BOOKS
473
The fact is that he himself is permeated by the dialectic in the
trivial sense in which he presents it. His own work has a dialectical
pattern and it would be easy to show, by employing his own reduc–
tive method, that he is committed to the doctrine he attacks. The
book is divided into three parts,* which illustrate a progressive
development of historical consciousness through a series of nega–
tions. In the first part we read about historians who have no will
to change the world; in the second part, the utopians are inspired
by this will, but lack historical understanding; the Marxians syn–
thesize the two; and finally, in the third part, come the Russians
who negate the revisionist negation of class struggle by a successful
revolution, which also synthesizes the antagonism of Marx and
Bakunin. The book abounds in smaller dialectical patterns and at
one point, in speaking of Lenin, Wilson even explains the emer–
gence of his ideas and personality by an inherent law of antithesis.
"This flaccid provincial life conditioned, by a law of antagonism,
a purpose of irresistible intensity." The phrase "expropriating the
expropriators," which expresses so vividly an essential thought, is
cited as an instance of dialectical formalism. But in calling one
chapter: Lenin Identifies Himself with History, and the next one:
Trotsky Identifies History with Himself, Wilson creates an even
more abstract antithesis which does violence to the portrait of
Trotsky and requires for its support a questionable judgment of
Trotsky's vanity by Bruce Lockhart. From the viewpoint of histori–
cal sequence, the book is artificially constructed in order to exhibit
the process described above: the characters of the first section,
Michelet, Renan, Taine and Anatole France, have no influence
whatever on the events and personalities of the subsequent parts;
and the correspondence that Wilson finds between the changes in
their conceptions of history and the decline of the French bour–
geoisie-it also mirrors Vico's idea that human culture passes
through a cycle from the primitive, which is popular and emo–
tional (Michelet), to the civilized and intellectual (Renan, Taine),
to the anarchic stage of decay (France)-masks the fact that a
more objective historical science continued to flourish after the
•And to confirm Wilson's Pythagorean ancestry, let me add that the book contains
thirty chapters, three times TEN, which for the Pythagorean• ia the holy triangular
number, the TETRACfYS, the aum of one, two, three and four, and the source of all
other numbers; and each of the three parts of the book haa an even number of chap–
ten, the even numbers being feminine, just as three
is
muculine.
