The Historical Society, Boston University

“Historians increasingly depict the Great War as opening a door to the barbarization of Europe. That war, however, only unleashed the murderous potential—millions of senseless deaths, political instability, cultural collapse—which was latent in modernity itself. In so doing, it established a pattern of ‘industrial killing’ still alive and well into the new century. German actions and experiences in Russia thus invite interpretation as a precursor to the worst of Nazi atrocities in the East only a quarter-century later….Considered in context, two characteristics of the German army’s experience in Russia stand out. First, the army’s attitudes to the ‘Ostvoelker’ developed within existing matrices and paradigms, rather than generating new ones. Those broad-spectrum attitudes incorporated indifference, amusement, and contempt, as well as fear and hostility. Primarily, they reflected a basic sense of cultural superiority, comprehensively reinforced by the way Germans in the East processed everyday events that lost any ‘charm of difference’ with the passage of time.

A process of racializing the mind-set of alienated superiority clearly surfaced as the German occupation continued. Its consequences, however, were checked by the second characteristic of the occupation: It overwhelmingly involved involuntary participants. Whether killing Russian soldiers, shaving Jewish heads, or having sex with Polish women, the Ostritter of World War I were conscripted conquerors. If they were racists, they were, above all, homesick racists. They saw nothing in the East that was not exponentially better in Germany—and certainly nothing worth the effort of ruling over the natives for the long term. The concept of an eastern imperium may have attracted generals and politicians, but almost everyone else was marking time until he could board the freedom train back home. To the extent that racialization influenced thinking, it propounded a negative: to keep these aliens, their folkways, and their lice, as far away from Germany as possible.

“Drawn from such extraordinary experiences and such prodigious scholarship, [Friedrich] Katz’s new book. [The Life and Times of Pancho Villa] is a uniquely interesting, nuanced, and balanced study of Villa and the Mexican Revolution. Most wisely, it is less a biography of Villa than an old-fashioned demystification of his life and times. Once in a while, therefore, a discussion turns discursive….But the overarching explanation has a conceptual power that pulls the wealth of detail on the man into a coherent reinterpretation of the revolution. Better than any other book yet, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa renders comprehensible the ‘great social changes’ in Mexico that historians in other fields and the public in general have before usually had to read as an exotic explosion.

The book’s title is the key. Only his ‘times,’ in sum the Mexican Revolution, make Villa worth the attention he has received. As Katz demonstrates, neither before 1910 nor after 1920 did Villa do anything of historical significance. But between 1910 and 1920, as Katz also shows, in the first and for decades (despite its official restraint and corruption) the most serious of Latin America’s modern revolutions, Villa organized the largest and most disciplined of all the revolutionary armies, probably the largest revolutionary army in Latin American history, and gave the strongest military support to agrarian reform—Zapata’s as well as his own. If his forces had defeated Carranza’s, which Katz convincingly argues they could have in 1914-15, Mexico would have had a peasant-driven redistribution of land—not the politically managed redistribution it received 20 years later—with a peasantry as foundation of the new regime rather that its eventual creation and creature. This difference, Katz convincingly reasons, would have resulted in a country that was more egalitarian, locally democratic, U.S.-beleaguered, nationalist, and less capitalist. Even in defeat, Katz affirms, Villa forced the official revolutionaries to do justice to some peasants, for example, by land grants in Chihuahua in the 1920s. In his time and place, Villa ranked as a very significant man.”

“At an accelerating pace since World War II,…peoples throughout the globe have been crossing the countryside to the urban threshold, and, today, nearly half of the world’s population qualifies as rural—or, more significantly, as farmers. According to the percentages, our world has become close to fifty percent urban, yet the absolute number of farmers has continued to grow. We thus confront the paradoxical situation in which a growing number of farmers comprise a shrinking share of the world’s population, and, further to complicate the picture, women account for a steadily growing share of that number….

Intuitively, most people assume that the dramatic progress of globalization during recent decades has inevitably resulted in a decline in the world’s farming population. And, worldwide, since World War II, the number of farmers has steadily declined as a percentage of the total economically active population. At the same time, however, the agricultural work force has grown numerically, with the result that there are more farmers today than there were at the beginning of the century when, with the exception of Great Britain, the world was more rural than urban….

For most of history, men have typically dominated the world’s agricultural work force, especially in areas in which farm or peasant households prevailed. Most rural societies have favored a sexual division of labor that assigned men to the fields and women to the house and sometimes the dairy or specialized gardens, and typically cast men as head of the household. Areas of gang labor, especially in slave societies, have broken with these patterns. In recent decades, the number of men in farming has declined, but they still account for more than half the world’s farmers….The numbers reveal that while men outnumber women in the agricultural work force, the number of women has been rising more rapidly. Worldwide, from 1950 to 1990, the number of male agricultural workers rose by forty-two percent; the number of female workers, by sixty-six percent.”

From Ingrid Merikoski’s “The Challenge of Material Progress: The Scottish Enlightenment and Christian Stoicism”

“Union with

England

in 1707 transformed Scotland’s economic fortunes by giving it wider access to English commercial markets and trading routes. Increased prosperity deeply influenced Scotland’s social and intellectual life. A burgeoning middle class became the bulwark of a new commercial order, whose members enjoyed previously unknown opportunities for education, travel, and cultural exchange. By mid-century, members of the merchant and trading classes who formed the ‘middling ranks’ of society, sought to cultivate a refinement in learning, manners, and civility that became hallmarks of Scotland’s ‘polite’ or enlightened society.

Enlightenment thinkers, who were concerned with ethics and morality in a new social order, viewed the motivations for economic action in society as of central interest. The tensions that arose between self-interest and benevolence within rapidly changing social and commercial spheres required special attention, particularly from the Moderate Clergy of the Church of Scotland, who sought to define what the character of ‘commercial man’ should be. The task was daunting, but they eventually devised Christian Stoicism to connect social ethics and Christian principles in a newly commercial and cosmopolitan society….

The Scots’ great challenge was to address humankind’s variable nature in an accessible and consistent way, using tools of empirical evidence upon which their deliberations relied. Christian Stoicism provided an innovative way to do so, as well as a way to defend the compatibility of political economy, morality, and faith in a peculiarly Scottish context.”

From Mark Bauerlein’s “Literary Evidence: A Response to Keith Windschuttle”

“…Windschuttle’s phrase ‘The evidence of the novel is that…’ presents a novel’s evidence as static and not itself subject to diverse interpretations. Early in his essay, Windschuttle claims that ‘the techniques of literary criticism have become part of the methodology of history.’ Literary scholars draw historical generalizations from intricate readings of a few texts; for example, [Edward] Said diagnoses the history of colonialism through ‘a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, some short stories and poems, and one Italian opera.’ Windschuttle proceeds to demonstrate the pitfalls of literary historicism, namely, Said’s factual blunders. Said thinks it is illegal for an Australian convict in the nineteenth century to return to Great Britain—wrong. He considers Egypt a British colony in 1860—wrong. He thinks Mariette composed the libretto for Aida—wrong.

For historians, mistakes of this kind are embarrassments, which may undermine their credibility. At the least, factual errors indicate sloppy research; at the worst, they expose the historian to charges of bad faith and ideological bias. For a literary critic, in contrast, an expose of errors may be somewhat annoying, but not debilitating. Facts are handled as ancillary to the interpretation, not as grounding it. Besides, to theorists, facts themselves belong to the ideology of Western rationality, along with objectivity, truth, and reality. Having been trained to regard all phenomena as textual, and to read all texts as ever intertextual and subtextual, literary scholars treat facts as the empiricist’s folly. Anything accepted as given marks a failure of interpretation—sheer ignorance of the textuality of things….In short, Windschuttle takes the postcolonialists’ historical facts too seriously. He reminds them that, ‘To demonstrate that any work of art has had social consequences, the critic is obliged to offer empirical evidence that this actually occurred.’ But poststructuralists feel no such obligation. For thirty years they have slighted empirical work, which they dismiss under the smug mantra ‘naïve positivism’; mocked the fact-finder; and ‘theorized’ facts into ideological tools. Facts are there for the interpreter’s taking or leaving, and if Windschuttle disqualifies some facts from inclusion in postcolonial reading, well, there are always others.”

From Robert Herzstein’s “Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Ordinary Germans’: A Heretic and His Critics”

“The demeaning of Goldhagen’s work has become fashionable and even ‘academically correct.’ When Hitler’s Willing Executioners first appeared early in the spring of 1996, Daniel Goldhagen participated in a panel dedicated to a discussion of his new book hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The symposium quickly revealed itself as an ambush. Several senior academic historians, especially Yehuda Bauer, mercilessly attacked Goldhagen; some apparently sought to humiliate him, even questioning his right to bear the letters Ph.D. after his name. Goldhagen, his critics alleged, was arrogant, inexperienced, a vulgariser—in short, wrong—and they have charged him with having said nothing new, with merely having revived the old, discarded, ‘Luther-to-Hitler’ theory.

…American readers, by contrast, supported Goldhagen, whose book went on to become a bestseller. This bifurcation was not surprising. The young man was dignified and determined in the face of personal and professional attacks. And his largely Jewish audiences were ready to believe the worst about the German murderers of other Jews….As the gap between the guild and the public grew, American Jewish groups were anxious to have Goldhagen as a speaker, while academic organizations usually shunned him. To laymen, his thesis seemed plausible; to academic critics, it was unproven, monocausal, and simplistic.

Provoked by Goldhagen’s support among members of the reading public, his enemies opened up a second front. All concerned viewed this issue as both professionally and emotionally serious: Who will control the public portrayal of the Holocaust? Goldhagen’s book quickly became fodder for those engaged in ideological combat.”

With the end of the Cold War, many Americans and Western Europeans settled into the comfortable illusion that we had broken free of the violent military conflicts that have punctuated—and often defined—history. September 11, 2001 exploded those illusions, and the invasive fallout continues to provoke fear, uncertainty, and troubling questions about the meaning of the events and their implications for the future. Most commentaries emphasize the novelty of our situation: we are, as President Bush and his advisors insist, fighting a new kind of war for which we have no templates. If we focus exclusively upon technology and tactics, the case for novelty seems compelling, and there is reason to question how much illumination history can provide. If, however, we focus upon the character of the main combatants or attempt to unravel the most salient causes of the conflict and the most important issues at stake in it, history may provide, if not answers, at least challenges to serious reflection.

As historians should be the first to remember, the conflict between Islam and the Christian “West” originated virtually with the emergence of Islam as an organized faith, for Muslims and Christians shared a commitment to the conversion of infidels. History affords remarkable examples of collaboration and exchange, especially in intellectual work and the arts, but virtually no one promoted the idea of “tolerance” for other faiths, or even other denominations or sects within one’s own faith. Both Muslims and Christians—and, eventually, sects within both faiths—believed that personal salvation depended heavily upon the faithfulness of others. In this perspective, to live a religion faithfully included the obligation to convert others to it and, in many instances, to combat those who resisted.[i] Thus at least until the seventeenth century, when even the burning of witches receded, conflict between rival faiths was a predictable feature of life.

Christians and Muslims alike risked their lives in wars or embraced martyrdom in defense of their beliefs. Religion mattered enough to die for, and it justified massive confrontations among peoples and states. Many evoke the Crusades of the 11^th to the 13^th centuries as evidence of Europeans Christians’ sinister designs upon the Islamic peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, but the Muslims, for their part, conquered the North African littoral and much of Spain before they began to be pushed back in the Reconquista. And only with the naval victory at Lepanto on 7 Oct. 1571 did Christian forces begin to arrest the expansionism of the Turks. Meanwhile, following the Protestant Reformation, Christians across Europe fought among themselves with similar if not greater ferocity than anything they deployed against the Muslims.

This issue of The Journal was assembled—and the articles drafted—well before the recent cataclysm, and, to the best of my knowledge, with no suspicion of its possible occurrence in mind. Yet, however indirectly and however much in differing ways, each of these articles may be read as shedding light upon the “new” conditions that press upon us, for the more closely one looks, the more familiar many features of our new conditions appear. Through the centuries, conflict between the Christian and the Islamic worlds, notwithstanding seismic transformations of both, has recurred with such disturbing frequency as to look more like a norm than an exception. The Islamic world predominates in Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, which has helped to frame and decisively contributed to the acrimonious discussions of post-colonialism. In the post-colonial perspective, denizens of the “first” or “developed” world, which is to say Western Europeans and Americans, have simultaneously exploited and disdained denizens of the “third” or “underdeveloped” world, among whom Muslims figure prominently.

Religious, ethnic, cultural, political, and economic conflicts have also characterized the relations among innumerable other groups and peoples. Recently, both Africa and the Balkans have afforded dramatic examples of the possibilities for massacre and destruction when two hostile—or simply culturally and ethnically “diverse”—peoples lay exclusive claim to a single corner of the earth. Irreconcilable differences and rivalries between Muslims and Hindus forced the partition of Pakistan from India. And so it goes in one part of the world after another. Caught in the cross currents of this bloody history have been the Jews, who long suffered persecution and segregation at the hands of Europeans and Americans as well as Muslims and who for more than a century, have been locked in fratricidal conflict with Arab Palestinians over the establishment and survival of Israel as a state.

If religion and culture, overdetermined by ethnicity and tribalism, have figured prominently in these conflicts, which they often seem to define, so has economics. However disapproving one’s view of European aggression against Muslims during the Crusades, it is hard to deny that the two sides faced each other on comparatively equal terms, and the Muslims ultimately drove the Crusaders off. But beginning in the 17^th century, if not the 14^th, Europeans embarked upon the accelerating economic and technological development that would secure them an increasingly unassailable advantage over the rest of the world. This development led to the European colonization of other peoples and lands—a process long referred to as the Expansion of Europe overseas, almost as if Europeans were settling and filling in what had heretofore been little more than blank space. Today, the Europeans’ “expansion” is more likely to be condemned as the conquest and exploitation of indigenous peoples who had their own ancient and admirable civilizations. Consequently, it has been easy for critics of European colonization to write as if Europeans had been uniquely guilty of the enslavement of other peoples, of racism, and of countless other violations of the dignity and rights of other peoples.

Throughout history, the cruelty and barbarism of one people’s treatment of another have constituted a vast subject that merits separate and specific discussions. The articles in this issue of The Journal all touch upon it—or upon the ways in which we write about it, which has emerged as a central preoccupation of academics. Dennis E. Showalter and Robert E. Herzstein’s investigations of discrete aspects of the origins of and writing about the Holocaust frame the issue as a whole. Showalter, focusing upon the German army’s activities in Eastern Europe, notably Russia, during World War I, poses the question of whether that German experience in the East laid the foundations for the Holocaust and genocide. His exploration of the behavior of the German army in a variety of situations strongly suggests that during World War I the German army deployed many of the practices and attitudes that would be systematically united in the Holocaust. Yet more disturbing, he suggests that the German experience with Russians—Slavs, whom they could easily regard not merely as different but as culturally inferior—led to the German’s “racializing the mindset of alienated superiority.”

Ultimately, Showalter’s work invites the speculation that the most chilling of atrocities may arise from an accumulation of ordinary activities rather than from a specific massive trauma and, in this respect, confirms Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the “banality of evil,” which he evokes. For the Germans in Russia familiarity did breed contempt, and it vastly strengthened their sense of their own ethnic and cultural superiority. In this respect, their attitudes towards those in their power differed little from the racism displayed by Americans during the decades of legal segregation. These attitudes were hardly new, and Showalter argues that they “developed within existing matrices and paradigms, rather than generating new ones.” In putting these attitudes into practice and thereby making the practices acceptable, they doubtless contributed to the climate from which Nazism and its genocidal campaign against the Jews would arise. The compound produced by this experience was, in Showalter’s view, unpalatable, but not “toxic. It would require reification by voelkisch scholars and Nazi ideologues before it became the stuff of genocide.”[ii]

Debate over responsibility for the toxicity that ignited the genocide continues to rage. Not all of those who died in the Holocaust were Jews, and the Germans were not alone in persecuting, segregating, and massacring Jews. But even knowledge of these truths has not significantly blunted the horror of the Holocaust nor the widespread tendency to view it as uniquely directed against the Jews and perpetrated by at least some of their fellow German citizens. The most hotly contested questions concern which Germans perpetrated the atrocities and why. Do the most dedicated Nazis deserve full responsibility or do those who “merely” followed their orders also bear a share of it? Through an exploration of the hostile response to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Herzstein takes up these questions and their persisting ability to evoke intense responses among American as well as German historians of modern Germany.

Goldhagen, as his title suggests, argues that responsibility for the Holocaust lay with ordinary Germans—those who were simply pursuing their lives within the context of Nazi Germany. In the end, it matters little whether ordinary Germans’ responsibility lay in the mere failure to protest Nazi anti-Semitism, the refusal to acknowledge its ubiquitous and corroding presence, or active participation in some aspect of the Holocaust. Their complicity enabled and furthered Nazi genocide, and no ex post facto claim of ignorance or secret revulsion can confer exoneration. The Holocaust, Goldhagen insists, cannot be conveniently shoved off on the Nazis: It derived, in all its horror, from the beliefs and actions of ordinary Germans and sank deep roots into German history.

From one perspective, Goldhagen’s argument seems unexceptionable: Hitler rose to power through a democratic election, and historians have frequently argued that Nazism must be understood within the broader context of German history rather than as alien to it. Yet as Herzstein demonstrates, the academic community both in the United States and in Germany denounced Goldhagen’s claims with outrage and engineered his virtual exclusion from debates about the substantive issues. Herzstein’s troubling account of the reception of Goldhagen’s work offers a cautionary tale with implications that exceed the putative role of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust. Herzstein does not endorse all of Goldhagen’s methods or conclusions, but he forcefully protests the prevailing academic proclivity to silence arguments and points of view that do not conform to reigning pieties. In this respect, Herzstein’s review of Goldhagen’s treatment carries implications—and warnings—for all who write heretically on “sacred” subjects.

Mark Bauerlein, in his response to Keith Windschuttle’s critique of the work of Edward Said, mercilessly drives the point home.[iii]Bauerlein does not disagree with Windschuttle’s fundamental assessment of Said’s work. If anything, he implicitly endorses Windschuttle’s criticism of Said’s discussions of literature. He does, however, chide Windschuttle for mistaking the real quarrel with Said and, accordingly, for overestimating the possibilities for civil debate. Windschuttle, Bauerlein reminds us, faults Said for the misuse of literary evidence—for a failure to read and interpret the words on the page responsibly. According to Bauerlein, this criticism of Said misses the most important point: Said does not credit the validity of any evidence in literary studies. There is no point in faulting him for his disregard for evidence when he refuses—on principle—to acknowledge its existence.

Corrosive as this position may be in literary studies, where, as Bauelein reminds us, it increasingly holds sway, it is nothing short of disastrous for historians, whose very craft has always depended upon a minimal respect for evidence, however fragile and open to conflicting interpretations. Yet there can be no doubt that Windschuttle undertook his critique of Said’s work because of the intrusion of similar attitudes into increasing areas of historical study—a move that its practitioners proudly identify as the “literary turn.” Windschuttle’s mistake, in Bauerlein’s view, lies in taking literary scholars’ infatuation with what they call “historicism” at face value and in treating Said as a serious interlocutor who could improve his practice if only he chose. Said’s true interest lies in exploding the very notion of evidence, which is to say of the possibility of any common or objective ground.

Many of Said’s aficionados adapt his methods and attitudes to a variety of topics in literary and cultural studies, but Said himself never disguises his own special interest in post-colonialism, especially the West’s domination and exploitation of the Islamic world. Regrettably, most of those who most passionately evoke the West’s post-colonial domination pay less attention than one might hope to the dynamics of the non-Western world. Consequently, their indictments of Western exploitation rarely attend closely to the values of the indigenous peoples, who frequently manifest a social and cultural conservatism totally at odds with the liberationist predilections of their Western academic champions. More often than not, the prophets of post-colonialism write as if they were pleading the case of other intellectuals whose sense of self is, in some way diminished, by Western arrogance or logocentrism. Yet with a staggering arrogance of their own, they assume that these intellectuals must share their values and want the things they want. In some instances—notably in the case of Franz Fanon, who imbibed large doses of Parisian existentialism—the assumption is warranted. In many others it is not.

As Louis Ferleger reminds us in “A World of Farmers, But Not a Farmers’ World,” most of the world’s people are peasants, and one of the main shared attributes of secular, postmodern Western intellectuals is that they have never met a peasant and probably never given serious thought to peasants’ true goals and desires. How can they understand a world in which people may never have left their village or may belong to families that have farmed the same piece of land for generations? How can they grasp the destructive impact upon such people of the forced-march modernization of global capitalism? In a breathtaking book, The Seed Is Mine, Charles Van Onselen, the eminent South African scholar, captures some of the agonizing tension between tradition and innovation, especially as it plays itself out amidst political, social, and economic upheaval and between generations.[iv]Ferleger’s piece offers a salutary reminder of the irreplaceable value of numbers—yes, quantification—in helping us to grasp the magnitude of the phenomena we so cavalierly discuss under a host of ideological and theoretical rubrics. The numbers tell us of the widening gap between societies that remain predominantly rural and those that have become or are becoming predominantly urban—with all the potential for rootlessness, anomie, and social disconnection that implies.

John Womack provides another perspective on the substance of colonial life and politics in a gripping discussion of the career of the Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa, as discussed in Frederick Katz’s biography. Womack displays a special sense of the ways in which the lives of peasants intersect with the ambitions of political leaders and the uneasy compromises in which the intersections too frequently end. Womack’s arresting synthesis simultaneously locates Villa’s place within the Mexican Revolution and Katz’s place within the turmoil of twentieth-century German history. And, notwithstanding Womack’s customary subtle touch, the conjuncture of the two lives—that of the revolutionary leader and that of his biographer—convey something of the complex interlocking of the Western and non-Western worlds throughout this century as well as something of the ways in which the writing of history is inescapably tied to the experience of those who write it. We come to the demands of our craft with likes and dislikes, heroes and villains, ideals and horrors. These views and more shape the topics we select and the ways in which we write of them, but, at the best, they enrich rather than falsify or distort our work.

Acerbic contention about the nature of truth, appropriate evidence, and the possibility of minimal objectivity nonetheless remain the condition of our time, and they weigh heavily upon the writing of history. When Muslims and Christians confronted one another during the Crusades, neither side suffered from paralyzing doubts about the truth and justice of its cause. Those doubts were born of the intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Not until man—rapidly followed by woman—placed himself at the center of the world and of knowledge did serious doubts about the reliability of anything external to him move to center stage. Once unleashed they steadily gained a seemingly irresistible Faustian seductive power until, in our own time, personal identity, individual rights, self-esteem, and constructed knowledge have swept all before them—at least for the moment.

In a consideration of the Scottish Enlightenment’s engagement with Christian Stoicism, Ingrid Merikoski illuminates some of the ways in which leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment attempted to balance moral concerns with their understanding of the logic of economics. Merikoski is not the first to note that the Adam Smith who pioneered in delineating the impersonal workings of the market—and the role of self-interest in their smooth operation—was the same Adam Smith who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in which he argued for human beings’ possession of an innate sense of morality. But she singularly advances the discussion by illuminating the role of a distinct Christian Stoicism in the thought of Smith and the other leading Scottish intellectuals of his day. Her reflections are all the more important because of the broad influence of Scottish thought upon British, American, and even some continental European political and social theorists and leaders.

From our contemporary vantage point, it seems clear that the conundrums with which the leading Scottish intellectuals wrestled continue to haunt our own ability to reconcile morality and economic imperatives, charity and self-interest. Smith and many of his peers rejected the most mechanistic implications of the importance of the economy in ordering human affairs. Thus, they remained dissatisfied with Bernard Mandeville’s extreme formulation in The Fable of the Bees (1705), namely that the selfishness of individuals would result in the maximum good for society as a whole. Their difficulties arose in attempting to identify a source of moral authority that would simultaneously rein in the most self-serving and anti-social human inclinations and provide a convincing antidote to Humean skepticism. Merikoski especially focuses upon the influential preacher and rhetoretician, Hugh Blair, and the distinguished historian, William Robertson, both of whom turned to Christian Stoicism as the solution to their problems. Christian Stoicism, however, marvelously embodies precisely the tensions they were hoping to resolve, for it ultimately relied upon the individual to exercise the moral self-governance that would promote the good of the whole. Yet they were loathe to designate an overriding authority—even that of the Christian churches—should the individual fail in the exercise of moral self-governance, as individuals predictably would do.

Merikoski captures the heart of the contradiction in a discussion of Robertson’s last work, An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge the Ancients Had of India (2^nd ed. 1794). In that work, Robertson expresses an unexpected admiration for the Indian caste system, primarily because of its power to assign each individual to an appropriate station, thereby maintaining the stability of society and assuring each member of it a fitting role in it. Even during the waning years of the eighteenth century, most “enlightened” readers would have found a defense of the caste system problematic. Legally enforced social hierarchy ranked as the primary target of both political and intellectual revolutionaries, and it stood as the antithesis of the freedom and rights of the individual. Even during the first half of the nineteenth century, the slaveholders of the American South, who staunchly defended the virtues of slavery as a social system, rejected the caste system as beyond the pale. That Robertson defended its socially redeeming attributes tells us less about his fundamental attitudes toward individual freedom—or even his colonialist insensitivities—than about the intractable difficulties of reconciling individual freedom and a morally acceptable social order.

Taken together, these articles touch in different ways upon the problems of freedom and authority, not merely in human affairs—although most importantly in them—but also in our tolerance for the different ways in which people may write about and interpret them. And if, in this respect, one problem stands out above all others, it may be the problem of how we sustain respect for the integrity of evidence—for some minimal standard of historical truth—while simultaneously nurturing the maximum intellectual freedom.

t_h_s	t_h_s	t_h_s
	t_h_s