and laborious work of collecting
and interpreting treaties and other documents is steadily expanding our
knowledge. The myths nonetheless die hard. Popular audiences
cherish them, if only to infuse some adventure and romance into the early
history of the country. For very different reasons, trendy, “theorizing”
historians are also attached to them, although mainly because they offer
a way of disembedding historical accounts from the straight-jacket of events.
The mythic dimension of figures like John Smith and Pocahontas open opportunity
for endless speculations about the “construction” of the myths and their
significance for those who spun them and the subsequent generations who
clung to them. These elaborate theoretical speculations may not contribute
much to our historical understanding and rarely find a large following
among the general literate public, but they often enjoy considerable prestige
in academic circles.
These
potential and often actual rifts among the different audiences for history
are symptomatic of widespread disagreement about the role of history in
the perpetuation and renewal of a national culture. Biography often
offers a way to bypass some of the more heated theoretical debates, and
it has the special virtue of potentially appealing to both academic and
popular audiences. But, as Bruce Kuklick points out in a review essay
on recent biographies of Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and John Dewey, biography can do only so much. Intellectual
biography in particular, while telling us about the intellectual development
and life of an important figure, can offer us only partial glimpses of
the larger world within which the biographer’s subject operated.
Above all, it can tell us little about the real correspondence between
the ideas of the intellectual and the world or about his or her impact
on it. To call attention to these limitations is not to denigrate
the genre, which remains invaluable for understanding the thought of distinguished
minds. But it remains to disentangle the ties between that thought
and the culture of the period, especially the popular culture.
In
an essay on recent treatments of Benjamin Franklin, Allan Kulikoff engages
these issues, carefully attending to Walter Isaacson’s biography, also
discussed by Kuklick, and Catherine Allen’s long documentary on his life.
Kulikoff attempts to place these efforts in context by considering them
in relation to other recent documentaries, notably Ken Burns’ various treatments
of other giants of the Revolutionary epoch. Even more than assessing
the discrete virtues and failings of these specific works, Kulikoff’s primary
interest lies in assessing the contributions of different historical genres
to our national culture and historical memory. In so doing, he maintains
an admirable balance between pay overdue respect to the ways in which popular
historical works—whether books or films or even the restoration of historic
sites and reenactments of events, battles, and everyday life—can make important
contributions to historical understanding.
Kulikoff
insists that acknowledgment of the value of these efforts does not cancel
our responsibility to criticize them, but he does underscore the responsibility
of professional historians to criticize them for what they are, not for
their failure to be academic history. The truth is that popular history,
including history written for the general educated public that reads the
Wall
Street Journal, does more than most academic history to secure history’s
place in Americans’ sense of themselves as a people. The challenge
for historians is to defend appropriate standards across the spectrum of
historical writing and to appreciate the contributions of a variety of
genres. In this issue we do not take up the place of historical fiction,
but it, too, can make significant contributions to a broader recognition
of the importance of history in the ways in which all Americans think about
their country, the world, and political decisions. The dangers in
popularization, Kulikoff reminds us, lie in simplification and even outright
distortion, much as even the most “theoretical” academic history is capable
of misleading or misrepresenting. In our current situation, when
much academic history is retreating to theory, popular history and biography—to
which we might add military history—often emerge as important custodians
of the story of our national past.
Anthony
D’Agostino moves us back to the European world of Bernal and Orwell—the
world of the World Wars that opened the way for the Russian Revolution
and the emergence of the Soviet Union even as they dramatically transformed
the international balance of world power, undermining Europe’s hegemony
and propelling the United States to the status of super power. At the center
of these dramatic transformations stands what is often known as the “German
problem.” In what measure was Germany responsible for the origins
of the wars? And what fueled German ambitions? Analysis and
accounts of the origins of the two world wars have provoked waves of revisionism,
which have explored a series of complex and politically charged questions.
D’Agostino offers a fascinating account of the successive explanations
of these phenomena, elucidating the ways in which those of one generation
tend to cluster around a primary explanation—such as, the Peace of Versailles
wronged Germany so what could one expect—which the next generation “revises,”
charging Germany with a “griff nach die Weltmacht” (a struggle for world
power) that preceded World War I rather than resulting from it.
History
offers countless opportunities for speculation about the causes, consequences,
and meanings of events, and the recurring attempts to engage the challenges
it offers—not least, its bearing upon our ability to rise to those of our
own time. William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is not dead, it
is not even past.” The same may be said of history, and the recognition
of history’s persisting force in the lives of peoples and nations informs
the persisting attempts to understand its bearing and significance.
The twentieth century brought such extensive and rapid changes to all aspects
of human life that many find it difficult to grasp the significance of
the past for current events, which, pace to the Preacher of Ecclesiastes,
often do seem like something new under the sun. The omnipresent sense
of novelty and the breakneck pace of change—le chic et le choc as
it were—have seemingly put the lessons of the past up for grabs and, by
the same token, moved struggles over the writing of history to center stage.
The contributors to this issue explore some of the many challenges that
confront us and, in so doing, explicitly or implicitly engage the central
questions of democracy’s tendency to sacrifice freedom of thought to the
comfort of conformity, the protections for intellectual property in an
electronic age, the relation between story and analysis—between the telling
of an individual life and the meta-analysis of an age—and the relation
between academic work and the broader culture. These questions are
unlikely to go away any time soon.
From
Jim Sleeper "Orwell's 'Smelly Little Orthodoxies'--And Ours"
“Orwell
perceives causes of intellectual cowardice that run deeper than Stalinism
—and for “cowards” besides those in the “highbrow” “intelligentsia,” who
preoccupy him at the moment. He is struggling, as he would in Nineteen
Eighty-Four, against a more pervasive despair of the public and of
democracy itself, as if both harbored a malignancy that editors may carry
and accelerate but not cause. The long struggle against despair of
democracy had absorbed Orwell from his first encounters with British colonialism
(and the colonials themselves) in Burma, and from his time spent
“down and out” in Paris and London, tramping with Britain’s “underclass,”
sojourning with workers at Wigan, and fighting in Spain alongside proletarians
and peasants . The preoccupation would consume Winston Smith in Nineteen
Eighty-Four: “[I]f there was hope, it lay in the proles.
You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable;
it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement
that it became an act of faith.” Not an illusion, and not even a
revolutionary act of sacrifice, but an almost stoical, tragic, perhaps
even faintly Christic act of faith, a burden so heavy and at times frightening
that many will do anything but bear it—even if they are only publishers
turning aside manuscripts whose force and integrity would leave readers
no escape from the responsibilities and risks of being free.
Reading
Orwell thus revivifies three truths sometimes finessed by political writers
who should know better. First, and not all that surprising, democracy
itself may prove inherently dangerous to freedom. Americans, especially,
are too inclined to conflate freedom and democracy. Second, what
matters most in a political writer is not the courage it takes to stand
for “equality” with the left against the right or for “freedom” with the
right against the left, but the more elusive courage it takes to see and
illuminate complicated truths about freedom that may anger both sides or,
worse, be taken up opportunistically by both sides. Third, courage
depends upon a willingness to strip oneself of protections that come with
the insulations of class, and with the nursed injuries of class—and with
ideological partisanship. Writers who are brave enough to open themselves
to experiences of “freedom” and “equality” they might well have avoided,
and who have the body scars to show for it, will sometimes spoil the effort
by sparring with other writers about whose stigmata are bigger. They may
even argue about whether Orwell, even when “down and out,” always kept
a train ticket home to a comfortable flat. What matters, I think,
is whether one does some stripping and risking or whether one does none.
One writer’s moral imagination may be quickened and instructed by modest
leaps and risks that would seem like a Sunday outing to another.”
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From
Joseph Lucas "The West in Perspective: An Interview with David Landes"
“Lucas:
How do you evaluate the future of “literate” economic history, the kind
of economic history that can be read and absorbed by an educated person
who has not had technical training in economics?
Landes:
This is the kind of question you can ask about any science. Take
physics: There are books that the physicists can read, and then there are
books that are intended for the educated layman. And the second kind
of book makes all the difference, because not only does it give the layman
a sense of the value of what the physicist is doing, but he also gains
a much better sense of the world. It is the same with economics,
which has become a science—not a natural science, but a social science—and
as a science it has become more mathematical, more statistical. It
is full of equations and charts and so on, which the ordinary person cannot
possibly read….
Consider
the whole business I stressed in Atlanta [at the 2002 Conference of The
Historical Society] about global change over time. A thousand years
ago, China was in the lead, and the Muslim Middle East was also ahead of
Europe, which, in spite of some glorious periods in the past, had lost
ground and was seen by some as barbaric and certainly backwards.
Why did everything change, and how did it change, and when did it change?
That stuff is never really going to be satisfactory in mathematical form.
It is the kind of thing where you have to be able to talk to colleagues
in the other social sciences, maybe even colleagues in literature.
It will be of interest even to natural scientists, when you talk about
the calculation of longitude and latitude and things of this kind, or the
role of time and time keeping. One has to learn to write in such
a way that it will be understandable. There will even be room for
style.”
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From
Karen E. Fields "On Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life: The Scholarly Translator's Work"
“Literary
translation is often called an undervalued art. Scholarly translation
lives in a similar twilight. In both, the translator’s active work
of reconstruction is wrongly imagined as a kind of mediumship that enables
the text itself to move seamlessly from one language to another.
One consequence, in the case of scholarly translation, is that the elementary
forms of academic life easily fade and disappear. Few specific rules
guide proper acknowledgement of other translators’ work. But even
if specific rules were many and well-conceived, it is in the nature of
things that few readers could know when those rules have been violated.
Thus the predicament of scholarly translation becomes a predicament for
scholarly collectivity, because the collectivity must uphold for itself,
and inculcate in students, the cardinal principle ‘Do your own work.’”
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From
David Kronstan "The Projeny of the Warrior: Dean Miller's Epic Heroes"
“Miller,
in a large and intriguing book, takes as his subject not the archetype
of the hero, in the reductive manner made popular by Joseph Campbell (in
The
Hero with a Thousand Faces), but rather the hero as he appears in a
specific epic tradition, namely that of the Indo-European family of languages,
which includes English and German, Latin and its romance descendants, Greek,
the Slavic tongues, Albanian, Armenian, Persian, and Sanskrit and its modern
derivatives, and many others. Miller's decision to restrict his survey
to the literatures of the Indo-European linguistic group is not simply
one of convenience. He seeks to trace the evolution of a specific
narrative type from its earliest surviving manifestation in the Homeric
epics, composed roughly three thousand years ago, down through its manifold
variations in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and into modern times.
The transformations of the hero figure have responded to the social conditions
of the poets and their audiences, and Miller's sensitivity to the interplay
between epic narrative and history makes his book of interest to historians:
The code of chivalry shaped one inflection of the epic hero; the Reformation,
with its "recovery of certain scriptural images of God-justified 'heroic'
violence" (15), another; and the discovery of the New World followed by
the advent of Romanticism shaped yet another. But certain features
of the hero persist, according to Miller, and retain even today the stamp
of institutions and beliefs that go back to the earliest phases of Indo-European
society.”
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From
Fay A. Yarbrough "Speaking of Books: Love and Hate in Jamestown"
“David
Price has written an engagingly readable account of the early English efforts
to establish the settlement of Jamestown. Price gives particular
insight into the character of John Smith—his origins, his personality,
and the experiences that shaped his reactions to the New World and its
indigenous populations. In the published accounts of Smith and his
fellow colonists, Smith’s pragmatism and disregard for hierarchy, his ingenuity
and quick-thinking, often saved the colonists. For Price, John Smith
becomes the prototypical American, embodying all of the qualities, good
and bad, of the emerging new nation. Price also explores the role
of the indigenous woman Pocahontas in Jamestown’s success. For Price,
the story of Pocahontas presages the larger story of the European colonization
of North America.
Price’s
sources highlight the experiences of the colonists, which may leave some
readers disappointed by the comparative lack of analysis of American Indians’
perspectives of the interactions between the colonists and the native population.
Price’s prologue and chapter on the first Africans at Jamestown also provoke
questions about the development of the concept of race in American history.
Yet overall, Price offers a detailed description of the sometimes courageous,
and sometimes comically miserable, founding of Jamestown.”
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From
Alan Kulikoff "Electric Ben: Franklin and Popular History"
“Understanding
the goals of popular biography and assessing their success in meeting those
goals decisively helps comprehension of historical memory. But that
does not relieve historians of the task of judging popular work.
We should not require biographers and directors to become professional
historians. We can pass over factual lapses, but not repeated howlers
and distortions that lead readers or viewers to misunderstand the historical
context of the protagonist’s life. If the stories they tell and the
fictions they present preserve the subject’s integrity, viewers gain historical
understanding. In such cases, critics need to avoid carping on inaccurate
but inconsequential details. Occasional errors notwithstanding, neither
Issacson’s biography nor Allan’s documentary misrepresent their subject.
Rather
than emphasize inaccuracies, historians should examine the arguments and
pinpoint the themes of popular biographies but refrain from challenging
the goal of biographers and directors to connect to the lived experience
of their readers and viewers. If excessively pedantic, criticism
could seem to demand that popularizers do academic history. By raising
concerns, professional historians can advance the educational goals biographers
like Isaacson and documentary-makers like Allan share with them.
One ought to judge written biography on the basis of its presentation of
each issue. Filmed biographies, in contrast, require a double analysis,
both of the script and scenes that illustrate it. We should thus
hold Isaacson’s biography to a higher analytical standard but Alllan’s
documentary to a greater visual and evocative one.
Franklin’s
life raises five issues of concern both to historians and to the public.
His evocation of middle-class identity, the grand theme of his life, has
been a subject of controversy for more than a century. An urban man
in a rural world, his ideas were shaped by the city environments in which
he lived. His practicality and politics invite examination of Franklin
as a provincial man of the empire, as a consummate imperial politician,
and as a scientist and thinker.”
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From
Bruce Kuklick "Biography and American Intellectual History"
“As
a collectivity, these books express the deep conservatism of the genre
of historical biography, and they go a little way to explaining why some
historians consider biography an enemy of critical thinking…. None of the
authors escapes making a hero of his subject, and it is this aspect of
biography, at least in American intellectual history, that is most problematic.
The biographical exercise seems designed to provide models of human excellence
for reflective people and to reveal history’s uses as a pep-talk for life
instead of as a repository of cultural knowledge, which would pose less
of a problem if biographers were only to find models in people whom they
imagine to be like themselves. Marsden’s faith commitments barely
damage his treatment of Edwards, and Isaacson’s treatment of Franklin proceeds
with an ideological moderation that does much justice to Franklin himself
and raises few objections. But Buell’s Emerson proves more problematic,
for the hero one gets is but the lengthened shadow of the values of the
biographer, and one hopes that Buell and Emerson were not much alike.
These
volumes illustrate another defect in intellectual biography: biographers
are often ill-equipped to grapple with the ideas that have made their protagonists
suitable objects of study in the first place. Biographers often invoke
some fuzzy distinction between the history of ideas and the biographical
enterprise, with the latter allowed to distance itself from examination
of thought. Isaacson, who does not do much with Franklin’s philosophical
ideas, employs such a strategy with some success. It is disastrous
for Martin, who is philosophically illiterate and overmatched by Dewey’s
thought. Marsden does not need the distinction, for he effectively
mastered eighteenth-century thought to write his Jonathan Edwards.
Looking
at the books as a group, I am struck by the ways in which American intellectual
history focuses, or distorts, our vision of American history. These
volumes make little room for what I might call the benign insights of cultural
studies. Attention to the lives of these successful men of mind does
not permit us to see how the bedrock assumptions of the social order were
shaped; the ways in which the subjects unthinkingly shared these assumptions;
or how they participated in the dominant structures of power and prestige.”
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From
Anthony D'Agostino "The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History"
“Revisionist
historians added greatly to knowledge of the climate and background of
British decision making. As Fay and the moderate revisionists of
the twenties showed, one could be educated by revisionism even if one was
not entirely convinced. Revisionism opened the flood gates before
a greater torrent—once the nuances of Chamberlain’s position were reconsidered,
the next question to ask was whether he, as opposed to Churchill, had not
been right all along. Perhaps it would have been prudent to seek
a greater Germany as a barrier against Soviet Russia; perhaps Churchill
and Eden had erred by their enthusiasm for a Grand Alliance….
Is
it fair, then, to say that revisionism has been the dominant intellectual
trend in European diplomatic history, and has the cause of those who took
us into the two world wars and the Cold War not proved in the end to be
meritorious in the eyes of the historians? The interpretation of
World War One as an accident, in keeping with the revisionism of the twenties,
has not lost its hold on the non-professional reader, and this interpretation
has continued to co-exist with a Churchillian interpretation of World War
II. The two models were sometimes set against each other as alternative
warnings, as for John F. Kennedy in 1961-62. Is it useful to compare
the origins of the two world wars? When AJP Taylor wrote his Origins,
he meant exactly such a comparison, which may have seemed to be a vindication
of “hack diplomatic history.” Watt, whose defense of the Origins
did much to bring about its eventual vindication, concluded only that the
parallels were closer than are admitted by orthodoxy, but less than the
revisionists like Taylor would claim.
Unkind
critics suggest the truly horrifying possibility that historians, as a
kind of deformation professionelle, tend to strive unreasonably
after originality, which may result in their overselling their analyses.
Historians may be too ready to discard work that is “superceded,” even
when no new knowledge or sources have been discovered to enlighten them….It
is useful for historians to resist the pull of fashion and the allure of
current “definitive” accounts to try to appreciate how the story was once
told. Such resistance broadens perspectives and encourages sympathy
for the intelligent educated general reader, who refuses to embrace all
of the latest professional innovations.”
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