PARTISAN REVIEW
525
power in an era of international economics (and therefore a characteris–
tic of socialist national states as well as capitalist), will tend to expansion,
exploitation, rapaciousness. It therefore is expected that when the mar–
ket economy is in its predominantly agrarian stage, the agrarian busi–
nessmen will dominate the talk and action of expansion, and that, as the
economy becomes increasingly industrial, the manufacturing interests
will become more important.
There are points of
real
interest here: the especially powerful drives
of capitalist economies to expansionism, and the fact that socialist eco–
nomies, so long as they are
national,
will have expansionist tendencies
too. Understanding this, along with the human consequences of expan–
sion, can teach us something about the necessity for replacing the capital–
ist mode of production, and also for replacing the nationalist fonn of
socialism.
On the other hand, the distinction between agrarian and indus–
trial expansionism is primarily of academic interest. The periodicization
question (did expansionism take hold before or after 1890?) is a typically
professional preoccupation, equally irrelevant to the objective Williams
set at the beginning: "changing those ideas and policies." They are not
of interest to any of the elements of that objective: understanding
why
change should take place, understanding
what
changes should take place,
understanding
how
change might be brought about. Understanding the
cognitive reality, the nonnative models, the process of transfonnation–
one or more of these must be served by a truly radical history.
When one labors after points of professional interest, the strain
shows. Thus, Williams wants to show not only a
post hoc
relationship
between agrarian and industrial expansion, but an
ergo propter hoc–
not just a temporal, but a causal relationship. This takes a stretching
of the evidence. He must also strain to find a "better balance" between
personal freedom and marketplace freedom among agrarians than among
metropolitans.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Professional Model
is one I have not yet mentioned: the insistence on keeping separate the
role of historian and the role of citizen. Williams presents, in his final
pages, a modified version of this, asking that the historian cultivate "a
conscious, controlled, and creative schizophrenia." That is, the historian
must maintain some distance between himself as scholar and himself as
citizen.
As a historian, Williams says, a person "has one primary respon–
sibility: to do his best to reconstruct what happened and to explain how
and why it occurred." (This is exactly the orthodoxy of the professional
historian, and exactly the opposite of Marx's admonition to the philos-
