World Order in History: Problems of Historical Interpretation

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Author: Paul Dukes

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WORLD ORDER IN HISTORY

‘A bold enterprise…. Much of the thrust of the book comes from addressing the present Russian dilemma: should Russia borrow yet another model from the West as to what its future should be?’ Roy Porter World Order in History argues that historians’ ideas about world order have been influential in transforming nations’ sense of themselves. Paul Dukes demonstrates how successive historians and other analysts attempt to make sense of the world in which they live, often appropriating intellectual ideas spawned in different contexts in order to do so. Hindsight allows us to view stages in the evolution of these interpretations, and to recognise that they are limited by the constraints of the age in which their authors lived. Dukes pursues the arguments with particular reference to Russia and the Western world from the early modern period right up to the present. He draws conclusions on the state of the debate in the 1990s, and offers some views as to the way forward for historians of Russia and the wider world. This book will be of interest to all those concerned with the study of history, in particular philosophy of history and Russian history. Paul Dukes is Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of A History of Russia (1974) and A History of Europe (1985) and several other books on Russian and comparative history.

WORLD ORDER IN HISTORY Russia and the West

Paul Dukes

London and New York

First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1996 Paul Dukes The author and the publisher would like to thank Cambridge University Press for permission to quote from Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. by Anne M.Cohler et al. (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge, 1989). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-12936-2 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-22330-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-22342-X (Glassbook Format)

CONTENTS

Preface Introduction

vii 1

1 MONTESQUIEU AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER Montesquieu and The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu, the USA and Russia Catherine the Great and the Russian ‘constitution’ George Washington and the American constitution Constitution and revolution: Burke and Robespierre

14 15 21 29 33 38

2 MARX AND REVOLUTIONARY ORDER Karl Marx: introduction Marx and Capital The Russian Revolution: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin The Russian Revolution: revisions and alternatives

44 45 52 57 66

3 FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS ATLANTIC ORDER, 1900–22 A watershed in European history, 1900–13 History congress in England, 1913: speeches History congress in England, 1913: papers From European towards Atlantic order, 1913–22

78 79 87 91 96

4 SOME APPROACHES TO WORLD ORDER, 1923–62 Pirenne and Europe, 1923 E.V.Tarle and the USSR, 1923–48 C.A.Beard and the USA, 1923–48 Jan Romein and the Cold War, 1948–62 Towards a new world order, 1962 and after v

107 108 111 116 123 134

CONTENTS

5 CONCLUSION The action, the time, the place Montesquieu, Marx and Western world orders Russian history: alternatives and revisions World history, pure and applied Notes Index

138 139 144 154 167 172 189

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PREFACE

This book has turned out to be different from the one I first aimed at. To begin with, I wanted to consider the problem of the study of history, pure and simple. Increasingly, however, I took up the further problem of the application of the discipline, largely under the pressure of history in its other guise; that is, because of what happened. The idea was originally conceived many years ago but did not mature until after 1985 with the arrival of perestroika and glasnost. The actual writing began in the aftermath of the great changes which swept through Eastern Europe in 1989, and continued against the background of further shattering events from August 1991 to October 1993 as the Soviet Union broke up, only for the integrity of its largest fragment, the Russian Federation, to come under threat. The final revisions have been made throughout the year 1994, as a question mark still hangs over the future of that Federation and the other former republics of the USSR. No answer is given here to that highly significant question, since the book has been written by a university teacher who for more than twenty-five years assured students that the Soviet Union would never collapse. Understandably, perhaps, I have not presumed to make any more categorical statements about what fate may hold in store for the Russian and other successor states. However, I have attempted to take a fresh look at the Russian past in its context, taking into consideration not only the impact of recent years but also the consequent shifts in perspective. At the outset, I must make it clear that this book is not primarily about the Soviet Union, its predecessors and successors. Bearing vii

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in mind my original intention to consider the problem of the study of history, I have thought it of overriding importance to adopt a wider setting for the study of the USSR, before and after, than has normally been adopted. There has been the strong tendency for West to remain West, East to remain East, and the twain rarely to meet: in other words, for the academic divisions of discipline and demands of specialisation to keep separate Russian studies on the one hand and European and American studies on the other hand. Nevertheless, many researchers in Western fields, not just historians but also social scientists, have been and remain obliged to fit the vast Russian chunk of the Eurasian continent somehow into their global view. By global view, I do not mean an examination of all the stretches of land and water from pole to pole, but rather the equivalent of the Russian mirovozzrenie or the German Weltanschauung. I have sought an approach which illustrates how investigators have incorporated Russia into their overall conception of Western world order, which means for the most part leaving aside Africa, Asia and Latin America. I have selected two different kinds of world order for particular attention—the constitutional and revolutionary, respectively indicating continuity and change. I have attempted to describe the manner in which two outstanding Western individuals, Montesquieu and Marx, in turn formulated influential views of constitutional and revolutionary order, and the manner in which Russia was included in them. At the same time, I give some emphasis to the USA, for two reasons. First, its political culture serves as a measure of comparison with Russia’s against various European standards, embodied by constitutional Montesquieu and revolutionary Marx especially. Second, the USA came to dominate the West in the twentieth century, especially during the years of the Cold War, itself becoming the standard against which other states and their political cultures were measured. Against the background of constitutional and revolutionary orders, I also want to consider some of the global views of the historical profession as it has evolved through the twentieth century, both before and after the two world wars, looking first at its practitioners in Western Europe, including the UK, then at their colleagues in the USSR and USA. For the years of the Cold War, I have singled out for special attention the work of a Dutch historian, Jan Romein, more affected than most by the impact viii

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of that great conflict. From 1900 to the 1990s, as we shall see, there have been several significant shifts in the overall outlook of Romein and other representative historians. There can be no firm conclusion to a work such as this, but in a final chapter I seek to recapitulate and draw together the book’s major themes. In so doing, my aim is to reinforce the case for critical scrutiny of the Russian predicament to be accompanied by a measure of Western introspection. I would particularly like to encourage researchers both in Russia and in the West to achieve more fully their aspirations to greater mutual understanding. While shying away from any predictions for the future, I try to point out some ways in which we might approach the past, especially through the abandonment of ‘uniqueness’ in the treatment of Russian history and by a fuller acceptance of a wider comparative framework by historians and other academic investigators irrespective of location and affiliation. In the course of writing the book, I have become aware of many problems, for example variations in meaning from century to century, from place to place and according to the subject under discussion of such words as ‘history’ and ‘world order’ as well as ‘Russia’ and ‘the West’. I hope that I have made my usage of these and other words as unambiguous as possible at any given moment, although I would also argue that complete and clear distinctions cannot always be maintained: at least, to take the same examples, the entities signified by the words above cannot be divorced from our perception of them. Like all my other published work during the past thirty years, this book has been completed at the University of Aberdeen, an institution whose Quincentenary on 10 February 1995 has been a constant reminder of the necessity to take the long view. As before, I consider myself fortunate to be a member of an excel-lent department with colleagues always ready to help and encourage, and to have found equally willing support elsewhere, mainly but not exclusively in the Arts and Social Sciences, not forgetting the Queen Mother and King’s Libraries. In particular, although I alone bear the responsibility for the final outcome, I should like to thank Cathryn Brennan, Dr Jean Houbert and Dr George Molland of the University of Aberdeen along with Professor Edward Acton of the University of East Anglia and Dr Sarah Davies of the University of Durham for their most helpful reading of successive drafts: all five will readily see how much of their advice I have ix

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accepted, how little of it rejected. The secretarial support of Sandra Williams and Gillian Brown has been indispensable, as have been the advice and encouragement of Claire L’Enfant and other associates of Routledge. I am grateful to Douglas Matthews for compiling the index, and for indicating several errors and inconsistencies. The book is dedicated to my friends at the University of Aberdeen. I venture to say that there are too many to list by name, but I believe that I know who they are, and I hope that they do, too. I would like to make exceptional mention of Cathryn Brennan, Jean Houbert and George Molland; and of Ann Gordon, for many years Administrative Assistant in the Department of History and a wise counsellor still. Paul Dukes King’s College, Old Aberdeen 10 February 1995

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INTRODUCTION

What is history? What purpose is there in studying it? Over the years, I have put such questions to many colleagues. I recall in particular the answer given to the second of them by a distinguished professor at Yale, C.Vann Woodward: the elimination of error. When I asked him if this was enough, he replied that he found no shortage of error. Taking our subject at C.Vann Woodward’s word, let us begin by making a couple of correc-tions. First, in a stimulating book by Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson entitled Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World, the authors write: The fact is that the West has been the main source of example and competition for Russia for a long time, ever since the Russian élite turned decisively towards Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century. French and (later) German were the languages spoken at the tsarist courts.1 The fact is otherwise. The Russian élite did not turn decisively towards Europe before the end of the seventeenth century, even the beginning of the eighteenth century. German was then the main (foreign) language spoken at the tsarist court. French achieved a more comprehensive predominance later in the eighteenth century. To be sure, German made something of a come-back towards the end of the nineteenth century. Let us take as a second, more extended example one of the important news items from December 1993, the Russian election results. As is well known, these marked the rise of the opposition ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the comparatively disappointing performance 1

INTRODUCTION

of the parties giving various degrees of support to the President. Boris Yeltsin himself was blamed by some journalists for the outcome, in particular for not giving more support to Russia’s Choice, the only bloc committed to continuing economic reforms at a fast pace. Although this is not the place for a full analysis of the election results, or indeed of Russia’s Choice, we may approach at least some of the issues involved by turning our attention to a contradiction between the party’s symbol—Peter the Great—and its motto—Liberty, Property, Legality. In reality, Peter the Great who ruled Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century had little to do with the introduction of these three concepts, all of which made their first clear appearance there in the second half of the eighteenth century. ‘Freedom and liberty’ make their first appearance in a decree issued on 18 February 1762, granted by Tsar Peter III to the nobility. Even then, several strings remained attached, as may be seen in the decree’s last words, commanding all the Emperor’s ‘obedient and true sons to despise and scorn’ those who evaded his service: such defaulters would ‘not be allowed to appear at Our Court, or at public meetings and celebrations’. A dozen or so years later, a false ‘Peter in’ (in fact a Cossack named Pugachev masquerading as the Emperor who had been murdered in the summer of 1762 and replaced by Catherine II) rewarded his followers in a major peasant uprising with the same ‘freedom and liberty’ among other gifts, while giving the order in his edict of 31 July 1774 that those who were formerly nobles in their estates, these opponents of our authority and disturbers of the empire and destroyers of the peasants catch, execute and hang and treat in the same way as they, not having Christianity, have dealt with you, the peasants. Arguably, the contradiction between two such views of freedom reached its climax in the Russian Revolution of 1917: certainly, we may already see some of the distinctive features of Russian history as a whole in the decrees of 1762 and 1774.2 These two same documents may be used to illustrate concepts of property as well as of freedom. Of the first of them, Richard Pipes wrote in 1959: ‘Altogether, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the edict of 1762 for Russia’s social and cultural 2

INTRODUCTION

history. With this single act the monarchy created a large, privileged, Westernized leisure class, such as Russia had never known before.’ Other scholars have since modified this evaluation considerably, some of them giving more emphasis to the Charter of the Nobility of 1785, but most of them would accept that the 1762 manifesto was an important milestone along the road to the acquisition of full property rights by the Russian nobility as a class, if not so much as individuals.3 Regarding the peasantry, passages from Pugachev’s edict of 1774 may be taken as indicative of popular attitudes towards property as well as other matters: With this personal decree we bestow our monarchical and paternal generosity upon all those formerly in the peasantry and subject to the landlords, be true slaves to our crown…and you may be Cossacks for ever, without demands for recruit levies, poll and other money dues, possession of lands, woods and meadows and fishing rights, and salt lakes without tax and payment and we free all from the evils caused by nobles and bribe-taking town judges of the peasants, and taxes and burdens placed on all the people. Here, even more clearly than in the case of the nobility, we may see that property rights are attributed to a class rather than to individuals, emphasis thus being given to age-old communal customs and beliefs. Up to the Revolution of 1917 and beyond, the communal outlook remained strong, as did the belief that the land belonged to those who cultivated it. Just before that Revolution, even the intellectuals of the liberal Kadet Party refused to defend land ownership as a private right; although most of them believed in such ownership in general, Western legal norms in this area met with far from broad acceptance.4 As is already apparent, no doubt, Western norms as a whole were not universally recognised in pre-revolutionary Russia. Undoubtedly, some progress towards such recognition had been made from the later eighteenth century onwards, especially during the reign of Catherine II, or Catherine the Great. On the other hand, the Empress had come to power via the assassination of her husband, Tsar Peter III, and had connived at this monstrous act of illegality even if she did not actually instigate it. Having gained the supreme power, she was determined not to lose it. The ‘legal 3

INTRODUCTION

monarchy’ which she did much to develop fell short of encroaching on tsarist absolutism, which included rights and privileges for the nobility under the protection and patronage of the autocratic Empress, and meant little if any advancement for the peasants. This injustice helped to spawn the uprising by Pugachev and his supporters. In other words, Catherine’s ‘constitutionalism’ was already confronted by a primitive form of revolutionary opposition in the shape of Cossack and peasant insurgents. During the nineteenth century, some significant advance was made by Russia as far as our key concepts of liberty, property and legality were concerned. While Russia moved forward, however, the pace was even faster elsewhere, and the chances for full assimilation of the main foundations of the Western way of life under the tsarist (or indeed any) regime were severely limited. In 1906, Max Weber wrote that: The historical development of modern ‘freedom’ presupposed a unique and unrepeatable constellation of factors, of which the following are the most important: first, overseas expansion…secondly, the characteristic economic and social structure of the ‘early capitalist’ period in Western Europe; thirdly, the conquest of life through science… finally, certain ideal conceptions which grew out of the concrete historical uniqueness of a particular religious viewpoint. Looking at Russia in particular in the aftermath of the failed Revolution of 1905, Weber added: It is ridiculous in the extreme to ascribe to modern high capitalism, as currently being imported into Russia…any inner affinity with ‘democracy’ or even ‘freedom’ (in any sense of the word). The question is rather ‘How are any of these at all possible in the long run under its domi-nation?’5 In the long perspective of 1993, perhaps, some of the voters for Zhirinovsky were in unwitting agreement with Max Weber, as well as reflecting traditional attitudes towards liberty, property and legality. But 1993, of course, was very different from 1906 not only in Russia and the West but throughout the world. As we shift our 4

INTRODUCTION

focus of attention from Russia to the world more generally, we can find a convenient reminder of recent great changes in The Economist’s end-of-year suggestions for an updated list of the seven wonders of the world first compiled in the second century BC. Here they are with their year of creation in brackets: the microprocessor (1971); the ‘pill’ (1951); the global telephone network (still some way to go—Asia has more than half the world’s population, but only 7 per cent of its telephones); the ‘jumbo jet’ (Boeing 747) (1968); the off-shore oil platform (1947); the hydrogen bomb (1952); the human moon landing (1969). Not everybody would accept this list, but few would argue with the essential suggestion that the times we live in are indeed very different to what they were fifty years ago.6 Responses would probably vary according to generation, an important consideration for current affairs and history alike. Arguably, the longer people have lived, the more likely they are to appreciate history’s essential component, the passage of time, and to possess a sense of perspective on today’s preoccupations. On the other hand, while the senior citizen might recall the days before the automobile and the aeroplane, he or she might also have difficulty in getting to grips with the implications of such new-fangled hardware as the computer and the video-recorder, which most young people take to almost as ducklings to water. But if we look forward, and assume that human beings will still be in existence in 2093, in a hundred years’ time there may well be some researchers pouring scorn on the short-sightedness of The Economist’s choice in 1993. ‘Why no mention of genetic engineering?’ one can imagine somebody asking in that far-forward year. None of us can yet perceive what the really significant developments of our own time may turn out to be. Apart from partiality of generation, and of moment in time, there are other differences of viewpoint. Western attitudes will by no means always coincide with Russian, while within these two main groups there will be further variations in world outlook, especially since the disestablishment of Soviet MarxismLeninism. For example, on both sides, especially in the Englishspeaking world where the two words have distinctive meanings, there will be some who maintain that history is an art, others who insist that it is a science; everywhere, some will be more conservative, resisting change, others more progressive, 5

INTRODUCTION

welcoming it. And so on. To some extent, differences may be reduced by a number of approaches, of which the most fruitful is the comparative. This approach is of two kinds: the synchronic and the diachronic. That is, one may consider any historical phenomenon in the global context of the time at which it made itself known—synchronic—or trace its development and consequences (and/or its antecedents and origins) through time— diachronic. For example, Catherine the Great could be considered either as one of the enlightened despots or absolutists of the late eighteenth century or as one of a succession of Russian rulers after Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great but before Nicholas II and Lenin. Similarly, Pugachev could be compared not only with such predecessors as Bolotnikov, Razin and Bulavin—all leaders of peasant revolts in Russia—but also with successors, including some of the peasant insurgents in the Revolution of 1917, or with similar figures elsewhere in the eighteenth century.7 There may indeed be distant echoes of the edicts of Pugachev in the promises and threats of Zhirinovsky, although more conventional parallels would be sought in more recent ultra-nationalists at home or abroad. In fact, many comparative approaches, including that to be adopted in the present book, are a mixture of the synchronic and the diachronic. To give one more example, the concepts in the slogan of Russia’s Choice—Liberty, Property, Legality—have evolved and been discussed in other countries over a longer period than in Russia itself, as is already clear from the observations of Max Weber in 1906, quoted above. We need to look no further than John Locke, who, at the time of the ‘Glorious and Bloodless Revolution’ of 1688, gave much attention to liberty and property, along with life, as basic human rights within the framework of civil government, drawing on well-established English traditions of legality as he did so. Looking forward from 1688, we could draw a line of development through to the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century and beyond. Here, as already mentioned in the Preface, special emphasis will be given to the American case. Ultimately, any comparative investigation should be carried out within some kind of global framework: hence the theme of this book, as clearly indicated in its title. Yet, though simple enough to be spelled out in eight words, this basic idea has met so far with less than general acceptance, and therefore requires a 6

INTRODUCTION

considerable amount of elaboration: indeed, five chapters have been considered a bare minimum. In the rest of this Introduction, therefore, I explain how the rest of the book is structured, and what I aim to do in it. After the prologue constituted by this Introduction, the five chapters address the theme roughly in the manner of the five acts of classical drama: Chapters 1 and 2 are exposition; Chapters 3 and 4 are development; and Chapter 5 is conclusion or denouement. The main plot is Western interpretation of world order in history and Russia’s place in it. However, there is a sub-plot: comparative American-Russian history examined against the expanding background of the move from European to Atlantic ‘civilisation’, and then on to an allembracing ‘new world order’. Incidentally, too, such questions as the relationship between the arts and sciences are touched upon. The actors are mainly academic or intellectual in their primary interest, but there are some who are doers rather than thinkers, and a few who are a mixture of both. The first two chapters set out two kinds of modern Western order, constitutional and revolutionary, of which early definitions were given by Maximilien de Robespierre in a speech delivered at the end of a year of tumult and Terror on 25 December 1793: The goal of the constitutional government is to maintain the Republic; that of the revolutionary government, to found it. The revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies; the constitution is the regime of liberty, victorious and peaceable. The revolutionary government demands extraordinary activity precisely because it is at war. It is subject to less uniform and less rigorous laws because prevailing circumstances are stormy and changing and, above all, because it is forced constantly to deploy new and speedy resources to meet new and pressing dangers. The constitutional government is concerned principally with civil liberty; the revolutionary government, with public liberty. Under the constitutional regime little more is required than to protect individuals against the abuse of the public power; under the revolutionary regime, the

7

INTRODUCTION

public power itself is forced to defend itself against all attacking factions.8 Some of what Robespierre said in 1793 would be repeated by Lenin in 1917 and after: we will look more closely at both the French and the Russian Revolutions below. But, for present purposes, constitution is taken to mean continuity and stability, revolution— radical change amid turbulence. The first kind of order was elaborated by the middle of the eighteenth century in L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws), where Montesquieu argued that government in various parts of the world should accord with the basic circumstances of particular states, geographical as well as historical. Later in the century, after the work had established a great reputation, it was adopted by Catherine the Great and the ‘Founding Fathers’. The Russian Empress sought to compose a ‘constitution’ for her ‘enlightened absolutism’, while Hamilton, Madison and other leading formulators of the constitution of the USA wanted to devise a rationale for their federal republic. Before the century was over, however, constitutional government on both transcontinental and transoceanic frontiers of Europe was challenged by its antithesis embodied in the most radical phase of the French Revolution. Against this background, in 1792 and 1796 respectively, Catherine the Great and George Washington asserted in her and his own fashion the advantages of constitutional order. These were also expounded by Edmund Burke in Britain, while Robespierre in France made his early comparison of constitutional and revolutionary government. Revolutionary order was proclaimed in a more developed fashion fifty years or so later by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, followed by a series of works culminating in the unfinished Capital. This expanded the argument that the development of capitalism was a world process leading towards its own collapse reinforced by the maturation of a new class, the proletariat. The Marxist analysis found apparent confir-mation fifty years after the publication of Volume 1 of Capital in the October 1917 Revolution in Russia. But how should Marxism be interpreted and used? Three differing answers were given to this significant question by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. And other significant questions were posed in the years preceding and following the October Revolution. Was the only road to socialism 8

INTRODUCTION

Marxist revolutionary? What were the possible alternatives? In particular, could Russia join constitutional rather than revolutionary order along the lines indicated by the US President Woodrow Wilson in his vision of a world made safe for democracy? My Chapter 2 concludes with a response to the October Revolution by a Russian historian, E.V.Tarle, implicitly closer to Wilsonism than to Leninism. The second pair of chapters takes discussion of constitutional and revolutionary order from the opening of the twentieth century to the immediate aftermath of the First World War, then through the Second World War to 1962 when the Cold War reached its climax in the Cuba Crisis. However, the emphasis is not on the historical events, but on the writing of history. The basic question here is: how did a representative selection of Western historians react to emerging world order and disorder? Here, it should be pointed out that the profession of historian was one of the world’s youngest: up to the late nineteenth century, few if any writers had been able to make a living solely through the investigation of the human past. That is not to say that there was no worthwhile historical writing in earlier centuries, but rather that the practitioners whom we will meet in Chapter 3 were very conscious of their comparatively new-found importance. Moreover, the beginning of the twentieth century marked a turning point, distinctive responses to which came from such historians as Karl Lamprecht in Germany, Henri Berr in France and Lord Acton in England. A decade or so later, a general opportunity for discussing questions of global and not so global significance arose at the International Congress of Historical Sciences meeting in London in April 1913. In fact, ‘International’ tended strongly to mean ‘European’ for many of the delegates, who were at the same time clearly moved by the spirit of nationalism, with most opportunities for celebration of that spirit given to the majority of those in attendance—from the host nation. However, minorities from Russia and the USA made their mark, which was to be more distinctive after the First World War and Russian Revolution. In particular, the centre of the Englishspeaking world was poised to move considerably to the west of longitude 30 in mid-Atlantic where Lord Acton had placed it in 1896, as the USA overtook the UK and the other European powers as potential world leader. Chapter 4 begins with the reaction of one of the 1913 London Congress delegates, Henri Pirenne, to the cataclysm of the First 9

INTRODUCTION

World War, which he personally had spent largely in a prisonerof-war camp. In a keynote address to the following Congress, held not in St Petersburg in 1918 as originally planned but in Brussels in 1923, the Belgian historian recommended an approach to universal history via the comparative method. Another delegate to the 1913 London Congress, E.V.Tarle, whose reactions to the Russian Revolution are discussed at the end of Chapter 2, made an accommodation with Marxism-Leni-nism to become one of the leading Soviet historians. Tarle did this by waving the USSR’s flag of ‘socialism in one country’ and celebrating patriotism more than internationalism. Similarly, episodes from the career of Charles A.Beard, first introduced towards the end of Chapter 3, illuminate some of the historiographical currents in the West, especially the USA. For example, Beard attempted to set out to further a ‘New History’ incorporating the USA in a world-wide order and broadening the subject in many other ways. In particular, Beard and his colleagues could not hold themselves aloof from ideological struggles in Europe, although the Atlantic civilisation adumbrated before the First World War did not take on full shape until after the Second. The successive stages of development from 1945 to 1962 are illustrated by an examination of three articles by the Dutch historian Jan Romein, from ‘Theoretical History’ through ‘The Common Human Pattern’ to ‘The Problem of Transformation’. Reflecting a new Western concern for the history of all humankind as part of the post-1945 world order as he adapted the old arguments of his predecessors, Romein also ran up against the restrictive influences of the Cold War and nationalist self-assertion. However, he died in 1962 before the climax of the Cold War and decolonisation, and the many other great changes, economic, social and cultural, associated with the 1960s. The movement towards a more complete global view of history now accelerated, against the background of the continuing Cold War. After the exposition of the ‘classical’ conceptions of the constitutional and revolutionary world orders, and their twentiethcentury development as reflected in the works of some representative historians, we come to the denouement, ‘Conclusion’. A simple analogy is made with a game of football: if there can be no hope of general agreement concerning the movement imparted to a ball for an hour and a half by twenty-two human beings in an area not exceeding a few hundred square metres, how can we approach an objective appraisal of the events 10

INTRODUCTION

and developments of several centuries’ duration involving the population of the entire globe? In search of an answer to this persistent question, a recapitulation follows of the worldviews of Montesquieu and Marx, along with some updated discussion of the accompanying twin-track theme of the courses of American and Russian history. There is consideration of the continuing relevance of these worldviews, and this theme, even into the 1990s. Next, I present some observations on historical revisions and alternatives triggered by the collapse of the USSR and its aftermath, but incorporating recent developments in the arts and sciences. How best can we consider constitutional and revolutionary order in the light of the new circumstances? And which further comparative approaches might prove most fruitful? Finally, there comes ‘world history, pure and applied’. Is it possible to study history for its own sake, or must there be some ulterior purpose? I suggest that it is possible to do both in any approach to world history, and that they can both play a part in the difficult task of discerning world order and the even more intractable problem of creating it. The same might be said of the two kinds of order discussed in this book, constitutional and revolutionary. Like other opposites, they are ultimately not contradictory, but complementary, a thesis and antithesis leading towards synthesis. To conclude this introduction, another question must be posed: why begin a study of history and world order with Montesquieu? After all, through language, human beings have sought to impose order on their environment since the dawn of time, even if historians as professional dealers in time did not emerge before the later nineteenth century, a period which introduced the demarcation of academic disciplines in general. Briefly, philosophy in a broad sense ‘finds in human reason the common source of our knowledge of nature and our beliefs concerning the supernatural’ from the period of Descartes—‘a worthy contemporary of the heroes of the Thirty Years War’ — that is, the first half of the seventeenth century. And about a hundred years after the conclusion of that war, ‘Montesquieu, in his Esprit des Lois (1748) undoubtedly makes use of the Cartesian method itself, applying it to political matters.’ Meanwhile in England, the empiricist tradition, based on observation rather than on reason alone, was firmly established in the course of the seventeenth century from Bacon to Newton, both of whom continued to exert an enormous influence throughout the eighteenth century. Between them, Descartes and 11

INTRODUCTION

Newton may be considered among the most important forerunners of the Enlightenment.9 Descartes himself wrote of the histories and fables of ‘the Ancients’: For to converse with those of other centuries is almost the same as to travel. It is a good thing to know something of the customs and manners of various peoples in order to judge of our own more objectively and so not think everything which is contrary to our ways is ridiculous and irrational, as those who have seen nothing are in the habit of doing. But when one spends too much time travelling, one becomes eventually a stranger in one’s own country; and when one is too interested in what went on in past centuries, one usually remains extremely ignorant of what is happening in this century.10 These words of the ‘modern’ Descartes could serve as an epigraph for this book. Its aim is to visit earlier centuries in order to arrive at a better understanding of our own. It hopes to indicate through an analysis of the writings of Montesquieu, Marx and others how their ideas were influenced by the times in which they lived, but also to indicate how the themes of constitutional and revolutionary order as enunciated by Montesquieu and Marx, and developed—either explicitly or implicitly —by historians and others in the twentieth century, remain of great relevance today. Of course, there are other kinds of order besides the constitutional and the revolutionary, but at least some of them, for example the economic, will normally be sub-sumed under them. Definitions are in any case perhaps best left to social scientists,11 while this book concentrates on the historian’s stock in trade—movement through time—attempting to illustrate how the study of past views of world order may help us approach the present and the future. In 1748, the year of publication of The Spirit of the Laws, the world was still imperfectly known. In spite of voyages of ‘discovery and exploration’ from Columbus to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Southern Pacific and Australasia still awaited Cook and others, while most of the Arctic and Antarctic would remain uncharted for many years. Meanwhile, the interior of the great continents had yet to be penetrated fully by those 12

INTRODUCTION

with the most extended worldview, Europeans at home and abroad. In particular, as far as the outliers of the northern hemisphere were concerned, what was to become the USA and Canada consisted primarily of maritime colonies, while Russia was barely beginning to incorporate Siberia fully into the empire. Great changes would ensue through the dates to be picked up later in this study, 1789, 1867, 1917 and so on up to 1994—as we will remind ourselves, as we pursue the subject of the consideration of world order through time.

13

1

MONTESQUIEU AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER

In 1748, when The Spirit of the Laws was first published, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, wrote to a friend: I can say that I have worked on it my whole life: I was given some law books when I left my college; I sought their spirit, I worked, but I did nothing worthwhile. I discovered my principles twenty years ago; they are quite simple; anyone else working as hard as I did would have done better. But I swear that this book nearly killed me; I am going to rest now; I shall work no more. Indeed, this publication was the one on which he laboured longest and for which he is best remembered. However, he certainly wrote other worthwhile books, notably The Persian Letters, which satirises the French society and politics of his time, and Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, probably envisaged with at least half an eye on the eighteenth-century present. Equally, his vision was on Greece and especially Rome when he began his Foreword to The Spirit of the Laws with the observation: In order to understand the first four books of this work, one must note that what I call virtue in a republic is a love of the homeland, that is, love of equality. It is not a moral virtue or a Christian virtue; it is political virtue, and this is the spring that makes monarchy move. Therefore, I have called love of the homeland and of equality, political virtue.1

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MONTESQUIEU AND THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS Montesquieu’s masterpiece gives special attention to the relationship between the four major continents of the world— Europe, Asia, Africa and America—as they were known before 1748, the year of publication. Montesquieu was at pains to show why, among all these continents, Europe had achieved supremacy. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, Europe was the Western world, and so the Americas were in the periphery of Montesquieu’s vision. As for Russia, the great man suggested that its relationship with Europe was also bor-derline. Having looked at the manner in which The Spirit of the Laws outlined the relationship of Europe—the then West— with the transoceanic and transcontinental frontiers, this chapter proceeds to depict the way in which the book was utilised during the composition of the American constitution and the Russian ‘constitution’, that is the rationale for enlightened absolutism. It then goes on to throw some light on the impact of the French Revolution on the Russian and American systems as defended by Empress Catherine the Great and President George Washington, as well as making a few observations about how Russians and Americans of the time related to Europe. Finally, excerpts from the works of Burke and Robespierre are used to illustrate further the concept of ‘constitution’ and to introduce its apparent opposite, ‘revolution’. Montesquieu was the first major writer to attempt to apply the principles of modernisation to the world as it was, or rather as it appeared to be in the first half of the eighteenth century. Hobbes, Locke, Grotius and Pufendorf, among others, discussed the principles at an earlier stage, but they did not attempt to apply them. Hobbes and Locke, for example, both had extensive knowledge of the New World as well as of Europe through a wide range of contacts, but their discussion of government was mostly abstract. The social contract, developed by Locke in particular, was a conceptual tool at best, not a reality. Montesquieu, on the other hand, brought fundamental questions down to earth, although why this should be still appears itself as a matter for speculation. Probably, it was a combination of growing commerce, a greater number of travel accounts and a certain vogue for the Orient which combined with a favourable conjuncture in French history and with Montesquieu’s own talent and energy.2 15


If Montesquieu was not the first to conceive of a social science, he was the first who wanted to give it the spirit of a new science, so to speak, in proceeding not from ideas but from facts, and extracting from these facts their laws. In other words, the discovery of Montesquieu was not ingenious detail but universal principles permitting the understanding of all human history along with all its details.3 Montesquieu himself made a more explicit comparison of his approach with that of the artist. As he observed at the end of the Preface to The Spirit of the Laws: ‘When I have seen what so many great men in France, England, and Germany have written before me, I have been filled with wonder, but I have not lost courage. “And I too am a painter”, have I said with Correggio.’ Correggio was alleged to have made this remark on seeing Raphael’s St Cecilia. This painting may have been on his mind when, in his discussion of the spirit, mores and manners of a nation, Montesquieu declared: In extremely absolute monarchies, historians betray the truth because they do not have the liberty to tell it; in extremely free states, they betray truth because of their very liberty for, as it always produces divisions, each one becomes as much the slave of the prejudices of his faction as he would be of a despot. Their poets would more often have an original bluntness of invention than a certain delicacy of taste; one would find there something closer to Michelangelo’s strength than to Raphael’s grace.4 Nearly two and a half centuries after the first publication of The Spirit of the Laws, many limitations are apparent in the great man’s masterpiece. But even now historians and their colleagues in other disciplines alike could do worse than take it as a point of departure for their examination of some of the most important developments taking place in the decades following 1748, in particular the framing of the American constitution and the attempt by Catherine the Great to introduce a ‘constitution’ into the Russian Empire. As they embark upon such an exercise, they should no doubt strive to avoid the excesses of the pursuit of their profession in extremely absolutist and extremely free states, while recalling the strength of Michelangelo, seeking the balance and harmonies of St Cecilia, and bearing in mind the conclusion of Montesquieu’s Invocation to 16


the Muses: ‘You also want me to make reason speak. It is the noblest, the most perfect, the most exquisite of our senses.’5 The first approach might be to the proportions of The Spirit of the Laws itself. The work was divided by Montesquieu into six parts of unequal length, as follows. Part 1 begins with an introductory section on laws in their various forms, continues with an analysis of three kinds of government—republican, monarchical and despotic—and follows with a further examination of these three from the aspects of education, civil and criminal cases, matters of sumptuosity and the condition of women, before a final discussion of how the principles of the respective kinds of government might become corrupt. Part 2 looks at defensive and offensive force, political liberty in the constitution and for the citizen, before evaluating the relationship to liberty of the levy of taxes and the size of public rev-enues. Part 3 is devoted mainly to climate and its influence on civil and domestic slavery and political servitude; it includes a book or section on laws in their relation to the nature of the terrain, and another on laws in their relation with the principles forming the general spirit, the mores and the manners of a nation. Part 4 focuses on commerce, commercial revolution, the use of money and the number of inhabitants, Part 5 on religion and on the relationship of various kinds of law—religious, civil, political and domestic—to their contexts. Part 6, concentrating on the Roman and Frankish origins of feudalism, brings the work to an end on fiefs ‘where most authors have begun it’.6 If Montesquieu’s end is in the beginning, his last is certainly not his least. For, in ascending order of length, the parts run 5, 2, 3, 4, 1, 6. There is more than three times as much on feudalism as on religion, while Part 6 is more than half as long again as its nearest competitor, Part 1. Vulgar proportions do not necessarily mean intended emphases, yet the preponderance among the parts matches a marked bias in the whole considered from another point of view—the geographic. To put it bluntly, for all its worthy intentions to be global in coverage, The Spirit of the Laws is heavily Eurocentric, with the rest of the world constituting a periphery to its core, acting as provinces to its metropolis. Asia is the continent ‘where despotism is, so to speak, naturalized’, where ‘domestic servitude and despotic government have been seen to go hand in hand in every age’. Moreover, 17


‘Mohammedan princes constantly kill or are killed’, while the ravage of Asia by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan also demonstrated that: we owe to Christianity both a certain political right in government and a certain right of nations in war, for which human nature can never be sufficiently grateful. This right of nations, among ourselves, has the result that victory leaves to the vanquished these great things: life, liberty, laws, goods, and always religion, when one does not blind oneself. Inequitable taxation, emphasis on luxury at one end of the social scale and consignment to misery at the other were among other Asian problems, which all stemmed largely from physical features, especially heat.7 Meanwhile, in Africa, ‘carnivorous beasts…have had dominion…from time immemorial’. Moreover: Most of the peoples on the coasts of Africa are savages and barbarians. I believe that this comes largely from there being some uninhabitable countries that separate those small countries which can be inhabited. They are without industry; they have no arts; they have precious metals in abundance which they take immediately from the hand of nature. Therefore, all peoples with a ‘police’ (i.e. good order as well as coercive power) were in a position to trade with them in an advantageous manner. Again, climate was a factor, if not the only one. Africa to some extent resembled also Asia in other features, of which Montesquieu wrote in comparison with his home continent: In Asia one has always seen great empires; in Europe they were never able to exist. This is because the Asia we know has broader plains; it is cut into larger parts by seas; and, as it is more to the south, its streams dry up more easily, its mountains are less covered with snow, and its smaller rivers form slighter barriers. In Europe, natural divisions had led to the formation of many medium-sized states which could be maintained with the rule of law, but would without it become decadent and inferior. Hence, ‘a genius for liberty’, making it very difficult for any part to be 18


subjugated by foreign force ‘other than by laws and by what is useful to its commerce’. By contrast, in Asia there reigned ‘a spirit of servitude’ that had never left it: ‘in all the histories of this country it is not possible to find a single trait marking a free soul.’ Moving on to summarise his view of the world as he knew it, Montesquieu declared: This is what I can say about Asia and Europe. Africa has a climate like that of southern Asia, and it has the same servitude. America, destroyed and newly repopulated by the nations of Europe and Africa, can scarcely demonstrate its own genius today, but what we know of its former history is quite in conformity with our principles.8 By America, of course, Montesquieu meant both northern and southern continents, before and after their ‘discovery’. As one who did not accept the idea of a social contract, Montesquieu found no state of nature in the Americas. In the area of primary concern to this chapter, even the Iroquois, who allegedly ate their prisoners, possessed a ‘right of nations’ even if it was not founded on true principles. In nearby Louisiana, the ‘savages’ cut down trees and gathered the fruit when they wanted it. But, if this approached the state of nature, Montesquieu deemed it ‘despotic government’. As a whole, ‘There are so many savage nations in America because the land by itself produces much fruit with which to nourish them.’ The happy fate of these peoples of plenty was contrasted with that across the Atlantic: ‘I believe one would not have all these advantages in Europe if the earth were left uncultivated; there would be scarcely anything but forests of oak and other unproductive trees.’ However, after the ‘discovery’ of 1492 and beyond: ‘The peoples of Europe, having exterminated those of America, had to make slaves of those in Africa in order to use them to clear so much land.’ As a possible individual exception to this rule, Mr Penn was singled out as a ‘true Lycurgus’ bent on peace. But, in general, beyond conquest and annihilation, ‘in Europe it remains a fundamental law that any commerce with a foreign colony is regarded as a pure monopoly enforceable by the laws of the country.’9 Less than thirty years later, such an attitude was to help lead to the American Revolution. Before we move on to that event and the ensuing developments leading to the drawing up of the US constitution, however, two further points need to be made. What, 19


in Montesquieu’s view, were the reasons for Europe’s preeminence? And how had it developed over time? Part of the answer to the first question has already been given: a conducive geographical disposition; a particular aspect of it has been strongly implied: the moderate climate. Asia had no temperate zone, but in Europe there was a very broad one. From this, Montesquieu argued: it follows that the strong and weak nations face each other; the brave and active warrior peoples are immediately adjacent to effeminate, lazy and timid peoples; therefore, one must be the conquered and the other the conqueror. In Europe, on the other hand, strong nations face the strong; those that are adjacent have almost the same amount of courage. This is the major reason for the weakness of Asia and the strength of Europe, for the liberty of Europe and the servitude of Asia: a cause that I think has never before been observed. This is why liberty never increases in Asia, whereas in Europe it increases or decreases according to the circumstances. These included internal climatic variations, which divided the north of the European continent from the south. Equilibrium was maintained by the laziness of the latter compared with the industry and activity of the former. Between them, England, France and Holland were responsible for nearly all the commerce and navigation of Europe, while Europe as a whole carried on the commerce and navigation of the other three parts of the world. Altogether then: Europe has reached such a high degree of power that nothing in history is comparable to it, if one considers the immensity of expenditure, the size of military engagement, the number of troops, and their continuous upkeep, even when they are the most useless and are only for ostentation.10 This predominance, conditioned as it was by basic geographical circumstances, had also developed over time, from the ancient world through the medieval to the modern. Of course, it all began with the Greeks, and was continued by the Romans, a view widely shared by his contemporaries along with Montesquieu, who devotes a considerable amount of The Spirit 20


of the Laws to the systems to be found in Athens and Rome. However, the great man was not an uncritical analyst of the classical world, nor did he believe that Europe owed everything to it. He asserted that there had never been on earth a government as well tempered as that of each part of Europe during the years of existence of the Gothic German ascendancy following the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Apart from references to the evolution of Europe throughout the work, such as the observation that the English took their admirable system of government from the Germans, a whole complete part, the last and the longest, was devoted to an account of how the feudal system emerged and then led on towards modernity. By the later seventeenth century: Toward the middle of the reign of Louis XIV, France was at the highest point of its relative size. Germany did not yet have the great monarchs it has since had. Italy was in the same situation. Scotland and England had not formed a monarchy. Aragon had not formed one with Castile; and the separate parts of Spain were weakened by this and weakened Spain. Muscovy was as yet no better known in Europe than was the Crimea.11 MONTESQUIEU, THE USA AND RUSSIA The moral of that particular passage is: ‘All size, all force, all power is relative.’12 Indeed, thus it was in the world of the first half of the eighteenth century, about which Montesquieu said very little of a specific nature, and so it remained in the second half of the century, after his death. Silas Deane was to note in 1777 that ‘Russia like America is a new state, and rises with astonishing rapidity.’ This dual surge interacted with the early moves of the USA through revolution to constitution, and the expansion of tsarist Russia accompanied by the attempt of Catherine the Great to introduce her own governmental reforms.13 The ideological debt of both movements to Western Europe was enormous, but both made their own distinctive adaptations. To take the USA first, as Bernard Bailyn has pointed out, ‘law was no science of what to do next’,14 but the Americans drew on Coke and then Blackstone of the English law tradition, Grotius, Pufendorf 21


and Beccaria of the continental schools, as well as the classical tradition of republican virtue relayed for the most part via modern authorities. Minor figures were often as important as the major, for example the former Aberdeen students Gilbert Burnet, Thomas Gordon and William Small. A comparatively minor influence on the Revolution, Montesquieu was to enjoy a much more central presence at the time of deliberations leading to the constitution. To quote Benjamin Fletcher Wright on the arguments of the opposition: Montesquieu had a vast prestige in that day. He was almost venerated as the exponent of principles of free government. Many of his views were, in fact, entirely unac-ceptable to the Americans, but those opinions, when not unknown, were disregarded. On the incompatibility between freedom and an extensive republic, and on the necessity of greater separation of powers, his views were quoted over and over again.15 Meanwhile, in a similar manner, the supporters of the new constitution were also drawing on the writings of Montesquieu. James Madison asserted: ‘Montesquieu was in his particular science what Bacon was in universal science. He lifted the veil from the venerable errors which enslaved opinion, and pointed the way to those luminous truths of which he had but a glimpse himself.’ Without false modesty, Madison implied that he himself and his fellow contributors to The Federalist knew better than Montesquieu what was good for the USA. So they could take from The Spirit of the Laws the concept of the ‘confederate, or federal republic’, for example, and adapt Montesquieu’s discussion of it as a means of extending the sphere of popular government and combining the advantages of monarchies with those of republics. Madison declared: As the natural limit of a democracy is that distance from the central point which will just permit the most remote citizens to assemble as often as their public functions demand, and will include no greater number than can join in those functions; so the natural limit of a republic is that distance from the centre which will barely allow the representatives to meet as often as may be necessary for the administration of public affairs.16 22


As far as the overall influence of Montesquieu on the Founding Fathers is concerned, the account of Anne M.Cohler is broadly acceptable, especially since it takes into consideration the circumstance that the arguments of The Spirit of the Laws often ran parallel to those of other authorities, the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, for example. In her careful formulation, ‘The presentation of the argument for the constitution in The Federalist follows a pattern that Montesquieu could well have suggested.’17 There was a need for a more perfect union both powerful and free, with a government that was representative of but not too directly dependent on the people, divided, balanced and checked. But if the nearest model was the British constitution, this was neither republican nor written, and could not be adopted directly. Therefore, as Scottish and English authorities on the limited monarchy of Britain were used by the Founding Fathers along with the anglophile Montesquieu, they themselves were probably not always certain whose support specifically they were using. The adaptation of the concept of honour from monarchy to federal republic as a basis for full citizenship might well have been suggested by The Spirit of the Laws, to give just one example, but the fact remains that there are only a handful of specific references to its author in the records of the Federal Convention and The Federalist. Madison pointed out that if ‘the oracle who is always consulted and cited’ on the subject of the separation of powers was ‘the celebrated Montesquieu’, ‘the British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry.’ And so one of a pair of groups of specific references is to the separation of powers and allied matters. The other is to the aforesaid federal republic, which forms but a minor part of The Spirit of the Laws, and was then expanded and altered for their own purposes by Hamilton, Madison and others.18 Meanwhile, some of the central arguments in Montesquieu’s masterpiece were mentioned scarcely, if at all, for example climate, seen in that work as one of the fundamental formative influences. Needless to say, climate was very different in most of the thirteen states from how it was back in Britain and northern Europe. An immigrant from England had recently complained to a friend back home:

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The hotness of the weather, sir, has so prodigious an influence on the constitution that it fevers the blood and sets all the animal spirits in an uproar. Hence we think and act tumultuously and all in a flutter, and are strangers to that cool steadiness which you in England justly value yourselves upon.19 Admittedly, Jonathan Boucher was discussing his own body rather than the body politic, but there were implications for government in such observations from the point of view of The Spirit of the Laws beyond ‘animal spirits’. Even more significantly, there was virtually no reference in The Federalist or the records of the Constitutional Convention to the subject which, if length be any guide, was of greatest importance to Montesquieu as he concluded where others began, with the evolution of feudalism. For the Founding Fathers, this was not a matter of much significance, for the beginning or the end or the middle of their deliberations. Why should it be, as they made use of arguments imported across the Atlantic mainly to emphasise their distance from Europe and the newness of their government as opposed to those forms to be found in the old continent? Madison argued that what the channel had done for Great Britain the ocean could do for his own country: ‘The distance of the United States from the powerful nations of the world gives them the same happy security.’ However, if the Union were not more perfectly formed, there would be much internal disruption in the USA, while ‘A plentiful addition of evils would have their source in that relation in which Europe stands to this quarter of the earth, and which no other quarter of the earth bears to Europe.’ A somewhat different view of this special relationship was put with great passion by Alexander Hamilton in the course of an address to the people of New York on ‘The Value of Union to Commerce and the Advantages of a Navy’: The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe, by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America, have successively felt her domination. The superiority she has long maintained has 24


tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America— that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arro-gant pretensions of the Europeans. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother, moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!20 Hamilton felt strongly about the security of the western hemisphere, not only in his native Caribbean but also on the expanding continental frontier. His views on the latter subject were shared nearly a quarter-century previously by Jonathan Boucher, who characterised the imperial policy leading towards the Stamp Act as ‘in every sense oppressive, impolitic and illegal’. Boucher would have been far from alone in such an observation, but not many attacked the British parliament with the assertion that it was as ignorant in its dealings with the American colonists as it would be in the prescription of ‘an assessment to the inhabitants of Kamschatka’. As far as the London government’s Indian policy in particular was concerned, Boucher was morally certain that ‘it were a much easier task to civilize every savage in America, than Peter the Great had, when he took to humanize the bears of Russia.’ Here, then, was the recognition that Europe had two frontiers, to East as well as West, and that the situation of the American colonists was not completely exceptional.21 More specifically, one of Hamilton’s other works, his ‘Report on the Subject of Manufactures’ of 1791, was published in Russian in St Petersburg in 1807 with the observation from the translator A.F.Malinovskii about similarities between the USA and Russia ‘in size, climate and natural produce, in a population 25


disproportionate to size and in the young age of various useful institutions’. To be sure, Malinovskii recognised the differences between the two ‘new states’, especially regarding the peasantry; indeed, he frequently expressed a preference for a rural rather than an urban society, and was apparently seeking to integrate manufactures in the former rather than to develop the latter. Moreover, differences are also revealed in a close comparison of the original text with the translation, where certain passages of a technical nature or of a character completely alien to Russian society are omitted. Evidently, too, in view of the official sponsorship of his work, Malinovskii made a judicious number of further changes, omitting a section concerning the American Revolution and its positive impact on the financial situation of the USA, and replacing the phrase ‘before the revolution’ with another: ‘before the separation of America’. He also left out a reference to a slave revolt in Haiti, for fear no doubt of the potential comparison with similar action taken by the Russian serfs—further reinforcement of the argument that eighteenthcentury observers saw the case for the comparison of America and Russia in general.22 Such a view should be much clearer to us today, and can be illustrated through the agency of Montesquieu’s world picture and the use made of it by Catherine the Great, who took The Spirit of the Laws as her ‘prayer-book’ and went much further than the Founding Fathers in the direction of the sincerest form of flattery—imitation—of ‘President Montesquieu’. To be sure, she was inclined in this direction by the great man himself, who made more than a score of references to Russia, using as his principal source John Perry’s The State of Russia under the Present Czar, first published in London in 1716. It is also possible, though not certain, that ‘Much of Montesquieu’s information about Russia may have been derived from conversations with Cantemir’, that is Prince A.D.Kantemir, Russian ambassador in France from 1738 to 1744.23 A map drawn as a supplement for the revised edition of The Spirit of the Laws in 1756 focused on Europe and included at its eastern extremity ‘Russie Européenne’ stretching as far as the River Volga with ‘Petite Tartarie’ occupying the northern littoral of the Black Sea. This caught in the year after Montesquieu’s death the difficulty that had been caused him in his life by the

26


frontier situation of the Russian Empire. In his estimation of Catherine the Great’s illustrious predecessor he wrote: Peter found it easier than he had expected to give the mores and manners of Europe to a European nation. The empire of climates is the first of all empires. Therefore, he did not need laws to change the mores and manners of his nation; it would have been sufficient for him to inspire other mores and other manners. On the other hand, Montesquieu also observed that the soul of northern peoples was less sensitive than others to pain, and that therefore: ‘A Muscovite has to be flayed before he feels anything.’ A similar kind of ambiguity and imprecision affects Montesquieu’s overall estimate of Russia. It was for him a despotism, but he could not place it in the basic category of Asiatic despotism, or in the minor, distorted type of European despotism. Moreover, he did find some possibilities for the mitigation of Russian despotism in the reforms of Peter the Great and after. For example: ‘In Russia, taxes are of medium size; they have been increased since despotism has become more moderate.’24 The Empress Catherine made the most extensive use of The Spirit of the Laws in the composition of her Nakaz or ‘Instructions to the Commission for the Composition of a Plan of a new Code of Laws’. She wrote of this work to d’Alembert in 1765: ‘For the benefit of my empire I have robbed President Montesquieu, without naming him; I hope that if he sees my work from the other world, he will forgive me this plagiarism for the good of twenty million people, which must come from it.’ And so, confessing to Frederick the Great that she was behaving like the crow of the fable who made itself a garment of peacock’s feathers, she took her admiration of The Spirit of the Laws to the letter, extracting 294 out of 655 clauses in her Nakaz wholly or in part from her ‘prayer-book’. But the plagiarism was not without a measure of adaptation and improvisation, as the Empress discounted her mentor’s implication that Russia was bound to remain to some extent a despotism and his description of the desirable structure for the state. For example, while Montesquieu’s constitution was basically class-monarchical, Catherine’s was bureaucraticautocratic. For his social composition of intermediate powers, she substituted a bureaucratic variant. Separate as well as 27


intermediate institutions would prevent despotism as well as favouring the monarch’s own enlightenment. After all, Montesquieu himself had observed that despotism would not hold sway where judicial, legislative and executive powers were separate and the sovereign was enlightened. Even regarding the bureaucracy, however, the priorities of the Empress were not those of the philosophe. For example, while accepting the division of powers, she subordinated this principle to another, the internal correctness of government, based on the concept of natural law. Natural law in general appears in the Nakaz not as the fundamental guarantor to all subjects of certain rights, but rather as a basic governor of the self-limitation of the autocratic power, therefore as a rationale not for constitutional monarchy, but rather for enlightened absolutism. While Catherine made more extensive use of The Spirit of the Laws in her Nakaz than had the Founding Fathers, her approach to enlightened absolutism resembled theirs to the constitutional federal republic in its selectivity and emendation. Like them, moreover, she had little or nothing to say about Montesquieu’s longest part, on the evolution of feudalism, which had taken a different path in Russia from that of Western Europe. Like them, too, she had made use of other authorities, including some from the Scottish Enlightenment, although her tendency towards German cameralism and French physiocratism were among indicators of further divergences. In her later legislative work, contemporaneous with the movement towards the American Revolution and constitution, moreover, she resembled them in her adoption as a new model of ‘Sir Blackstone’, although with the reservation ‘I do not make anything from what there is in the book, but it is my yarn which I unwind in my own way.’25 Russian specialists are joining their Western counterparts in serious consideration of Catherine’s Nakaz and other projects, especially her Charters of 1785—to the Nobility, to the Towns and (in draft) to the ‘State Peasants’ —as a foundation of a Russian imperial constitution. 26 She should not therefore be dis-missed as a vainglorious hypocrite: if the Founding Fathers were putting forward in their way the Enlightenment’s ‘program in practice’, so was she in hers. It might be argued that they were closer to the intention of The Spirit of the Laws in particular. On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that Montesquieu had observed in his masterpiece first published in 1748 that what he knew of 28


America’s former, mostly pre-colonial history was ‘quite in conformity with our principles’. Would he have seen the USA in such conformity in 1787, from the point of view of climate, republics or whatever?27 In their search for a constitution, then, both the Founding Fathers and Catherine the Great must be allowed equal latitude in the use that they made of Montesquieu’s work. All of them worked in conformity with The Spirit of the Laws as set out in the Preface: Many of the truths will make themselves felt here only when one sees the chain connecting them with others…. I do not write to censure that which is established in any country whatsoever…. If I could make it so that…each could feel better his happiness in his own country, government, and position, I would consider myself the happiest of mortals…. I would consider myself the happiest of mortals if I could make it so that men were able to cure themselves of their prejudices…not what makes one unaware of certain things but what makes one unaware of oneself.28 Here also Montesquieu reminds us of the basic aim of this book, which is to encourage awareness of prejudices in this larger sense. That aim is now to be further pursued by an examination of the manner in which both the American and Russian approaches to constitutionality were confronted at the end of the 1780s by the challenge of the French Revolution. We will see that this uncomfortable experience reinforced the Russian and American deviations from the norms of The Spirit of the Laws. CATHERINE THE GREAT AND THE RUSSIAN ‘CONSTITUTION’ In the short run, to be sure, the French Revolution appeared to be joining the search for stability rather than opposing it, and therefore received a welcome from both sides. The Empress Catherine, to take her first, shared at least some of the early interest in events in Paris, although she soon moved towards suspicion, writing to one of her intellectual correspondents, Baron Melchior von Grimm, in February 1790: 29


As a person ignorant of the facts, I simply ask questions, foreseeing the destruction of everything that has been linked with the system of ideas of the beginning and middle of this century, which brought forth rules and principles without which, however, it is impossible to live one day.29 How could the disciple of Montesquieu and other early philosophes serve the cause of enlightened absolutism in these newly troubled times? At least some of her thoughts were set down in a memoir composed in August-September 1792, ‘On Mea-sures for the Restoration of the Legitimate Government in France’. The Empress began with an uncompromising affirmation: ‘The cause of the king of France is that of all kings. Europe is interested in seeing France retaking the place due to that great kingdom.’ Force would be necessary to effect a restoration, but it would not be of the situation obtaining before 1789. Wrote Catherine: It seems that a revolution is indispensably necessary, that matters could not remain on the same footing. This revolution could consist only of the re-establishment of monarchical government such as existed since the arrival of the Franks. Would not the balance of powers, the nobility, the clergy, the magistrature reunite under leaders animated by a desire so legitimate, so equitable, so moderate? The nobility, the clergy, the magistrature, the princes, the troops, could they not reunite for a most essential purpose: to effect the deliverance of the king and the royal family from the hands of the populace of Paris? And would this be so difficult? If it was not, it would be a matter only of concentrating the wisest and most certain means. Since the world began, order has triumphed over disorder.30 The so-called National Assembly had gone beyond the powers accorded it, which included the maintenance of monarchical government, and aimed at the abolition of this form of government which had been established in France for a thousand years, even daring to dream of the abolition of the Christian religion. Instead, it was trying to introduce a destructive anarchy, driven on by the bandits swarming around Paris. The restoration would have to be 30


carried out by force of arms. However, the aim was not to harm the reasonable liberty of individuals, but to abolish a government in the form of a republic incompatible with the existence of a great kingdom, all the more because it was contrary to the wishes of the nation prescribed in the cahiers (statements of public opinion) for the maintenance of monarchical government and the Roman Catholic religion. The deliverance of the king and royal family must be carried out in a manner least likely to cause the risk of a revolt of the princes which would plunge France into open civil war. Calm and tranquillity should be reborn from the provinces, whose harmony would oblige the capital to follow their example. Moreover, as monarchical government was being re-established, old customs which inspired respect for rank among the public should not be neglected or despised. Soldiers must always wear their uniform in camp, while persons of superior standing should not appear in public without their appropriate dress, nor princes allow anybody into their presence in similar circumstances. Such measures would discourage any lingering illusion of perfect equality, and introduce anew the dignity of rank in military and civil life, along with the certainty of hierarchy in the three estates. Generally speaking, Catherine was aiming in her measures for the restoration of the kind of monarchy favoured by Montesquieu, true to the Frankish heritage as set out at length in Part 6 of The Spirit of the Laws, and reflected by French public opinion in the cahiers: that is, absolute monarchy, but constitutional. She also revealed some of her own bureau-cratic-autocratic outlook.31 After the radical turn in the French Revolution signalled by the execution of the king and queen early in 1793, Catherine’s hopes for restoration were dashed, and her disillusionment with the course of events moved towards horror. About a year later, in February 1794, she wrote to Baron Melchior von Grimm: And so you were right, never expressing the wish to be included among the luminaries, the illuminés and the philosophes, since experience proves that all this leads to destruction; but whatever they have said and done, the world will never cease to heed an authority…it is better to prefer the foolishness of one, than the madness of many, infecting with fury twenty million people in the name of ‘freedom’, of which they do not possess even the shadow 31


after which these madmen rush forward to ensure that it will never be achieved.32 Catherine’s final position, then, was even more absolute, and less constitutional. Her far-sighted correspondent, Baron von Grimm, had made a long-term forecast of the French Revolution’s impact at the end of 1790, writing of a future when: Two empires will then share all the advantages of civilisation, of the power of genius, of letters, arts, arms and industry: Russia on the eastern side, and America, having become free in our own time, on the western side, and we other peoples of the nucleus will be too degraded, too debased, to know otherwise than by a vague and stupid tradition what we have been.33 The quality of Grimm’s forecast was adversely affected by another of its features, his declaration that the French Revolution would mean the end of Europe, rather than leading towards the continent’s further ascendancy. We can compare the actual impact of the French Revolution on the transcontinental and transoceanic frontiers by considering successive episodes in the career of a single individual. Edmond Charles Genet was born early in 1763 at Versailles, a location aptly suggesting the background of comfortable circumstances, even if bourgeois rather than aristocratic. An ambitious father pushed him towards a career normally above his station, in diplomacy, and after an appropriate education including a version of the Grand Tour, followed by some years in the civil service, he was appointed Secretary of the Legation in the St Petersburg Embassy. Arriving at the beginning of 1788, he became chargé d’affaires in 1789 when the Ambassador returned to France soon after the outbreak of the Revolution. At first, Genet was taken aback, writing at the beginning of 1790 that ‘We have shown Europe the sad sight of all those ills brought about by anarchy.’ By July 1791, his position had shifted considerably, as was shown by some of his comments on developments in Poland: ‘For a long time I could not assimilate the direction of the new constitution. The consequences of revolution frightened me, but now I am completely attached to that system which the people have chosen.’ Later in the same 32


year, he exclaimed: ‘The more numerous the enemies of freedom, the stronger burns the flame of my patriotism.’ He wrote to his sister: I am a patriot not from calculation, but from good conscience, as always. I love freedom, hate violence, and the rules of my conduct are based on the citizen’s oath. I am true to the last breath to the law, the nation and the king. Towards the end of 1791, there was some doubt in Genet’s mind, and he wrote: ‘If we cannot instil respect for our order, then it must be abandoned.’ But he soon recovered to reiterate: ‘My conduct will show that it is possible to love freedom and to worship the king.’ He thus confirmed an earlier instruction to his sister: ‘Inform the king of my feeling and tell him that I shall spill my blood for his defence with as much readiness as in defence of the constitution.’ Just before his departure from St Petersburg, Genet observed in July 1792: ‘Hereditary constitutional monarchy is the best way of opposing the disastrous intervention of foreigners.’34 Catherine opposed what she saw as his disastrous intervention by ordering him to leave in July 1792. His moderate support of the French Revolution, even though not far from her own original attitude towards it, was too much for her. GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION Genet arrived back in Paris in September. In almost no time at all, he made a considerable impression on the salon of Mme Roland, who spoke of his ‘solid’ and ‘enlightened mind’, and of the ‘sweetness, justice, grace, and reason’ of his conversation, which contained no ‘affectation or pedantry’. Jacques Pierre Brissot, who had recently visited the USA and written a book about it, used his influence as a journalist and politician to advance the cause of ‘democrat Genet’ as he chose to call him. Having written a report on the reorganisation of the diplomatic service, arguing for its comparability to the civil service, Genet found himself the beneficiary of one of his own proposals, the substitution of ‘Minister’ for ‘Ambassador’ as the highest appointment, as he was appointed representative of the French government in the USA early in November.35 33


The instructions for Minister, or as he was to become known, Citizen Genet, were ready by the middle of December, and were in two parts, the first more rhetorical, the second more practical. They began with a misunderstanding of the American constitution which was to lead to later complications: addressed not to the President, but to Congress, the instructions were based on the erroneous belief that the American Congress, like the French National Convention, possessed all power since it embodied the sovereign will of the people. Genet seems to have been unable to eradicate this misconception during the months of his mission. Indeed Genet’s high-handed policies soon after his arrival in mid-May 1793 attracted much disquiet, and the American government decided to ask for his recall, complaining that the French Minister was acting in the USA as if he were a ‘cosovereign’. Just one sentence in a long letter written by Jefferson in mid-August aroused debate in the cabinet: the Secretary of State feared that Genet’s activities might lead towards hostility between the USA and France and bring upon both of them ‘a reproach, which it is hoped will never stain the history of either, that of liberty warring on herself’. Alexander Hamilton, the leading member of the pro-British element in the American administration, objected to the last four words, unable to accept that the course taken by the French Revolution made it possible any longer to accept that it promoted liberty. Washington and a sufficient number of members of the cabinet were persuaded that the four words should be deleted.36 Soon after Genet learned of the request for his recall, in a situation deteriorating even further, he wrote in early October 1793 an angry response giving emphasis to his own view of the American constitution: Persuaded that the sovereignty of the United States resides essentially in the People and its representatives in Congress; persuaded that the Executive power is the only one which has been confided to the President of the United States; persuaded that this magistrate has not the right to decide questions… [which] the Constitution reserves particularly to Congress; persuaded that he has not the power to bend existing treaties to circumstances…persuaded that the league formed by the tyrants to annihilate 34


republican principles founded on the rights of man, will be the object of the most serious deliberations of Congress; I had deferred in the sole view of maintaining good harmony between the free people of America and France, communicating to my Government, before the epoch at which the representatives of the People were to assemble, the original correspondence which has taken place… between you and myself.37 Less than six months after his arrival in the American capital, then, Genet had reached the point of no return in his relations with the American administration. He had alienated himself from the government in the USA even more quickly than he had previously done from that in Russia. However, on this occasion, unlike before, Genet did not go home, but married and settled down as a farmer, writing to his future wife early in 1794 that his ‘sole desire was to settle in a country where virtue was honoured and liberty respected; where a man who obeyed the law had nothing to fear from despots, aristocrats, or ambitious men.’38 Red Indians and black slaves, to name but two groups, would not have agreed, but Genet’s decisions as well as his letter to his future wife were a clear reflection on the triangular relationship of constitutional developments in the USA, France and Russia in the 1790s. Of course, in that decade, the international situation as well as the relative internal situation in each country were changing very quickly, and, even in the USA, life was far from tranquil for political leaders. In the summer of 1793, which Jefferson considered important for mankind all over the earth, President Washington lost his temper after a satirical attack in which it was suggested that he would suffer the same fate as Louis XVI. As Jefferson described the ensuing spectacle: The President was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself, ran on much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him, defied any man on earth to produce one act of his since he had been in the govmt. which had not been done on the purest motives, that…by god he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world and yet they were charging him with wanting to be a King.39 35


By this time, early August, an outbreak of yellow fever had begun, and was to become an epidemic by the end of the month. Thus, climate interfered with the business of government as well as affecting the tempers of its leaders, a vindication of some of Montesquieu’s arguments in The Spirit of the Laws. However, rather than developing that point, looking further at popular disaffection in 1793 and 1794 or examining the manner in which the great debates on the French Revolution continued in the USA in the later 1790s, we will look at the comparative calm of Washington’s famous Farewell Address of 19 September 1796, seeking out in particular the retiring Presi-dent’s views on the constitutional order. Thanking his fellow-countrymen for their support and expressing the wish that ‘the free constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained’, Washington went on to declare: Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same Religion, Manners, Habits, and political Principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together. The Independence and Liberty you possess are the work of joint councils, and joint efforts— or common dangers, sufferings and successes. Here is a blend of constitutional order with its antithesis, revolutionary order. However, the strong emphasis is on the preservation of what had been won in the past rather than on what might be gained in the future. And so, although ‘the right of the people to make and alter their Constitutions of Government’ is the basis of our political systems, change can only come about through ‘an explicit act of the whole people’. Until such a step has been taken, Washington stresses, the constitution which exists at any time ‘is sacredly obligatory upon all’. To take another example, ‘the continuance of the UNION’ should be ‘a primary object of Patriotic desire’. The President asked an almost rhetorical question, possibly reflecting some of the reservations of 36


Montesquieu as well as more recent debates: ‘Is there a doubt, whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere?’ But his answer in fact left little room for doubt. Immediately, it was: ‘Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal.’ A longer response, arguing for the necessity of co-operation between North, South, East and West, took up a not insignificant proportion of the Farewell Address. The spirit of the American laws was expressed further through ‘reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power’, obtained ‘by dividing and distributing it into different deposi-tories, and constituting each the Guardian of the Public Weal against invasions by the others’. The necessity for such checks had been evinced ‘by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes’. Here again was a mixture of old and not so old precept with more recent practice. Further props for justice and efficiency (all of them noted by Montesquieu in his time) were the promotion of institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge, and the preservation through restraint of the public credit, not to mention religion and morality. Domestic despotism would thus be avoided. Internally, apart from threats to the Union, there were ‘the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally’. Unfortunately, this spirit was natural and deep-rooted, and was sharpened by another spirit, that of revenge. In different ages and countries, there had thus arisen a frightful despotism, which could lead through an inclination ‘to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an Individual’ to ‘a more formal and permanent despotism’. Party might serve as a useful check on government and protection of liberty in monarchies, but was not a spirit to be encouraged in those which were purely elective and of a popular character. Externally, peace and harmony should be cultivated with all nations, while ‘inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded’. In particular, Washington observed that ‘Europe has a primary set of interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns.’ At the same time: ‘Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.’ And so: ‘Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and 37


prosperity, in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour, or caprice?’40

CONSTITUTION AND REVOLUTION: BURKE AND ROBESPIERRE As he left office, Washington hoped that his policy of neutrality would be followed, as well as the rest of his advice. In fact, the impact of the French Revolution and accompanying wars was to lead to strains on good order of a kind even greater than those of the mid-1790s. On the other hand, there were observations of a more lasting value in his Farewell Address, which was to be discussed as a living document in the twentieth century. More of that, and also of American and Russian constitutional order later. But for the moment, we will not leave the eighteenth century. Instead, having noted again that there were echoes of Montesquieu, witting and unwitting, in the retiring President’s remarks, let us cross the ocean to set out a view of constitutional order formed at about the same time in offshore Europe. Earlier in his career, Edmund Burke had been a good friend to the American cause, although not to all of its revolutionary aspects. In general, he was a supporter of constitutional order, even if unwritten rather than written, perhaps. Certainly, in 1790, soon after the outbreak of the French Revolution, he had described it as ‘a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma’, the first such since the Reformation, and bound, like its predecessor, ‘to introduce other interests into all countries than those which arose from their locality and natural circumstances’. Thus, for example: The Russian Government is of all others the most liable to be subverted by military seditions, by court conspiracies, and sometimes by headlong rebellions of the people, such as the turbinating movements of Pugatchef. It is not quite so probable that in any of these changes the spirit of system may mingle in the manner it has done in France. The Muscovites are no great speculators—but I should not much rely on their uninquisitive disposition, if any of their ordinary motives to sedition should arise. The little catechism of the rights of man is soon learned; and the infer-ences are in the passions.41 38


Six or so years on, and the situation had deteriorated almost beyond recognition, as Burke was to spell out in his Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France. Many later observers would say that by 1796–7 the Republic was returning to some kind of order, but not Burke at the time. In his view, since the Revolution, a state had prevailed worse than anarchy, for the government had become ‘the most absolute, despotic, and effective’ that had ever appeared on earth: Never were the views and politics of any government pursued with half the regularity, system, and method, that a diligent observer must have contemplated with amazement and terror in theirs. Their state is not an anarchy, but a series of short-lived tyrannies. France had no public, and the French people had become absolute slaves, in a manner ‘so searching, so penetrating, so heart-breaking’ that nothing like it was known by ‘the helots of Laconia, the regardants of the manor in Russia and Poland, even the negroes in the West Indies’.42 In such conditions, Russian and other peasants were less likely perhaps to be seduced by ‘the little catechism of the rights of man’, but Burke found it necessary, nevertheless, to develop further analysis and issue more warnings. He looked with approval at the past: There have been periods of time in which communities, apparently in peace with each other, have been more perfectly separated than, in latter times, many nations of Europe have been in the course of long and bloody wars. The cause must be sought in the similitude throughout Europe of religion, laws and manners. At bottom, these are all the same. The writers on public law have often called this aggregate of nations a commonwealth. They had reason. It is virtually one great state having the same basis of general law, with some diversity of provincial customs and local establishments. The nations of Europe have had the very same Christian religion, agreeing in the fundamental parts, varying a little in the ceremonies and in the subordinate doctrines.

39


It would seem, then, that the Reformation was no longer the great revolution in theory and doctrine that it had been for Burke in 1790. In 1796–7, he continued: The whole of the polity and economy of every country in Europe has been derived from the same sources. It was drawn from the old Germanic or Gothic customary, from the feudal institutions which must be considered as an emanation from that customary; and the whole has been improved and digested into system and discipline by the Roman law. From hence arose the several orders, with or without a monarch (which are called states), in every European country; the strong trace of which, where monarchy predominated, were never wholly extinguished or merged in despotism. In the few places where monarchy was cast off, the spirit of European monarchy was still left. Those countries still continued countries of states; that is, of classes, orders, and distinctions such as had before subsisted, or nearly so. Indeed the force and form of the institution called states continued in greater perfection in those republican communities than under monarchies. Possibly Montesquieu might not have agreed with this last observation, but in general his spirit presided over the letters of Burke, who went on to remark that Europe’s ‘system of manners and of education’ was so similar throughout the continent that ‘no citizen of Europe could be altogether an exile in any part of it…and never felt himself quite abroad’. But now, ‘a general evil’ was to be found in every country of Europe, and among all orders of men. The centre of the evil was France, and the circumference was ‘the world of Europe wherever the race of Europe may be settled’. Looking around this world, Burke lighted last on the most important of all, as he saw it— Russia, where he hoped that the Emperor Paul, the former Grand Duke who had succeeded Catherine the Great in 1796, would rule in the tradition of Peter the Great, since: ‘He is sensible that his business is not to innovate, but to secure and to establish; that reformations at this day are attempts at best of ambiguous utility.’ Burke then went on to say: ‘I do not know why I should not include America among the European powers, because she is of European origin; and has not yet, like France, destroyed all traces 40


of manners, laws, opinions, and usages, which she drew from Europe.’ Nevertheless, an America ‘men-aced with internal ruin from the attempts to plant Jacobinism instead of liberty in that country…whose independence is directly attacked by the French’ was unwisely advocating ‘a treacherous peace’ with those French forces threatening both peace and neutrality everywhere. For France was bent on forming a universal empire through universal revolution, and would attempt sooner or later to involve all other countries in a war against Britain and the British constitution, destroying for ever the balance of power and artificially creating a new constitution almost every year.43 From Burke in 1797, let us move towards conclusion by way of Montesquieu about half a century before. In The Spirit of the Laws, we found the classical exposition of constitutional order. Looking back at the British Revolution of the seventeenth century, Montesquieu observed that the nobility was buried with Charles I, and that Charles II believed himself to be less powerful than his father. On the other hand, he wrote: It was a fine spectacle in the last century to see the impotent attempts of the English to establish democracy among themselves. As those who took part in public affairs had no virtue at all, as their ambition was excited by the success of the most audacious one [Cromwell] and the spirit of one faction was repressed only by the spirit of another, the government was constantly changing; the people, stunned, sought democracy and found it nowhere. Finally, after much motion and many shocks and jolts, they had come to rest on the very government that had been proscribed.44 A monarchy without a nobility could hardly have been the same, but would promote more virtue than its regicide predecessor. Montesquieu would appear to have looked upon the seventeenthcentury revolution, then, as Burke looked upon the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Of course, we cannot say how Montesquieu would have reacted to events in France in 1789 and after. But we can observe that his masterpiece, looked upon as subversive enough at the time of its publication, was now considered for the most part a force for conservatism. Its argument that any polity should embody the spirit of its people was being replaced by the argument that the spirit 41


should be changed, or at least more liber-ated. On the other hand, Marat declared in 1785 on the road to revolution that Montesquieu was ‘the first among us to carry the torch of philosophy into legislation, to avenge outraged humanity, to defend its rights, and in a way, to become the legislator for the whole world’. Generally, according to Anne M.Cohler: ‘In France, during and after the French Revolution, Montesquieu’s concern to balance power led to the question of whether there remained any independent political body, king, or noble, that could be used to moderate the sovereignty of the people.’45 Of course, the revolutionaries themselves in the years following 1789 were too preoccupied with day-to-day events and too much men of affairs ever to set down in an extended form their own view of the world. On the other hand, Robespierre at least was able to express his broad outlook in a speech of 25 December 1793, which we have already encountered in the Introduction and which will now lead us from Chapter 1 towards Chapter 2: The theory of the revolutionary government is as new as the revolution which has brought it to power. We must not look for it in the books of political writers, who by no means foresaw this revolution; nor in the laws of tyrants who, content to abuse their power, are hardly preoccupied with investigating its legitimacy…. The function of the government is to direct the moral and physical energies of the nation towards the goal for which it is instituted…. The greater the power, the more free and rapid is its action and the more necessary is it that good faith directs it; for the day it falls into impure or perfidious hands, liberty will be lost; indeed, its name will become the pretext and excuse of counter-revolution itself and its energy will be that of a violent poison.46 Constitution, revolution, counter-revolution, would the great wheel never stop turning? On 5 February 1794, Robespierre tried to put forward ‘an exact theory and precise rules of conduct’, a new concept of virtue, ‘an order of things where all base and cruel passions are bound up and all the benevolent and gen-erous passions are aroused by the laws’. The people would be led by reason and the enemies of the people by terror in a situation which was as if ‘the two opposing spirits that have been contending for 42


control of nature are fighting, in this great epoch of human history, to establish irreversibly the history of the world, and France is the theatre of this awesome combat’.47 The second speech was not the equal of the first. Robespierre was already in decline, and was to lose most coherence before his execution in late July 1794. But opposing spirits of constitution and revolution, if not quite as he defined them, would continue their struggle. Before moving on to Marx, let us see what we have done with Montesquieu. Without repeating the opening remarks of this chapter, let us simply note that The Spirit of the Laws has helped us to conduct a kind of laboratory test. Historians often talk metaphorically of the litmus test, for example of the manner in which a tendency or movement may become more acidic— that is, redder—or more alkaline—that is, bluer. Here, I shall use in a similar way the more refined ‘universal indicator’ of the ‘pH test’.48 That is, in drawing up their constitutions, the American Founding Fathers and the Russian Empress made use of the great work for their own purposes. Thus, Montesquieu’s book is the ‘neutral’: over the Atlantic, American ‘alkali’ affected it in the creation of a basis for the federal republic; over the continent, Russian ‘acid’ worked upon the emerging structure of enlightened absolutism. In this case, by ‘alkali’ I mean the inbuilt tendency in the USA towards representative government, ultimately democracy, the political culture formed by the immi-grants from Europe in their new setting. On the other hand, I take ‘acid’ to be the political culture evolving in Russia over the centuries in its particular environment. Thus, we have pointed out the relationship between Montesquieu’s Western world order on the one hand and the stage reached at the end of the eighteenth century by Russian history and our selected principal comparator, American history, on the other. Let us now proceed to conduct a similar experiment with Marx and his Capital.

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2

MARX AND REVOLUTIONARY ORDER

The pH ‘universal indicator’ test to be conducted in this chapter is a little more complex than that carried out in Chapter 1, even though it proceeds along similar lines. Here, Marx’s Capital is the white paper, so to speak, and Russia turns it reddest, at least in the end, that is by 1917. But Marx himself shifted his own position on Russia considerably before his death in 1883, while both before and after the Russian Revolution his disciples argued about the message to be extracted from his teachings. The basic questions were: was the process described in Capital global or merely Western? How long would it take for that process to work itself out, and for capitalism to be superseded by communism? Then, in particular, to what extent was Russia a full participant in the passage from feudalism to capitalism and beyond? More certainly, during Marx’s lifetime, the USA was rapidly rising to be considered an integral participant in capitalist modernisation, but its ‘alkali’ resisted the overall impact of later Marxist doctrines. The major battles were fought in Soviet Russia, by Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, whose struggle for the true succession will receive at least a measure of the attention that it deserves. While nonBolsheviks also joined in the debate throughout Europe and beyond, even in Russia a more traditional Western view of world order was still in existence, as evidenced in an essay on ‘The Next Task’ by the historian E.V.Tarle. Just as Robespierre provided a bridge from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2, Tarle builds another from Chapter 2 to Chapter 3.

44


KARL MARX: INTRODUCTION On 17 March 1883, Frederick Engels made his speech at the graveside of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery, London. Three days before, ‘the greatest living thinker ceased to think’. And so: ‘An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the death of this mighty spirit will soon make itself felt.’ For: Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc.; and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsist-ence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case. But that was not all: in particular, Marx had discovered the law of surplus value, ‘the special law of motion governing the presentday capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created’. Moreover, the man of science who made independent discoveries in every field that he investigated was not even half the man. ‘Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force’, and the man himself was ‘before all else a revolutionary’, whose real mission was to overthrow capitalist society and its state institutions, and to contribute to the liberation of the proletariat. Marx had been the first to bring about the proletariat’s consciousness of its own position and needs, and for this revolutionary cause, ‘he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival’. While he had encountered much slan-der and opposition, he had brushed them aside as though they were cobwebs. He had hardly 45


one personal enemy, and was ‘beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers—from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America’. Engels concluded: ‘His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work!’1 Little more than a century after that ringing declaration, the issue is somewhat in doubt. While the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and its aftermath appeared to give fresh emphasis to the words of Engels, the August Revolution of 1991 seemed to mark the end of an era in Russia, with the beginning of the end already apparent in Eastern Europe in 1989. This of course was 200 years after the French Revolution, whose authenticity was also more than a little in question in bicentennial analysis. Towards the end of the twentieth century, then, the cause of revolution looks to be in retreat. We will examine that subject in due course in Chapter 5. Here, in Chapter 2, we will attempt our own appraisal of aspects of the life and works of Karl Marx, as well as making some observations about the revolutions, from 1789 in France to 1917 in Russia, and beyond. In this exercise, we shall not forget Marx’s own words, especially: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.2 Leaving aside for later (as indicated above) any implications of these remarks for the 1990s, we should note in particular that the relationship of the Russian Revolution to the French Revolution could be considered so close as to be almost sym-biotic. Moreover, Karl Marx himself helped to prepare the way for this relationship through an intellectual journey taking him from France to Russia 46


by way of Germany and England (or Great Britain). To investigate this journey will mean a neglect of the rest of the world, but, as we have seen in the funeral oration of Engels and will confirm in our forthcoming scrutiny, Marx concentrated his attention on those parts of Europe and America, from Siberia to California, where the proletariat was to be found. This meant comparative neglect not only of Africa, South America and Asia, but also of large regions between Siberia and California in Europe and America. In particular, as is well known, Marx had a negative attitude towards most of Eastern Europe, and, for much of his career, Russia. His ‘historical science’ therefore possessed certain weaknesses. On the other hand, beyond doubt, Marx was one of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century. The ‘mighty spirit’, as Engels had called him, began his intellectual life as an idealist, cutting his teeth on German philosophers, especially Hegel. Early in 1844, he published an Introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, including the following passage (his italics only): The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man. Germany can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy. When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.3 Before the Gallic cock crew again, Marx gave further consideration to its announcement of an earlier dawn: in other words, before review of 1848, there was retrospect to 1789. Early in 1845 Marx observed, ‘Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order.’ Nevertheless, ‘the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led 47


beyond the ideas of the entire old world order.’ Under the heavy influence of classical precedent: ‘Robespierre, Saint-Just and their party fell because they confused the ancient, realistic-demo-cratic commonweal based on real slavery with the modern spiritual-isticdemocratic representative society.’ The ‘idea of the new world order’ was to be found not in the thought of Robespierre and his associates, but in that of a more truly revolutionary movement beginning in 1789, temporarily defeated in Babeuf’s egalitarian conspiracy of 1796, and then re-emerging in France after the Revolution of 1830. This was ‘the communist idea’.4 From about 1845 to 1846, Marx moved from an idealist to a materialist conception of the world and history, and began to formulate more clearly the stages through which human beings would pass on the road to communism, a goal to be reached through the agency of the proletariat and involving the abolition of the division of labour: In communist society, however, where nobody has an exclusive area of activity and each can train himself in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production, making it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I like without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critic.5 At the beginning of 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels made their first full statement of their new materialist view of world history. The central idea was an ‘acceleration’ in global development. That is: The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The rising bourgeois class had worked miracles, converting members of all respected professions into its wage labourers, reducing the family relation to a mere money relation. Moreover: 48


The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades. In time, competitive expansion would lead towards the internal collapse of capitalism, and a proletarian revolution would bring to an end the phase of history dominated by the bourgeoisie. At the end of that revolutionary year, in December 1848, Marx compared events immediately preceding with others more remote: The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and French revolutions; they were revolutions of a European pattern. They were not the victory of a particular class of society over the old political order; they were the proclamation of the political order for the new European society. In these revolutions the bourgeoisie gained the victory; but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois property over feudal property, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of the partition of estates over primogeni-ture, of the owner’s mastery of land over the land’s mastery of its owner, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic laziness, of civil law over privileges of medieval origin. The revolution of 1648 was the victory of the seventeenth century over the sixteenth century, the revolution of 1789 was the victory of the eighteenth century. Still more expressing the needs of the parts of the world in which they took place, England and France, these revolutions expressed the needs of the whole world, as it existed then.6 The Communist Manifesto had suggested that the next revolution would be in Germany, and soon, taking place in ‘more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more 49


developed proletariat’ than its two great predecessors had been able to experience. But, as we all know, the next revolution was to come in Russia, and later, and in less advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a proletariat under-developed in most respects. In Russia (and indeed in Germany) for some time to come, however, the proletariat would have to coexist with a large peasantry: in Marx’s view an incomplete class which in France soon after 1848 he found to be a ‘simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes. “The peasants” are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own name.’7 We will examine the problems of interpretation of the Russian Revolution, including the relationship between the peasantry and proletariat, in closer focus below (pp. 59–65). For the moment, let us simply note the fact that, up to 1848 and beyond, Marx looked upon Russia as an unregenerate absolutist state beyond redemption. Moreover, whereas in England and France, and even in Germany, development of the state had been influenced mostly by the development of society, in Russia it was the other way round, in the view of Marx who wrote extensively about Russia at the time of the Crimean War. Before then, in the aftermath of February and March 1848, he had set out his main thesis: ‘Europe, with the defeat of the revolutionary workers, had relapsed into its old double slavery, the Anglo-Russian slavery.’ In the New Year, he wrote: The table of contents for 1849 reads: Revolutionary rising of the French working class, world war. And in the East, a revolutionary army made up of fighters of all nationalities already confronts the alliance of the old Europe represented by the Russian army, while from Paris comes the threat of a ‘red republic’.8 But then, the Hungarians and their supporters were defeated by the Russian invasion, while Marx was compelled to leave Paris for London, where the end of the Chartist movement also brought a new ‘bourgeois’ stability. As well as scrutinising the arrival to power of Napoleon in in France, Marx now began to study in greater depth his new homeland and its wider context. As D.B.Ryazanov, the great Russian expert on Marx, was later to put it: 50


The political enslavement of continental Europe to Russia was complemented by its economic enslavement to Britain. The revolution of 1848 had been wrecked on the resistance of Russia, the despot of Europe, and equally on the resistance of Britain, the despot of the world market.9 Marx himself described at some length the manner in which this Anglo-Russian stranglehold had developed from the time of Peter the Great onwards, emphasising the manner in which the absolutist government had been able to carry out its reactionary mission through rigid control of the Russian people. With the international crisis leading to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, new opportunities arose for Marx to analyse and condemn the tsarist autocracy while he also examined the policies of the government and opposition in Britain too. After the end of the war and the ensuing reforms in Russia, he still detected no significant change in Russian society, writing that: the emancipation of the serfs…is simply intended to perfect autocratic rule by tearing down the barriers which the big autocrat has hitherto encountered in the shape of the many lesser autocrats of the Russian nobility, whose might is based on serfdom, as well as in the shape of the selfadministering peasant communes, whose material foundation, common ownership of land, is to be destroyed by the so-called emancipation. In the view of Marx, Russian absolutism would not modify its aggressive foreign policy. On the contrary, ‘the emancipation of the serfs, as the Russian government sees it, would increase the aggressive power of Russia a hundredfold.’10 Marx would come to modify this view, possibly under the influence of Engels, certainly under the influence of events. We shall return to this revision below (p. 50). For the moment, let us focus on the place where Marx himself concentrated his attention in the aftermath of the Crimean War, on the rapid development of another belligerent, Britain, which Marx, following foreign custom rather than native prejudice, normally referred to as ‘England’. He was now on the spot, ideally placed to study what he called the ‘demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos’,11 to capture the essence of the hustle and bustle of the City of London from the nearby tranquillity 51


of the Reading Room of the British Museum. There, he worked on what he saw as his most important publication, Capital. MARX AND CAPITAL The Preface to the First Edition of Volume 1 published in 1867 ends with an adaptation of a line from Dante—‘Go on your way, and let the people talk.’ This was to demonstrate that he was making no concessions to the prejudices of ‘so-called public opinion’ at the same time as he welcomed every opinion based on scientific criticism. Unlike Montesquieu, then, who had wanted to think of himself primarily as an artist, like Correggio, Marx chose to compare his fundamental approach to that of the scientist, especially, though by no means exclusively, Darwin. However, at the same time, he was anxious to distinguish his own historical materialism from the ‘positivism’ of Auguste Comte and other nineteenth-century social scientists. Earlier in the Preface, Marx compares his own point of departure with that of the scientist. He explains his early emphasis on ‘valueform’ by deeming it the ‘economic cell-form’, and noting that just as in anatomy, ‘the complete body is easier to study than its cells’, so in economic analysis, the greater rather than the smaller subject had been previously more open to consideration. Marx goes on immediately to observe: ‘The physi-cist either observes natural processes where they occur in their most significant form, and are least affected by disturbing influences, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions which ensure that the process will occur in its pure state.’ The analogy with physical science is repeated in other Pref-aces and Postfaces, not least by Engels in the Preface to the English edition of 1886: Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science. This is best shown by chemistry, where the whole of the terminology is radically changed about once in twenty years, and where you will hardly find a single organic compound that has not gone through a whole series of different names. Similarly, continues Engels, Capital had needed to use certain terms in senses different to those customary not only in ordinary 52


life, but also in ordinary political economy, since he and Marx looked upon modern capitalist production, not as a form final and imperishable, but rather as ‘a mere passing stage’ in the economic history of humankind.12 Marxism in general and Capital in particular have inspired or provoked a vast amount of commentary and analysis. There will be little attempt in this book to add to it. However, as with The Spirit of the Laws above, so with Capital here, a reminder of the basic approach and contents might be appropriate. Through emphases and proportions, some idea may be gained of the author’s overall thrust. But unlike Montesquieu, of course, Marx never reached the final shore, and so the ultimate destination has to be imagined. Capital was never finished: indeed, only one volume of a projected longer work was published in Marx’s lifetime. According to one calculation, the author devised as many as fourteen different versions of his plan for Capital. Perhaps the most settled was drawn up in 1865–6: Volume 1, Process of production of capital; Volume 2, Process of circulation of capital; Volume 3, Forms of the process in its totality; Volume 4, History of the theory. Moreover, at least initially, Capital was projected as part of an even larger ‘Critique of Political Economy’, for which six books were envisaged by 1857: (1) On capital; (2) On landed property; (3) On wage labour; (4) On the state; (5) International trade; (6) The world market. Volume 1 of Capital unfolds in the following manner. Part 1 is the starting point, concentrating on the elementary form of capitalist wealth, the commodity, from the following points of view: (a) the commodity and the realisation of its exchange-value, or the process of exchange; (b) the process of exchange and the means of exchange: money; (c) money, necessary mediator of the process of circulation of commodities. Part 2 discusses the transformation of money into capital, that is value searching for an accretion of value, surplus-value. Part 3 focuses on the production of surplus-value and absolute value, Part 4 on the production of surplus-value and relative surplusvalue (from manufacturing to the modern factory system). Next, Part 5 examines the relations between wages, productivity of labour and surplus-value, including the rate of surplus-value. Then, Part 6 looks at how the value of labour-power is transformed into wages, their different forms and variations. Finally, Parts 7 and 8 analyse the accumulation of capital, that is capitalist wealth in its totality, 53


and its consequences for labour, along with the origins of capitalism—the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’. In such a manner, Marx set out to determine a fundamental process ‘stripped of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences’, as Engels put it. Yet, as Marx himself pointed out in 1867, the locus classicus of the development of the capitalist mode of production had been ‘England’ (i.e. Great Britain): that was why ‘England is used as the main illustration of the theoretical developments I make.’ Marx declared: If, however, the German reader pharasaically shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural workers, or optimistically comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell him: De te fabula narratur!13 ‘The tale is told about you!’ Horace had said in his Satires, but how would it reach its climax in Germany or further afield? For even in ‘England’ in 1867 and for some years afterwards, agriculture was still the most important economic pursuit. Admittedly, farming had reached the capitalist stage, and workers were being driven (or attracted) from the land to join the swelling ranks of the industrial proletariat. But would this process become universal? It is still insufficiently known that beyond the reasons of illness, poverty and political activity, Marx’s hesitation in the face of that question was what delayed the completion of Capital. Nearly twenty years on from the first publication of Capital, Engels appeared to consider that whereas a wholesale change of terminology was necessary for chemistry, this was not the case for political economy. Today, more than six times twenty years after Capital’s first appearance, some critics might argue that such a complete revision should be mandatory. We will approach this argument towards the end of this book; here let us for a moment look upon some aspects of the immediate context of the first ‘mere passing stage’. To take the outliers of ‘England’ rather than the locus classicus itself and its immediate West European context, the American Civil War had been over for two years when Marx observed in his original Preface of 1867: 54


Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class. In England, the process of transformation is palpably evident. When it has reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent. The progress made in the USA after the Civil War was marked in an addition made by Engels to the fourth German edition in 1890 to Marx’s original note of 1866. While Marx had written that ‘the United States must still be considered a European colony’, Engels was now to point out that ‘it had developed into a country whose industry holds second place in the world, without on that account entirely losing its colonial character.’ Some of the reasons for the USA’s rapid development were already hinted at in 1867. For example: Nowhere does the fluidity of capital, the versatility of labour and the indifference of the worker to the content of his work appear more vividly than in the United States of America. In Europe, even in England, capitalist production is still affected and distorted by hangovers from feudalism. Could it be therefore that ‘value-form’ in the USA differed from the ‘economic cell-form’ in England and Europe? Marx himself asserted that they were the same. Whatever the differences resulting from the lack of feudalism and much higher rates of immigration and foreign investment, together with closer connections to slavery, Marx reiterated at the conclusion of Capital, Volume 1, that what most interested him was the secret ‘discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by it’. This was that: the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property which rests on the labour of the individual himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker.14 No doubt, the same conclusion would apply to England and Europe’s eastern outlier, Russia, although Marx had far less to say 55


about it in Capital. He barely mentions the arrival of the ‘peculiar institution’ of serfdom, and makes no reference to its abolition. As far as industry is concerned, he notes: ‘On this Russian soil, so fruitful of all infamies, the old horrors of the early days of English factories are in full swing.’15 However, while the strong implication in Capital is of Russian backwardness, the tsarist empire, like the US republic, was soon to join in the development first noticed in England and Europe. The progress made by both outliers was noted most succinctly in the Preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1882. Marx and Engels observed that both Russia and America were missing from their first edition of 1848. At that time, both were in their respective manners ‘pillars of the existing European system’. But now, along with the great leaps forward made by the USA, Russia had advanced sufficiently to become ‘the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe’, albeit with peculiar characteristics: The Communist Manifesto set out to announce the inevitably approaching dissolution of modern bourgeois property. In Russia, however, we find that the fast-blossoming capitalist swindle and newly-developing bourgeois landed property stand face to face with peasant communal ownership of the greater part of the land. This poses the question: Can the Russian obshchina, a form, albeit heavily eroded, of the primitive communal ownership of the land, pass directly into the higher, communist form of communal ownership? Or must it first go through the same process of dissolution which marks the West’s historical development?16 This final question was to be posed with varying degrees of intensity for the next fifty years and more; even today, perhaps, a definitive answer remains to be given. In the shorter run, it is important that Marx himself devoted much attention in the later years of his life to the Russian question, in particular to the peasant commune and ground rent, with up to 30,000 pages of notes. Here then was another threat, possibly to the ‘value-form’ as ‘economic cell-form’, certainly to the completion of Capital. Marx had come a long way from the Postscript to the first German edition of Volume 1 in 1867: ‘If the influence of capitalist production…continues to develop on the European continent as it has done until now…the rejuvenation of Europe with the aid of the knout and obligatory 56


infusion of Kalmyk blood… may ultimately become quite inevitable.’17 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: LENIN, TROTSKY AND STALIN Marx’s own thought, as has been increasingly realised, is a far cry from ‘Marxism-Leninism’, which was an invention of the Stalinist period, and would not have been recognised as his own by either of its alleged progenitors. Furthermore, we need to recall, there were many other analyses besides those of Marx and Lenin concerned with the revolutionary direction that Russia was taking both before and even after the Revolution of 1917. Here, we will take just two examples of the constitutional persuasion. Maxim Kovalevsky was for a time a close collaborator of Marx but came to the conclusion that it was possible for constitutional government on the Western model to find roots in Russia. In particular, disagreeing with Marx here as well as elsewhere, Kovalevsky argued that communal property would become private in Russia as a wider process already nearer completion in other lands began to gather momentum nearer home. In a Preface to a translation of Woodrow Wilson’s The State published in the year 1905 he declared: Not cut off by a Chinese wall from the civilised world, possessing in our past those selfsame rudiments of free development as were shown by Western Europe in the Middle Ages, and in the contemporary transformation of state estates into economic classes—the guarantee of the changeover to the system of self-government of society, we, evidently, are bound by necessity to interest ourselves in the solutions reached by the races of the German-Roman world. These solutions might be reached by us in the near future, but not because of inorganic borrowing, but because of the force of circumstances, by our intellectual and economic development, by the transformation of our contemporary state order.18 Not so optimistic as Kovalevsky was the leading historian of the period, V.O.Kliuchevsky. In the early nineteenth century, N.M.Karamzin and his contemporaries had produced an account 57


of the story of Russia centred on successive rulers and implying that the general direction was progressive. Nearly a hundred years on, Kliuchevsky sought to present an analysis of the many-sided activities of the empire’s peoples, a ‘historical sociology’. He believed that he could achieve his aim only if the national history was taken to be part of a larger whole, with outside as well as internal pressures given their due weighting. But while he might have liked to have adopted the same forward movement as Karamzin, Kliuchevsky found himself inhibited by a number of considerations. To take first the most important of them: The law of the life of backward states or peoples among those which have outstripped it is that the need for reform arises earlier than the people is ready for reform. The necessity for accelerated movement in pursuit leads to the over-hasty adoption of the ways of others. Moreover: the means of west European culture, falling into the hands of some narrow strata of society, have been turned to their defence rather than the advantage of the country, strengthening social inequality, have been changed into a weapon for the many-sided exploitation of the culturally defenceless masses, lowering the level of their social consciousness and strengthening their class animosity, by which they are prepared for revolt rather than freedom. Meanwhile, the tragedy of the opposition was that ‘the patriot enlightened at government expense was struggling against his own country, while not believing in the power of enlightenment or in the future of the motherland.’19 Unlike his counterparts in Great Britain, France and the United States of America, then, Kliuchevsky was unable to present a ‘Whig’ view of Russian history, that is ‘to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’.20 He lived long enough after the Russian Revolution of 1905 to realise that the hopes held out for meaningful constitutional reform were coming to naught, and that it was unlikely that Russia would follow the path of its Western predecessors. 58


Oddly enough, the individual who did most to divert Russia along its own way, V.I.Lenin, himself at first appears to have argued that Russia would follow the Western path. In his first large-scale work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, coming out in 1899, he indicated the manner in which the stratification of the peasantry was leading towards the arrival of capitalism in rural areas. In other words, at this point, he was in agreement with the Marx of Capital, rather than of the Preface to the 1882 Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, which suggested the possibility of direct passage from the peasant commune to the higher form of communism, with the Russian Revolution as a complement for the proletarian revolution in the West. Following Marx, as well as the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, Lenin argued in What is to be Done?, published in 1902, that the proletariat was the key class in the movement forward, guided by a party equipped with the appropriate theory. Then came the Revolution of 1905, which confirmed for Lenin the impossibility of Russia following any road other than the Marxist, and encouraged him to pour scorn on those who offered alternatives. For example, he ridiculed the assertion of the émigré Paul Vinogradoff, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford, that it was necessary to strive with all possible might to ensure that Russia should move forward along lines comparable to those of Germany in 1848 rather than those of France in 1789. In Vinogradoff’s view, the latter would lead Russian society into danger, even to ruin. For Lenin, Vinogradoff was a lackey of the Russian bourgeoisie who feared the victory of the people, and approved of revolution only when, as in 1848, it was unsuccessful, rather than when, as in 1789, it enjoyed at least some success.21 After the limited success and ultimate failure of the Revolution of 1905, Lenin argued that Russia could proceed along one of two paths: either towards a capitalist landlord Junker economy, comparable to Germany; or towards the development of small peasant farming, comparable, at least in its basic freedom, to the USA.22 In such analogies, and in his consideration of Europe, Asia and the USA, as always Lenin took a worldview, if concentrating on Russia rather than its wider context. From 1907, Lenin saw his homeland following the Junker path, although he also perceived that industrial development in some regions would allow the proletariat to gain 59


strength. The outbreak of war in 1914 persuaded him to think of the possibilities of revolution on a wider scale. Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline was written by Lenin between January and June 1916, and published in 1917. It begins by asserting that during the previous fifteen to twenty years, especially since the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, the economic and political literature of the two hemispheres had increasingly adopted the term ‘imperialism’ to describe the ensuing era. For example, a book with the term as its title had been brought out in London and New York by J.A.Hobson, an English economist with a point of view of ‘bourgeois social-reformism and pacifism’. While borrowing heavily from Hobson, Lenin would also seek to deal with the principal economic aspects of the phenomenon in a different manner. By the end of the nineteenth century, Africa and Polynesia had been divided up by the capitalist countries to complete their seizure of the unoccupied territories of the planet. In 1852, Disraeli had declared: ‘The colonies are millstones round our necks’, but just over thirty years later, Britain was leading the scramble for their acquisition, fairly closely followed by France, with Germany, Belgium and Portugal among the European powers in pursuit. By the end of the century, the field had broadened beyond Europe; Russia, Japan and the USA were also variously involved in the race for empire, which Joseph Chamberlain was now describing as a ‘true, wise and economi-cal policy’, while Cecil Rhodes was declaring: ‘If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.’ As well as quoting bourgeois authorities as much as possible, since they were forced ‘to admit the particularly incontrovertible facts concerning the latest stage of capitalist economy’, Lenin set out what he saw as the five basic features of imperialism: 1. the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 2. the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’, of a financial oligarchy; 3. the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; 60


4. the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves; and 5. the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pro-nounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. Towards the end of his work, Lenin referred to the three periods suggested by the American writer David Jayne Hill in A History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe: (1) the era of revolution; (2) the constitutional movement; (3) the then present era of ‘commercial imperialism’. And he concluded by affirming that, although such a new stage in human development had been reached, its fundamental nature was already apparent in Marx’s ‘precise, scientific analysis’.23 In the Preface to Imperialism which Lenin wrote in the spring of 1917, he pointed out how it had been written with an eye on the censor, and that therefore he had been forced to omit the observations that: the period of imperialism is the eve of the socialist revolution; that social chauvinism (socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds) is utter betrayal of socialism, complete desertion to the side of the bourgeoisie; that this split in the working-class movement is bound up with the objective conditions of imperialism. Just over three years later, in another Preface, to the French and German editions of Imperialism, Lenin claimed that his work had proved that ‘the war of 1914–18 was imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world.’ With the war over, the ‘booty’ was shared between ‘two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth’ —America, Great Britain, Japan, who were involving the whole world in ‘their war over the division of their booty’. Tens of millions were ‘dead and maimed’ in the 61


war, while the ‘peace treaties’ were opening the eyes of the same number and more—‘downtrodden, oppressed, deceived and duped by the bourgeoisie’, while a thousand million more were becoming further embroiled in imperialism through the construction of railways. Thus: ‘out of the universal ruin caused by the war a world-wide revolutionary crisis is arising which, however prolonged and arduous its stages may be, cannot end otherwise than in a proletarian revolution and in its victory.’24 By this time, the summer of 1920, Russia itself had been involved for about two years in a civil war in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917 which had brought Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks to power. At home, then, in a sense, the revolutionary was becoming a constitutionalist, or, at least, having sought for most of his adult life to overthrow a government, he was now attempting to keep a government in power. And not just any government, but one representing both the workers and the peasants of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic and their comrades in the wider world. On the other hand, Russia’s regime could not become fully constitutional until the achievement of socialist modernisation at home and of revolution in the wider world. To put it another way, at the same time, he had to be conscious of the sets of circumstances which he had described in, respectively, The Development of Capitalism in Russia and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. A further dimension to the years immediately following the October Revolution was the confrontation of the highest hopes with the deepest difficulties. Lenin himself considered these continually, for example in a speech to the Congress of School Extension Workers in the spring of 1919, with arguments suggesting an update of those of Robespierre at the end of 1793: We say to the bourgeois intellectuals, to the adherents of democracy: ‘You lie when you reproach us with the infringement of freedom. When your great bourgeois revolutionists of 1649 in England and of 1792–3 in France carried through their revolutions they did not concede to the monarchists the freedom of meetings. The French Revolution was called the Great one because it was not like the weakly phrase-making revolution of 1848: after overthrow-ing the monarchists it crushed them out of existence…. He who imagines that the transition to 62


socialism will be effected by one man convincing another, and this other a third, etc., is at best a child, or a political hypocrite. You can, if you have luck, smash an institution at one blow: it is impossible to smash a habit, whatever your luck. We have given the land to the peasant, freed him from the squire, thrown off all his fetters, and yet he goes on thinking that liberty is free trade in corn, and serfdom the duty to surrender the surplus at a fixed price.’25 Here again, then, was Lenin necessarily thinking of the problems of the peasantry as part of the transition via proletarian revolution to socialism, a combination that was to lead to the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921. According to the assessment of the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1926, up to Lenin’s death early in 1924, his ‘thoughts never ceased to labour at the task of freeing the workers’.26 This was the conclusion of the author of that assessment, none other than Leon Trotsky, about to fail in the struggle for succession with Stalin, but determined to continue the fight for international proletarian collaboration and world revolution beyond his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929 right up to his assassination by Stalin’s agent in 1940. Trotsky set out his overview of history, following the law of ‘uneven and combined development’, in the first chapter of The History of the Russian Revolution, which he completed in exile about a dozen years after playing a major part in that great drama: ‘The fundamental and most stable feature of Russian history is the slow tempo of her development, with the economic backwardness, primitiveness of social forms and low level of culture resulting from it.’ In comparison with the leading countries of the West in particular, Russia would be numbered among those backward countries which revealed with the greatest sharpness and complexity in their destiny the most general law of the historic process—unevenness. From that law derived another involving ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’, a law which was to be called ‘the law of combined development’. Thus, medieval Russia lacked cities as centres of commerce and craft, with significant social consequences. And so when it came to the Pugachev Revolt of the late eighteenth century, there could 63


be no conversion into revolution because of the lack of an ingredient most apparent in France—a Third Estate. A century later, however, the Europeanisation and modernisation of Russia were especially noticeable in industry, which went on to double its production between 1905 and 1914. Now, the law of combined development revealed itself most forcibly in this economic sphere. While more than 80 per cent of the people were involved in agriculture, which still often used seventeenth-century methods, Russian industry in some aspects had caught up with and even outstripped its advanced rivals—for example, in the number of large-scale enterprises and in the confluence of industrial with financial capital. But this latter circumstance meant the subjection of much of Russian industry to the Western European money market.27 As with capitalism, so with socialism, ‘uneven and combined development’ would continue in a global situation characterised by Trotsky as ‘permanent revolution’. Looking backwards, he argued that in 1905 revolutionary Russia had revealed to the world the most advanced form of proletarian organisation, the soviet, moving on from the Paris sansculottes of 1789 and even the communists of 1871 to a higher level of proletarian consciousness. Then, in 1917, the soviet forces had achieved a great victory in combination with the peasants, for whom the proletarians had provided leadership. However, in Trotsky’s estimate, there were other lessons to be drawn from 1905 and 1917. For backward countries the road to democracy was by way of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Consequently, a permanent state of revolutionary development was established between the democratic revolution and the socialist reconstruc-tion of society. At the same time, indefinitely and constantly, all social relations were undergoing transformation, with attendant periods of war and peace, scientific and moral adaptations, never allowing the achievement of equilibrium. A final aspect of permanent revolution was its international character. The socialist revolution might have begun on national foundations, but it could not continue in that fashion without succumbing through contradictions.28 Trotsky made these observations in 1930, revising others made at the time of the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. By 1930, of course, Lenin had been dead for about half a dozen years, Trotsky had been recently ejected from the Soviet Union, and power had been effectively commandeered by Stalin and his supporters. During the next decade, a brand of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ was to be 64


developed that was in fact Stalinism. Most succinctly, Stalin himself had declared in ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ first published in Pravda soon after Lenin’s death in 1924: ‘The combination of Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism in Party and state work.’ Lenin, he argued, had ridiculed the theory of permanent revolution, whose advocates ‘have not only underestimated the role of the peasantry in the Russian revolution and the importance of the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat, but have altered (for the worse) Marx’s idea of “permanent revolution” and made it unfit for practical use.’29 By 1931, the peasantry had been crushed by collectivisation and the proletariat committed to the fulfilment of the grandiose targets of the first Five-Year Plan. In a famous speech, Stalin hammered home a simple message: To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her—because of her backwardness, because of her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness…. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we shall do it, or we shall go under.30 In a sense, Stalin’s argument was vindicated by the fact that the Soviet Union was able to withstand the attack launched by Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. On the other hand, not only did that attack take him by surprise, he had previously detracted from the success of the Five-Year Plans by his purges. Furthermore, his repetitious rhetoric distorted the nature of Russian history. From victory over the Swedes in 1709 to the triumph over Napoleon in 1812, tsarist Russia had won more battles than it had lost. In the years leading up to 1914, some 65


would claim, tsarist Russia was catching up with the advanced countries more quickly than the Soviet Union would manage to do after 1917. The historical debate continues while the argument about the Marxist inheritance is by no means over. What would Marx himself have to say about the Soviet Union, and about the views and policies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin concerning both it and the Revolution leading to its formation? If some of his last recorded views are any guide, he would have been surprised by the events of 1917: I would consider a European war a misfortune; this time a terrible misfortune. It would inflame chauvinism everywhere for years, as every country would have to fight for its existence. The whole work of the revolutionaries in Russia, who stand on the eve of victory, would be annihilated and made in vain.31 And then, we might ask, could it be that his analysis of Stalinism in particular would lead him back to his early view that, unlike the converse norm in Britain, France and even Germany, the development of Russian society was mostly influenced by the development of the state? Of course, we shall never know: perhaps we cannot remind ourselves too often that Marx died in 1883, several decades before the course of events that he had sketched just before his death came to their full development in circumstances far different. But certainly his ideas were used to promote revolution as much as those of Montesquieu had previously been used to underpin constitutions. At the same time, arguably, at least some of the would-be leaders of a Russian Revolution looked back beyond Marx for guidance to the French precedent, updating the retrospection of Robespierre and his colleagues beyond the philosophes to classical times. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: REVISIONS AND ALTERNATIVES After Marx’s death, however, and even more after that of Engels in 1895, the inheritance began to be disputed. Almost immediately after 1895, for example, Eduard Bernstein was to develop a theory 66


of ‘revisionism’, arguing that Marx’s predictions were not borne out by the evidence that he himself presented in Capital and elsewhere. To put the point simply, there was no sign of capitalism weakening, more that it was going from strength to strength. And so Bernstein argued in his contribution on Karl Marx in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1911 that the great scientific achievement of Marx was to be found not in such conclusions, ‘but in the details and yet more in the method and principles of his investigations in his philosophy of history’ (Bernstein’s emphases). Here, as was generally admitted, he had made an original contribution. Bernstein continued: Nobody before him had so clearly shown the role of the productive agencies in historical evolution; nobody so masterfully exhibited their great determining influence on the forms and ideologies of social organisms. The passages and chapters dealing with this subject form, notwithstanding occasional exaggerations, the crowning parts of his works. If he has been justly compared with Darwin, it is in these respects that he ranks with that great genius, not through his value theory, ingenious though it be. With the great theorist of biological transformation he had also in common the indefatigable way in which he made painstak-ing studies of the minutest details connected with his researches. It is almost as if Marx the scholar were the superior to Marx the politician. By implication, political analysis was better provided by Bernstein himself. While Bernstein developed his ‘revisionism’, a self-styled defender of ‘orthodox’ Marxism emerged in the person of Karl Kautsky. However, while insisting on revolutionary goals, Kautsky also believed that socialism could be, indeed should be, realised through the agency of a mass movement operating in the conditions of parliamentary democracy. He was therefore opposed to violent action, especially by a minority, and could only look upon the Bolshevik Revolution as premature and as a distortion of Marxism. He also differed with Lenin on the subject of imperialism, especially on the centrality of financial capital. Yet another view of imperialism was that of Rosa Luxemburg, who emphasised that the expansion of capitalism depended on 67


the exploitation of pre-capitalist societies. Like Kautsky, although more of a radical revolutionary than he, she was opposed to the manner in which Lenin and the Bolsheviks had forced the pace in 1917.32 In Russia itself, a number of socialists looked upon October 1917 and after as a jumping of the Marxist gun. Chief among them were the Mensheviks, who looked upon the October Revolution as premature, believing that it was necessary for capitalism to run its full course before it could be overthrown, and possibly also disagreeing with the late Marx himself. Then there were those who were socialists but not Marxists, especially the Socialist Revolutionaries who stemmed from the populist tradition, and also anarchists of varying complexions, including the great Kropotkin, opposed to the new regime from the liber-tarian point of view. Of course, the old regime still had its supporters, monarchists or constitutional monarchists, while a further, fresh interpretation of the whole Russian Revolution came from the Eurasian or Europasian school.33 A good example of Russian liberal reactions to the successive stages of war and revolution may be found in the writings of Lenin’s former pet aversion Paul Vinogradoff, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University. In September 1914, he wrote a long letter to The Times of London, recounting how a friend, a liberal like himself, had written from Moscow: ‘It is a great, unforgettable time; we are happy to be all at one!’ In Vinogradoff’s view, the intelligentsia, ‘imbued with current European ideas as to politics, economics and law’, would be able to collaborate with the rest of the people in the pursuit of victory. And it should be recognised that the Russian people were not backward in comparison with the German, and would be able to show remarkable patience in the face of suffering. It was an advantage at this time of crisis that the government was strongly centralised, and that the tsar could now demonstrate his statesmanship, which would include his recognition that there should be further constitutional advances at the end of the war. Declared Vinogradoff: ‘The Slavs must have their chance in the history of the world, and the date of their coming of age will mark a new departure in the growth of civilization.’ In 1915, after a visit to his native land, he observed that ‘there is no more occasion to doubt of ultimate progress in the field of domestic politics than there is to be nervous as to the outcome of the struggle in the 68


field.’ Then, in 1917, although he wrote of the ‘catastrophe of March’ and the manner in which the tsar had been brought down by the court camarilla, he was also happy to note that ‘Russia has shaken off her fetters.’ The February or March Revolution had shaken the pyramid of society to its foundations, but could not overturn it. The future would bring the glory of a free commonwealth justifying the faith of Russia in their own powers. But the October or November Revolution of 1917 did indeed overturn the pyramid of Russian society, and undermine the confidence of Vinogradoff in the immediate future. In 1919, he ventured still to remark: ‘This summer will, let us hope, decide the downfall of the criminal gang which has brought ruin to the country.’ Then, probably, a military dictatorship would have to be instituted as a necessary transitional stage. Certainly, ‘strong executive organisation will have to be kept up’, for ‘interdepen-dence between authority and right is the essence and the common trait of all constitutions.’ Two years later, in the summer of 1921, Vinogradoff’s hopes for the collapse of Bolshevism were still unrealised as he commented that the new government had been trying to shape the whole of Russia in the barrack mould associated with Arakcheev, responsible for military colonies in the nineteenth century. He could not now believe in the imminent demise of the Bolshevik regime, and lamented that ‘Salvation will not come from the emigrants or from the Allies. It can only be expected from an elemental crisis in an illness which is bound to be a protracted and an agonising one.’ 34 In the twelfth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1922, Vinogradoff was able to give his extended views under the entry ‘Russia’, observing: Altogether the ‘Constitution’ of the Federal Republic of Soviets was clearly intended to be an instrument for the oppression of the formerly privileged classes and a means of propaganda for the edification of people who want to believe in the benefits of Communist rule. However, Vinogradoff commented, ‘Pure Communism can be introduced only when the people have been ground into uniform pulp: then Law and the State will disappear of themselves.’ He 69


quoted with scorn the claims of the Bolshevik theorist N.I. Bukharin that: The Soviets are direct organizations of the masses; they are not impermeable, there is the right of recall…. In democratic commonwealths the supreme power belongs to par-liaments, that is, to talking-shops…. The real rulers are the members of a caste, —of a social bureaucracy. Vinogradoff sarcastically added, ‘One might think that the rule of Soviets was free from all fictions and substitution of power.’ In particular, Bukharin and his comrades had sought to justify the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 with the claim that it did not reflect the ‘will of the revolution’. This actually meant ‘simply the arbitrary sway of a gang of reckless adventurers’.35 As for non-affiliated historians, many of them lived through the Revolution of 1917 to confront again the problems which had preoccupied them before the sequence of shattering events begun in 1914. Among the survivors was E.V.Tarle, who presented his new thinking in an article published in 1922 and entitled ‘The Next Task’, a piece of work deserving close scrutiny not only because of its observations on 1922 but also because of its implications for the 1990s.36 Nobody, Tarle claimed at the outset, could claim a comprehensive grasp, but many questions were being posed: for example, how did the Muscovite state grow, not according to the twenty-nine volumes of S.M.Soloviev’s History of Russia from the Earliest Times published from 1851 to 1879, but in reality? A satisfactory answer was elusive, for two main reasons: first, the increasing multiplicity of facts, both from the archives and from the growth of new disciplines, especially economic history, which was threatening to overwhelm scholars from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards; and second, the growing complications of psychology, which made necessary the broadening of horizons. Moreover, the more difficult the task of criticism, the more attractive it became, and so critics and polemicists had become more numerous than systematists and constructors. The recent great catastrophe had struck deep into the psychology of that numerically insignificant group of people who had chosen as their life’s work the investigation of humanity’s past. What were the consequences for them? 70


Declared Tarle: The question is at least not unimportant for this group of people. It is time if not to investigate it, at least to pose it. One of the greatest virtues and duties of the historian is mistrustfulness. Must we, as we regain consciousness, with mistrustfulness turn first of all to address ourselves and attempt to establish: how has the apparatus of our thought changed? Are we more or less capable of coping and understanding than before? The following argument may be more natural, then: that we looked at the states, their forces, the correlation between these forces, at the psychology of the Russian people, at a multitude of phenomena, in a different manner to how we look at them now; and we know for certain that not only have these phenomena changed, but that we simply did not understand them very much, that we looked at many things in an unreal fashion and accepted phantoms as reality. If so, why should we think that our views of history were without error? If we in 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916 accepted, let us say, the Russian people as somebody else, then where is the guarantee that we know and understand better the Romans, the Greeks, the Franks, the contemporaries of Charles V or Louis XVI or Napoleon? In death, asserted Turgenev, there is some kind of definitive truth. Revolution is always first and foremost death, then life. That is why with each cataclysm there perish very many old phantoms and lies. And immediately too, of course, there are born new ones, but in each case, the process of recovery from old phantasmagorias is capable of shaking the strongest intellectual self-confidence. And just at this difficult period of the loss of faith in correctness of a whole range of their former convictions, the historians who have undergone the cataclysm are subjected to new and powerful temptations, their intellect is diverted from its direct scientific importance by powerful, often uncertain influences.37 Tarle went on to argue that history must be written not exclusively as narrative, but to establish the facts, and then to explain them. Certainly, history must not be written as advocacy, a practice into which generations following cataclysms too easily 71


fell. The French Revolution could be discussed quietly only thirty years afterwards, and then only exceptionally. Robespierre still quarrelled with Danton, but the first was impersonated by Mathiez, the second by Aulard, and they were both professors of history. There were many other such examples, even a century and a quarter on. Cataclysms also fogged vision, distorting the outlook of many historians and leading them into pseudo-history, which Tarle defined as what ensues when historians address some subject, but set out in allegorical or cryptographic form another subject, the history of their own time or near to it, modernising motivation. Such pseudo-history had been rare in Russia,38 but was especially attractive in epochs after storms. First, there was the search for analogies and antecedents, then the emergence of allegory and cryptogram. French historiography of the first quarter, even the first half of the nineteenth century had looked for a revolutionary bourgeoisie in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for the outlook of 1789 in the States-General of the fifteenth century. The same tendency would soon appear among Russian historians, in Tarle’s estimation—its chief disadvantage was that it divided and thus weakened the understanding. Historians must remember that the situation ‘is not an advantage for our generation, but, on the contrary, something capable of seriously lowering the analytical capabilities of even the strongest intellect’.39 However, there was a positive side to the present predicament of 1922. Such epochs promoted understanding of what in other times would not be completely clear, an empty sound. Examples could be found in the Renaissance writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, while the great Ranke drew extensively on the minor Clarendon, his superior regarding the experience of the English Revolution, although in other respects comparison would be ludicrous. Similarly, Voltaire appeared superficial and insipid compared to lesser figures who actually lived through the French Revolution. The way forward must avoid several pitfalls. History must not simply tell a story, nor relapse into advocacy. It must not become pseudo-history, allowing a poetic rendering of ideas to take over, as tended to happen during cataclysms, for example the years 1789– 99. The great catastrophe of the 1914 war, followed by the Russian Revolution, posed such a threat because it had first caused death. 72


But then it produced new life, as the old gave way to the new. On the one hand, Tarle and his generation were faced by a situation ‘capable of lowering the analytical capabilities of the strongest intellect’; on the other, there was the advantage of being in a position to react to the immediacy of experience. Continued Tarle: Auguste Comte ascribed great methodological significance to the study of revolutionary overtures; even greater significance in this connection is possessed by the personal experience of such events. The old fabric is torn, ends and beginnings are laid bare, and an element appears, which at other times cannot be seen, and whose presence can only be implied. The main point is that you observe the worthlessness of the historical significance of the rational foundation, all the particular, inhuman, but somehow different boundless logic, which, to be sure, is dominant even in ordinary times, but is overshadowed by the public platform and the press, in words, in gestures, in shouts, arguments, discussions, articles—in a word, by everything which masks with such success and hides from our view —in normal epochs—the true motivating forces of the historical process. States, apparently eternal, fly into pieces, the state culture turns out to be a superficial covering, primeval chaos envelops and overwhelms the shell, which has only just seemed an unbreakable and majestic ark. It seems to some nervous people caught up in such a cyclone that they are going out of their minds and becoming delirious. On the contrary, they were previously delirious, lulled by a false security, forgetting that not far under the elegant carpet of their cabin there is a dark and fathomless abyss, and that this abyss is the age-old natural reality, and that their cabin is a fragile and artificial invention; that the abyss existed before the cabin, and will remain after the cabin, and they themselves may study the abyss, if only imperfectly, but they may in no way control it. The most they can do is to try to delay the wreck of their ark.40 In the view of Tarle, after such an experience, the intellect could only grow stronger or weaker; it could not stay still. Looking around him in 1922, Tarle could not find much cause for optimism. He gave his verdict, for example, on Outline of 73


History by H.G.Wells: an author who combined elements of Jules Verne and Jack London deluded himself into believing that he was solving all the mysteries of world history with his gleanings from secondary-level textbooks mixed with vulgar philosophy and paradoxes. Yet this work had been taken seriously by a whole group of British academics, and many other similar examples could be given. Declared Tarle: ‘Whether there will appear the long-awaited serious schemes and theories, or whether there will be in this sphere the dilettante thinking aloud begun in 1914 and becoming stronger in 1917, leading nowhere, and with no future— time alone will tell.’41 Tarle believed that a growing academic exchange with Europe and America could and would have to be one source of fruitful thought in conditions of continuing cataclysm. But fact gathering must not be abandoned: indeed, he asserted, ‘The more powerful, the more authentic the generalising thought, the more it needs the erudite and erudition.’ To put the matter simply, the seventeenth century had produced erudition, the eighteenth had produced philosophy. For its part, the early nineteenth century had brought forward theory along with some erudition and criticism, while in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, erudition and criticism had grown, but so-called ‘philosophy’ had fallen to the low level that might be found only in remote epochs. Moreover, ‘philosophy’ in the eighteenth-century sense was no longer enough, because of the much higher level of erudition. Erudition should not be undervalued, Tarle observed: But never will our present architect, a builder by profession, begin to pour scorn and sarcasm on those who in expectation of his arrival have collected and polished the stones and marble, inspected and thrown away unsuitable material—and sometimes even participated in the laying of the foundation. However, on the other hand, in Tarle’s estimation, erudition should never be identified with science, nauka.42 Some earlier attempts at schematisation had suffered from a variety of weaknesses. For example, the eighteenth-century Physiocrats had explained Chinese and Egyptian history while knowing little or nothing about it. With a similar handicap in the nineteenth century, Hegel had attempted to distil the spirit of Indian 74


history. But was Hegel disturbed when facts contra-dicted his theory? No, the worse for the facts, in Hegel’s view. Such constructors of systems had been close in their outlook to the Cameralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who made the interests of absolute rulers absolute. Wrote one of them: ‘May he be damned who is predisposed to distinguish the interests of the sovereign from those of his subjects.’ Such servility was as unhelpful as disregard for facts. In conclusion, Tarle looked forward: We will hope that the beginning of the twentieth century turns out to be similar to the beginning of the nineteenth not only in destruction on an international scale of several million people, but also with the appearance of a galaxy of synthesising minds and talents. The time for the harvest has already arrived; perhaps the reapers are approaching.43 We are all too familiar with what was actually approaching: reapers who were grim indeed, a servility before absolute rulers that would outstrip that of the Cameralists, and the superimposition on events of a crude schema. After a period in the Gulag, Tarle himself, if without losing all his scholarly attributes, was to become one of the leading Stalinist historians, as we shall see in Chapter 4. But I have not devoted such close attention to his attitude in 1922 to the question of ‘The Next Task’ in order to spin out a cautionary tale, but rather to throw light on the problems faced by Tarle’s successors seventy years on, in the 1990s, as they too confront revolution. To give too much emphasis to the parallel would be to fall into the trap of the search for analogy and antecedent, which Tarle advises us to avoid, seeing it as a step towards allegory and cryptogram. Nevertheless, the following comments appear pertinent to any discussion of writing on history in the 1990s. First, seventy years ago, Tarle wrote in a language rarely found among his successors today, rich in vocabulary and subtlety of expression. Second, Tarle showed himself to be a scholar of broad education, familiar with classical and more recent culture, if mostly Eurocentric. Here, no doubt, Tarle would reflect the normal standards of his time, especially for specialists in general, vseobshchaia, history. For similar reasons and also, third, because he was a specialist in this area, Tarle made an inordinate number 75


of references to French history, in particular the French Revolution, although we should not neglect the obvious point that the French Revolution was the antecedent and analogy for the Russian, and allow Tarle to fall at least some way into his own trap. It certainly is striking how frequently Annaly: zhurnal vseobshchei istorii, 1922– 4 (published in Petersburg by Petrograd Publishers in which Tarle’s article on ‘The Next Task’ first appeared), refers to the French Revolution as the Great Revolu-tion.44 Equally, and fourth, like the journal of which he was co-editor, Tarle makes little reference to the Russian Revolution, and, perhaps more surprisingly, not one mention of Karl Marx, let alone V.I.Lenin. Even after the turbulent years 1917–21, then, the Russian historiographical tradition from Karamzin through Soloviev to Kliuchevsky was still alive. Quite possibly in 1922, Tarle also harboured thoughts about constitutional development similar to those of Kovalevsky and Vinogradoff, along lines advocated by the American President Woodrow Wilson. Even Lenin, as we have seen, found it necessary to consider both theoretical and practical problems of constitutionalism as he moved from Russian Republic towards Soviet Union. On the whole, however, Trotsky was probably accurate in his observation that Lenin’s ‘thoughts never ceased to labour at the task of freeing the workers’. After Lenin’s death, Trotsky kept the banner of proletarian revolution flying while Stalin moved further in the direction of constitutionalism (however distorted or even perverted). The original thoughts of Marx were by now far from the minds of the Soviet establishment, however much they used ‘Marxism-Leninism’ as an ideological underpinning for their own power. But we are running ahead of ourselves. Before moving on, we must return to our promised second pH test and confess that our attention in this chapter has focused much more on Russian ‘acid’ than on American ‘alkali’. Here, the reading for Russia would be towards the extreme, while that for the USA would barely register. The reason for this imbalance, as already indicated, is that revolutionary Marxism made little immediate impact in the USA. As Marx himself had indicated in Capital, this was partly because of the lack of American communal and feudal development, partly because of the USA’s possession to an unprecedented level of ‘the fluidity of capital, the versatility of labour and the indifference of the worker to the content of his work’ (see p. 55 above). As we turn our attention to the views of world order put forward from the 76


beginning of the twentieth century by a selection of E.V.Tarle’s European colleagues, we shall clearly see that the Atlantic remained a broad divide and that the USA was still not quite accepted as a fully mature member of the Western world, even if without doubt poised for rapid emergence to leadership of that world. At the same time, the kind of constitutional order asserted by Woodrow Wilson in his academic publications was soon to be proclaimed by him on the wider global stage.45

77

3

FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS ATLANTIC ORDER, 1900–22

Putting Marx and Montesquieu along with the pH test into the background, we now bring to the fore the colleagues of E.V. Tarle, professional historians. We turn to examine how they were adjusting their outlook on Western world order at the beginning of the twentieth century before the First World War, and then consider the impact made on the outlook of some historians and other representative writers by that great conflict. In particular, we shall note the full acceptance in the West, especially the now so-called English-speaking West, of the idea of an Atlantic community, including the USA, and the demise of a previously widely accepted cultural concept, that of a Teutonic’ group of nations including the United Kingdom and the United States along with Germany. In his excited discussion of ‘The Next Task’, E.V.Tarle presented an interesting view of the development of the writing of history from the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century. There is at least one point, however, that he failed to make sufficiently clear: that the profession of historian emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century. This development had important implications: historians expected their profession, like any other, to be taken seriously; they communicated much more among themselves, for example by way of new journals, in efforts to realise this expectation; equally, for the same purpose, they looked increasingly upon their discipline as a ‘science’ with its own distinctive techniques.

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F R O M E U R O P E A N T O WA R D S AT L A N T I C O R D E R

A WATERSHED IN EUROPEAN HISTORY, 1900–13 In July 1900, an International Congress of Comparative History met within the framework of the Paris World Exhibition. Like its predecessors from London in 1851 to Chicago in 1893, the Paris Exhibition was a contrast of wide collaboration and narrow self-interest. Not surprisingly, therefore, the proceedings of the congresses on a wide range of subjects both academic and nonacademic tended to comprise a bland mixture of mutual congratulation and nationalist assertiveness. And so historians would not have been surprised to hear that their subject had made great strides throughout the nineteenth century, overcoming misleading theories (including revolutionary socialism, no doubt) on the one hand and trivial compilations on the other to produce a large number of reliable facts revealing the full truth; nor would they have been surprised to find that the more they learned about their country, the more they learned to love it, and the more they loved it, the more they wanted to learn about it.1 However, both at the congress and even more outside it, there was ample evidence in and around 1900 that neither factgathering nor flag-waving was enough. Among the historians who had come to realise the shortcomings of empirical patriotism was Karl Lamprecht, who was to look beyond the confines of his German history as he completed its twenty-four volumes between 1891 and 1913. Increasingly, he came to turn from specialisation towards universalism, from the ‘individualist’ approach to the ‘collectivist’. Lamprecht’s views aroused enormous controversy and carried his name across the Atlantic. Invited to visit the USA in 1904, he set out his approach in a series of lectures published in 1905 as What Is History?. 2 Although this was the broadest exposition of his views, he still gave heavy emphasis to the development of Germany over the course of more than two millennia. In a stirring passage, Lamprecht declared: ‘I can imagine my sixtieth ancestor marching out with a German spear and looking with defiant mien across the Rhine, and my fiftieth ancestor putting behind him the great river and invading the carefully guarded regions subject to the Roman Yoke.’ And now their remote descendant—‘a brain-worker whose muscles have grown flabby from lack of constant exercise’—had crossed the 79


vast ocean to speak to a foreign yet kindred people about the life of his own nation through the passage of the centuries. Beginning with the heroic song and other forms of epic, Lamprecht observed, the narration of the German story passed through several stages before reaching newer, deeper insights than ever before in the latter part of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, a period of economic and political evolution following 1848 and culminating in 1871 was of great significance for intellectual growth. Released from their great anxieties concerning national life and unity, men could now concentrate on the development of internal culture. A stirring in the arts and social sciences shook their common foundation— ‘socio-psychological history’. To be sure, there was a period of disputation and pessimism, involving ‘brilliant failures’, among whom could be numbered the ‘tragic person of Nietzsche’. But during the past half decade or so, the concept of the Superman had given way to concepts of the individual, society and state which were simpler yet more in keeping with the dominant spirit of the new age.3 For Lamprecht, the greatest problem facing the scientific history of mankind was the deduction of a universal law from the history of the most important communities. Along with the USA and Japan these included European countries which had undergone modernising experiences comparable to those in Germany. The study of some stages of development of ‘overripe’ or ‘decadent’ cultures such as the Indian and Chinese could be useful, but the centre of attention would have to be where significant key political and economic evolution had recently occurred. This, of course, was ‘the doctrine of Karl Marx, the theory of the so-called, though most unhappily so-called, historical materialism’. But, in Lamprecht’s view, the doctrine of Marx and his school was ‘utterly inadequate’ even if there was an attempt to measure the mental and moral progress of a community. Ethnology, archaeology and the history of art would all play important parts along with political and economic history in the composition of a scientific Weltgeschichte, but among all the vast and inexhaustible sources of world history, the centre was emphatically ‘psycho-historical’.4 Lamprecht recognised that scientific history had advanced elsewhere, especially in France, both before and after 1871. But, of course, the proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles on 18 80


January of that year was a great humiliation for France, and by the end of 1871 the Paris Commune had been formed and crushed, adding another important date to 1815, 1830 and 1848 in the period following the French Revolution. Nevertheless, both in spite and because of the revolutionary tradition, French intellectuals had indeed managed to develop the study of history. Therefore, there was much to draw on when a new French departure took the pursuit of the subject further at the time of the Paris World Exhibition. In August 1900, the first number of Revue de Synthèse Historique was brought out by Henri Berr, and Lamprecht and other foreigners were joined in debate by their French colleagues. In addition, Berr himself published in 1911 a full exposition of his views, La Synthèse en histoire: son rapport avec la synthèse générale. In this book, he accepted that, empirically, history was the study of the human facts of the past, and that every other definition was tendentious. However, to concentrate on the summary and classifi-cation of facts was not enough: there was a clear difference between an erudite and a scientific synthesis of history, as well as a further gap between the latter and the philosophy of history.5 What was the scientific synthesis of history? Basically, the question revolved around another, that of causality, which in turn might be said to consist of three types or orders: contingency, necessity and logic. Contingency involved not only chance but also six modes of individuality: personal; ‘collective’; geographical; through time; at any moment; and (here Berr could not avoid the German noun) —Völkerpsychologie (folk or national psychology), an area much vaster and more indetermin-ate than the term might suggest, with a deep source expressing itself most clearly in the various collective individualities. If contingency in Berr’s view consisted of the facts, necessity was a matter mostly of the social, and therefore of sociology. The third order of causality, logic, in history meant ideas, of psychology as well as sociology, which between them helped to bring about the formation of consciousness (conscience). On the one hand, Berr held back from asserting too rigid a system, a fault which he believed he could find in sociology. Others, he suggested, might find an organisation of the scientific synthesis of history more adequate than his, which depended on the interaction of the three types of cause. On the other hand, through the patient, methodical and experimental study of this 81


reciprocal interaction, he believed that the study of causes in human affairs might open perspectives on causes in nature, on evolution as a whole. In such a manner, scientific synthesis would establish not only man’s precise role in society, but also help him to come to understand his role in the universe.6 Devoting the rest of a long career to the pursuit of such broad aims, Berr was to narrow his focus in the shorter run. For him, as for many others, the war of 1914–18 was both a point of arrival and departure in the evolution of humanity. In particular, Berr wanted to oppose German attempts at Weltgeschichte with a comparable French exercise demonstrating the national vitality, both commemorating those who fell to save France and advancing science in its broadest sense. At this point, apparently, allies were to be neglected as well as enemies, but in any case Berr had been on the whole accurate in his earlier observation that Britain in particular was far from adopting the objective scientific method in historical study, but continued to look upon history as a branch of general literature, against a strong background of the empiricist tradition of the Anglo-Saxons which had recently found expression in the defence of pragmatism on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in the USA.7 The senior partner among the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nations, Britain, was on the point of decline from world hegemony at the turn of the century, while a junior, the USA, was rising fast towards it. Among the observers of this phenomenon was Lord Acton, as much at home in the scholarship of the continent as in that of the English-speaking community—‘a miracle of learning’, according to his friend Lord Bryce, with ‘a passion of the intellect, a thirst like the thirst for water in a parching desert’. Unfortunately, however, although Acton could on occasion speak ‘as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight’, he wrote very little. Or, rather, in a sense, he wrote too much, filling hundreds of boxes with notes and extracts, distilling and bottling the essence of what he read, but never pouring it out fully in publication. To some extent, this was because Acton could not accept what Bryce wrote in an increasingly relevant observation: that it becomes ‘daily more than ever true that the secret of historical composition is to know what to neglect’.8 But a considerable part of his difficulty arose from the circumstances that he was a loyal Roman Catholic attempting to become a leading Liberal, and that, among mostly 82


insular empiricists, he was attempting to become a cosmopolitan universalist: ‘There is no escape from the dogma that history is the conscience of mankind.’9 While Acton’s professed outlook was all-embracing, it was not without its limitations and partialities. From its vantage point in Western Europe, it was directed across the Atlantic rather than across the continent or towards the wider world. The Orthodox world was on the circumference of his vision, and he saw Russia as mostly ‘inert’ in Universal History. Further afield, Acton confessed himself unable to judge what to think of ‘those who live pure and good lives but are without reach of Christianity’, although he firmly believed in the one ‘great operation set at work by Christ—the Preparation of the Nations’. And to his Christianity there was added his Liberalism, ‘based on the love of freedom for its own sake’, in the estimation of Lord Bryce, ‘joined to the conviction that freedom is the best foundation for the stability of a constitution and the happiness of a people’.10 Expounding his overview, though never completing his history of liberty, Acton thought of the seventeenth century as ‘the crisis in the history of conscience’, seeing 1642 as a starting point, and coming to share the opinion that Cromwell’s statue should be at Washington, not Westminster, for the Roundheads had taken several necessary steps towards 1776 and after. Although the process went back to Magna Carta and beyond, Cromwell and his associates had advanced it further through devising a theory of conscience, rejecting the authority of tradition and introducing the normality of ‘abstract ideas’. However, the Commonwealth had been marred by excesses of simplicity and completeness, and the Glorious and Bloodless Revolution of 1688 had been necessary to construct a more balanced legacy to the eighteenth century. The best was yet to come, for the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776 could be rightly compared with the nativity of Christ, with William Penn’s Quaker ‘Holy Experiment’ as a prefiguration. The Declaration of Independence had set up a new theory of government—the absolute condemnation of European politics—while the Founding Fathers not only continued the struggle for the introduction of conscience into politics but also, with the federal structure of the constitution, introduced ‘the supreme guarantee’ of freedom and democracy. Making a 83


comparative point succinctly, Acton wrote ‘French Revolution— pathology, American—normal development of ideas’. For him, the USA had produced ‘a community more powerful, more prosperous, more intelligent and more free than any other that the world has seen’.11 American historians would presumably have experienced no difficulty in accepting ideas such as these, or most of the sentiments put forward by Acton in his confidential report to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press in 1896 concerning the suggested project of ‘a history of the World’. Recommending the avoidance of ‘the needless utterance of opinion, and the service of a cause’, Acton went on to declare: ‘Contributors will understand that we are established, not under the meridian of Greenwich, but in Longitude 30 West—that our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, Germans and Dutch alike that nobody can tell, without examining the list of authors…’ Nobody should be able to detect who put the pen down and who took it up, although The Cambridge Modern History should be composed by pens ‘English, American and Colonial’ with ‘a capable foreigner rather than an inferior countryman’ to be taken only ‘in an emergency’. Ultimate history they could not have in their generation, but they could dispose of conventional history, now that all information was within reach, and every problem capable of solution. In a stirring passage, Acton explained what he meant by ‘Universal History’: that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series according to the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of mankind. Secondary states appear, in perspective, when they carry flame or fuel, not when they are isolated, irrelevant, stagnant, inarticulate, passive, when they lend nothing to the forward progress or the upward growth, and offer no aid in solving the perpetual problem of the future. Renaissance and the Epoch of Discovery, Reformation and Wars of 84


Religion, Turkish Crusade and Western Colonization, European Absolutism, Dutch, English, American, French Revolution, and its derivatives, the constitutional democratic, national, social, Liberal, Federal movement of the world that is the great argument of the Epic that we are to expose. These things are extraterritorial, having their home in the sky, and no more confined to race or frontier than a rainbow or a storm.12 As an example to illustrate his declaration, Acton chose Russia, a retrospect of whose history should be given ‘when it emerges, under Peter the Great, thereby following the natural order of cause, not that of fortuitous juxtaposition’. Hippolyte Taine had been right when he had said that to explain events, it is enough to put them in the proper order: to put them in their place is to express their cause. Thus, religion, philosophy, literature, science and art influenced the course of public events from time to time: ‘but when they do not then we are not concerned with them, and have not to describe their orbit when there is no conjunction.’ In such a manner, establishing the proportion between historic thought and historic fact, and adhering to the higher series, Acton hoped that The Cambridge Modern History would act as a chart and compass for the coming century, and also establish ‘in what measure history might be able to afford the basis for a true philosophy of Life’. Steering a course beyond longitude 30 to about 75 west, crossing the Atlantic Ocean rather than moving towards its middle, the muse of history was also inspiring American devotees. Henry Adams and George Bancroft led those who, like Acton, celebrated the triumph of federal democracy, while Frederick Jackson Turner asserted its impact on the further frontiers, and Charles Beard was among those interested in a ‘New History’ of broader scope and greater utility than its old predecessor. Meanwhile, on the landward side of Europe, longitude 30 east and more, the Russian peoples, previously ‘inert’ in Acton’s view, were soon to rise up in the Revolution of 1905 in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War. The historians among them were to recommend a variety of ways forward, from the Western parliamentary to the Marxist Soviet, with the most outstanding, V.O.Kliuchevsky, preferring the first but not convinced that the pattern of his country’s past would allow it. Unfortunately, as 85


yet, Kliuchevsky and his colleagues in Russia, even Adams, Bancroft, Turner and Beard in the USA, had still to make their full mark in Europe, while wider attention was not easily secured by scholars from the continent’s lesser powers. To be sure, Benedetto Croce was to achieve lasting influence with his argument that all history is contemporary history, that description of past events refers in reality to ‘present needs and present situations’. And Croce was not the only outsider to make an impression on the guild of historians in process of formation at the turn of the century.13 To capture the perceived circumstances of the end of the nineteenth century is not easy, but perhaps as good an approach as any is to quote a widely celebrated work of the French historian Charles Seignobos, translated into English in 1901 as A Political History of Contemporary Europe: The war of 1870 ended the crisis of nationalist wars. Germany, supreme in Europe, has obliged the other states to adopt her military system and has put a stop to war by making it horrible…. All warlike action has related to the Orient and has been practically outside of Europe…. War has ceased. The perfect police system and the vast military power of the governments have made revolutions impossible. To varying extents, Lamprecht, Berr and Acton might have agreed. However, Seignobos went on to observe: ‘A natural tendency to attribute great effects to great causes leads us to explain political evolution, like geological evolution, by deep and continuous forces, more far-reaching than individual actions. The history of the nineteenth century accords ill with this idea.’ For the three major crises in Europe after Waterloo, in 1830, 1848 and 1870, were all accidents, ‘sudden crises caused by sudden events’: the work respectively of a group of obscure republicans, aided by the blunders of Charles X; of certain democratic and socialist agitators, aided by Louis Philippe’s sudden lack of nerve; and of Bismarck personally, prepared by Napoleon III’s personal policy. Seignobos concluded: ‘For these three unforeseen facts no general cause can be discerned in the intellectual, economic, or political condition of the continent of Europe. It was three accidents that determined the political evolution of modern Europe.’14 86


The approach of Seignobos would continue through the twentieth century, with a latter-day version put forward by H.A.L. Fisher in 1936: ‘I can see only one emergency following upon another…the play of the contingent and unforeseen.’ Such a view, of 1914, 1939 and other world crises, is still widely accepted today. On the other hand, in spite of many unresolved problems (for example, the definition of ‘science’ and ‘conscience’) and vastly different circumstances, there are those who would want to persist with the aspirations of Lamprecht, Berr and Acton for a universal history, now that the debate is joined on the kind of watershed we are facing at the fin de millénaire.15 HISTORY CONGRESS IN ENGLAND, 1913: SPEECHES In the spring of 1913, the powder keg of the Balkans continued to smoulder after the failure of a peace conference in London in January. Rumours of war were not far away as the question was aired as to whether or not a national service system would be necessary to supplement the regular armed forces. As the process of replacing horse by motor vehicle continued, and the science of aeronautics developed, advanced thinkers wondered if future hostilities would take on unprecedented shape. Meanwhile, industry was rent by strikes, with the antidote of a minimum wage receiving little support from employers who, like landlords, were anxious about income tax and national insurance payments. Home Rule for Ireland and Votes for Women were continued slogans also causing apprehen-sion, and there were fears of the threat to public morality of the cinematograph with its possible ‘perversion into an agency for pandering to all the lowest instincts of untaught humanity’. More than eighty years on, the world of spring 1913 seems indeed to be one we have lost, especially as described by that establishment organ, The Times of London, whose issues of early April have been scanned to build up the picture just presented. Those issues will also be used extensively to put forward a view of the point reached in the development of the study of history, in particular in England, on the eve of the First World War. For, after earlier meetings in The Hague in 1898, Paris in 1900, Rome in 1903 and Berlin in 1908, the International Congress of Historical Sciences or Studies was now to continue its 87


deliberations in the hotels and public buildings of Victorian and Edwardian London.16 Proceedings began on Thursday, 3 April and, from the general tone of various speeches, The Times considered that the spirit of the Congress was to be one of peace and good will towards men. From all over Europe, from the United States and the British Dominions, from Chile and Argentina and Japan, the historians of the world had come to London, just as in previous years they had assembled at The Hague and Paris and Rome and Berlin, to meet each other face to face and discuss the latest results of their several studies. But just because they were historians by profession they were probably better able than most men to take a wide view of the meaning of history, and to look beyond the national jealousies and rivalries of any given moment to the ultimate good of the human race. And the delegates who spoke all joined, directly or indirectly, in expressing views of the inestimable value of friendship between nations similar to those put forward in the presidential address of Mr (soon to be Lord) Bryce.17 That address began with a hearty welcome, and continued with a comment on the modern expansion of the scope of historical research, especially with regard to the study of primitive man, the early Mediterranean civilisations, and ‘the backward races still scattered over the earth’. In view of the fact that his other duties had prevented him from following recent movements, Bryce asked permission to speak rather as a traveller than a student of manuscripts or printed books. But his traveller’s observations, illuminated by his wide historical knowledge and sound humanity, were throughout listened to with the deepest interest, in the view of The Times correspondent who went on to quote two passages in the spirit of international friendliness characteristic of the Congress: The world is becoming one in an altogether new sense. More than four centuries ago the discovery of America marked the first step in the process by which the European races have now gained dominion over nearly the whole of the earth. The last great step in that process was the partition of Africa between three European Powers a little more than 20 years ago. Now almost every part of the earth’s surface, except the territories of China and Japan, is either owned or controlled by five or six European races. Eight Great Powers sway the political destinies of the globe, 88


and there are only two other countries that can be thought of as likely to enter after a while into the rank of Great Powers. Similarly, a few European tongues have overspread all the continents, except Asia, and even there it seems probable that these few European tongues will before long be learnt and used by the educated classes in such wise as to bring these classes into touch with European ideas. It is likely that by AD 2000 more than ninetenths of the human race will be speaking less than 20 languages. Already there are practically only four great religions in the world. Within a century the minor religions may have gone; and possibly only three great faiths will remain, with such accelerated swiftness does change now move. Those things which are already strong are growing stronger; those already weak grow weaker and are ready to vanish away.18 Those conditions in which the world now finds itself, these closer relations of contact between the great nations in their transmarine possessions as well as in their European homes, suggest a final observation. It is this. One duty that was always incumbent upon the historian has now become a duty of deeper significance and stronger obligation. Truth, and only truth, is our aim. We are bound as historians to examine and record facts without favour or affection to our own nation or to any other. Our common devotion to truth is what brings us here and unites us in one body divided by no national jealousies, but all of us alike animated by the spirit of scientific investigation. But though no other sentiments intrude here, we are only too well aware that jealousies and misunderstandings do exist and from time to time threaten the concord of nations. Seeing that we are, by the work we follow, led to look further back and more widely around than most of our fellow-citizens can do, are we not as students of history specially called upon to do what we can to try to reduce every source of international ill feeling? As historians, we know how few wars have been necessary wars and how much more harm than good most wars have done. As historians, we know that every great people has had its characteristic merits along with its characteristic faults. None is especially blameless—each has rendered its special 89


services to humanity at large. We have the best reason for knowing how great is the debt each one owes to the other; how essential not only to the material development of each, but also to its intellectual and spiritual advance, is the greatness and welfare of the others and the common friendship of all. May not we and the students of physical science, who also labour for knowledge in their own fields, and bow as we do before the august figure of Truth, hope to become a bond of sympathy between the nations, helping each people to feel and appreciate all that is best in the others, and seeking to point the way to peace and good will throughout the world.19 Bryce’s respect for ‘the august figure of Truth’ should not be doubted: indeed, it allows us to observe that his speech laid bare the basic outlook of his generation. This recognised that the world was becoming one, but that ‘the backward races still scattered over the earth’ were dominated by European powers (including, from a linguistic-cultural point of view, the USA). And there was no sense of any loss of confidence or fear for the future where ‘things which are already strong are growing stronger’. As we shall soon see, the proceedings of the Congress were to demonstrate clearly that the expansion of the scope of historical research was taking place in a framework of such presuppositions. On the morning of Wednesday, 9 April, after five days of plenary and sectional meetings, the Congress held its closing session. The invitation to hold the next Congress at St Petersburg was unanimously accepted, with the Russian delegates assuring the committee that every facility would be afforded by their government for the entry into their country of persons who were not its subjects.20 In the evening, delegates were entertained in Oxford and Cambridge, The Times recording the speech given by Lord Morley at All Souls College, Oxford. Proposing the toasts of ‘The King’ and ‘The Foreign Delegates to the Congress’, Lord Morley said that, at any rate in England, the power of universities, and the public schools that fed them, in the working of other institutions and in moulding both secular and ecclesiastical politics—often for darkness as well as light, often the mirror of stolid prejudices and childish conventions—had been immeasurable. Universities, besides imparting special 90


knowledge, were meant for reason’s refuge and its fortress. The standing enemies of reason, in spite of new arms, altered symbols, changing masks, were what they had always been everywhere. One of the commanding impulses of their era, Lord Morley continued, had been nationality, and, as it happened, they never had better cause for realising this in its most comprehensive sense than at the present time. But then another work of their time had been the advance of science, and where nationality divided science united. Respectfully and with all humility, however, Morley urged historians to note that improvisation had far more to do in politics than people thought. He was of all men the very last to deny the supremacy of rational methods as tests of human beings, but in politics rationalism needed correction and enrich-ment from history. The plain busy man often asked what was old history to him. Well, one answer was that in Europe he was born 2,000 years old. History mattered more than logic, forces, incidents and the long tale of consummating circumstance. How often did miscalculations in the statesman, like narrowness and blunder in the historian, spring from neglect of the truth that deeper than men’s opinions was the sentiment and circumstance by which opinion was predetermined.21 Like Lords Acton and Bryce, Lord Morley was a prominent Liberal, indeed the leader of his party in the House of Lords. Possibly, it was his regular exposure to the cut and thrust of politics that made him a shade less optimistic than his peers, recognising the existence of both ‘blunders’ and ‘darkness’. However, his faith in history seemed no less great. HISTORY CONGRESS IN ENGLAND, 1913: PAPERS Returning to the proceedings of the Congress, let us see how they reflected profound ‘sentiment and circumstance’ as they had developed over 2,000 years and more. To take some general papers first in order of chronological focus, Eduard Meyer from Berlin delivered ‘a pleasant conversational lecture’ in English on ‘Ancient History and Historical Research in the last Generation’. He began with the thesis that the centre of ancient history was always the civilisation of Greece and Rome, the first great epoch of high human development, and that since then there had been 91


a continual growth down to his own time. There was more life and individualism, he said, in the early civilisation of Greece than in that of Babylon or Egypt. Meyer dwelt at some length on the great advance in the knowledge of ancient history that had been seen in recent years, illustrating his statement by the facts that thirty years before next to nothing was known of Babylon; that in 1873 he used to be told by his lecturer that the day of Egyptian discovery was nearly over; and finally, that the discoveries of Schliemann were, so to speak, themselves become ancient history. The address was, in the main, a general review of recent advances in this respect. Of two general papers with medieval emphasis, Professor N. Jorga’s considered ‘Les bases nécessaires d’une nouvelle histoire du moyen age’. The scholar from Bucharest said that the history of the Middle Ages, which was a recent creation of the science of history, resulted from a permanent conflict between the new factors brought in by the barbarians, the stubborn ideas of the newcomers, and the ideas of Roman antiquity. The new system that must be adopted, which would give to the history of the Middle Ages two characteristics which it had hitherto been wanting, was to follow the Roman ideas, to mark their interpretation in the Germanic sense, and to show their realisation by the new forces. Henri Pirenne from Ghent took as his subject ‘Les étapes sociales de revolution du Capitalisme du XIIe au XIXe siècle’. The Belgian professor showed how through the ages, from the twelfth to the nineteenth century, the pursuit of capitalism was due not only to the desire to gain money for a living, but also to a thirst for the power which was the natural result of riches. Always it was intelligence that was the impelling power for the creation of capitalism. In the thirteenth century the peasants were driven to the towns by their poverty, and as they became rich merchants formed themselves into guilds. Then the artisans began to combine against the merchants and developed protectionism, and having raised themselves to the position of capitalists formed the nobility after a certain lapse of time. In the fifteenth century capitalists grew more common in the great towns, and in the eighteenth century came the age of the manufacturers, who in their turn were absorbed into the ranks of the nobility. And always these par-venus, when they had raised themselves by the exercise of their intelligence, and were able to retire from the struggle of life, were converted into an aristocracy of financial proprietors, 92


of conservative instincts, in contrast to the radical views with which they were imbued when their class first began to rise in the social scale. Also touching on the medieval period was Professor Geheimrat O. von Gierke in a paper entitled ‘Zur Geschichte des Majoritätsprinzips’. The principle of the majority, though now widely spread, was not, he explained, self-evident. He limited his enquiry to the development of the principle in medieval and modern German law. It was not, he said, recognised in the earliest German law, where unanimity, produced if necessary by force, was the ruling idea. But in the second half of the Middle Ages unanimity came to be reached by the prevalence of the views of the majority, and the corporate conception was gradually evolved, based on the fiction that the majority must legally be considered the whole. Perhaps the most general of the general papers was that of Professor Ernst Bernheim on ‘Die historische Interpretation aus den Zeitanschauungen’. He began by reminding his audience that the view that each epoch of time left its own peculiar stamp upon life had been very gradually developed through the writings of Hegel and Comte. In historical interpretation it had not yet got so far as to deal with the intellectual part of life from the point of view of the various periods. Even when one was tolerably familiar with them one could not enter as clearly as one would like into their influence on ideas, words, motives and results, so as to understand thoroughly the specific meaning of the various events—‘if, in fact, we want to clothe the dry bones of history with the flesh of life.’22 Between them, these general papers present us with more than a skeleton of the approaches to history assuming shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, a shape also indicated by the addresses of Bryce and Morley. There is in fact a body of interpretation from classical times through to modern, Eurocentric and evolutionary. Greece and Rome, vastly superior to Babylon and Egypt, passed the torch on with some added fuel from the Barbarians’, especially the Germans, who helped to establish early democratic principles, while the ‘impelling power’ of capitalism was accompanied by appropriate social adjustments. Here then, spelled out in brief, is the heritage of the paper givers from the ‘European home’.

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Adding further flesh in various ways to the bones, by no means in every sense dry, of the general papers were those of the sections, which were nine in number: Oriental and Egyptological; Greek, Roman and Byzantine; Medieval; Modern—including Colonial, Naval and Military; Religious and Ecclesiastical; Legal and Economic; Medieval and Modern Civilisational; Archaeological and Prehistorical; Philosophical, Methodological and Ancillary. The sections, The Times suggested, were ‘a forcible illustration of the modern tendency to specialization that it is in anyway possible for the assembled historians to choose between the bewildering variety of papers that is offered for their entertainment, if that is not too frivolous a word to use in this connection’.23 ‘Entertainment’ was not too frivolous a word for the proceedings of the sectional meetings perhaps, but the delights were rarefied, and indeed forcibly illustrative of a tendency towards specialisation. Only one section was deemed worthy by The Times of description in larger type rather than smaller, and that was for certain of its aspects only. They were well introduced by Professor C.W.Oman, who dealt with ‘A Defence of Military History’, urging that a general knowledge of military history was essential to all citizens, and that the creation of an instructed opinion in things military and naval was most necessary. Other-wise we were at the prey of cranks and sciolists posing as authorities. The ultimate responsibility in high military matters rested with those who at present knew nothing of them.24 On the opening day of the Congress, the Acting President Dr Ward had remarked that, on the occasion of their holding the Congress in the capital of the British Empire, he felt sure that the foreign as well as the British members would all wish to see colonial and naval and military history conspicuously represented. Special practical importance had therefore been attached to the proceedings at the Royal United Services Institution where, in addition to the papers on these subjects, addresses given from the chair by General Robertson and Sir George Reid, and particularly by Prince Louis of Battenberg, the First Sea Lord, added greatly to the interest of the daily discussions, in the estimation of The Times. Admiral Prince Louis remarked that the Admiralty was very much alive to the importance of the study of naval history in the service, and would welcome a textbook on the subject. He went on to take 94


the opportunity of making an announcement which he thought might be of interest to those who took an interest in the study of naval history. The present Board of the Admiralty, soon after they took office, had realised the desirability of a study of the tactics of the battle of Trafalgar, which for some years past had been the subject of a great deal of discussion. At any rate it would be gratifying to everybody to feel that the crowning achievement of the incom-parable naval hero of the country had been definitely and finally set at rest and would no longer be a subject of discussion.25 Had there been more French delegates present, there might have been less enthusiasm for a study of the tactics of the battle of Trafalgar. But, in fact, there appears to have been no overt dissension at the Congress, and any possibility of such was reduced by the withdrawal of two papers from the Modern Section because of ‘their close bearing on contemporary politics’. On the other hand, reports in The Times on the sectional meetings reinforce the impression gained from the general meetings and welcoming speeches of strong prejudices at large among historians in the spring of 1913. For example, Sir William LeeWarner, in a discussion of the evolution of Indian history, considered the three stages through which the Indian peoples had passed in the pursuit of freedom: under the Hindu priestcraft; under the sword of Islam; and under British law. The last of these, in the speaker’s view, ‘secured the public peace and defence of India and abolished many evil customs, but, because of the guarantee of religious neutrality which it gave, could only make slow headway against the enslaving tendencies of past centuries’. Another encomium of British law came from Professor H.Marczali on ‘Count Széchenyi and the Introduction of English Civilization to Hungary’. In the Count’s own estimation on his first visit, the three things to be learned from England were constitution, engines and horsebreeding. It was the constitutional freedom of England, as opposed to the privileges of the nobility in Hungary, that most appealed to him as the fulfilment of his own ideals of equality and as the reason for England’s superiority to other countries. However, while the Count came to England also to study the science of bridge-building and to secure engineers and steamboats, he was always averse to the introduction of industrialism, and did not wish to put the reins of government into the hands of a Kossuth, who had wanted to revive Hungary 95


by the agencies of industries and commerce. Professor Marczali concluded his paper by prophesying that Hungary would some day return to the doctrines of Count Széchenyi, ‘their great apostle of humanity and truth’, whose sympathy for England turned, as he said, to Anglomania.26 Most of the delegates at the Congress, of course, would have been happy to listen to such observations, since they themselves were English. In large part, they would also have agreed that the British Raj had been a most progressive influence on India. FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS ATLANTIC ORDER, 1913–22 Generally speaking, the same mixture of mutual congratulation and national assertiveness found at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 was in evidence at the London Congress of 1913. For example, responding on behalf of the foreign guests at a dinner given by the British government on 3 April, Professor Felix Liebermann, corresponding Fellow of the British Academy from Berlin, declared in German that: the honour of thanking the British government for their cordial reception of the delegates had probably been conferred on him, and he had been allowed to express it in his mother tongue, on account of the kinship of civilization which connected the host country with Germany more intimately than with any nation not speaking the AngloSaxon tongue…. Here was ample reinforcement for the Teutonic idea of civilisation so prevalent before the First World War. Further support came from Commendatore Davidsohn who spoke in German at a concluding dinner on 7 April on behalf of the visiting dele-gations as a whole, observing that they all left England enriched by many intellectual and artistic inspirations, full, too, of a lively affection for a great, active and free people, who for centuries had gone forward at the head of the intellectual and political movement towards progress; for a people to whom in the last resort was owing all that Europe had realised in the form of free institutions since the beginning of the French Revolution.27 96


But, of course, the German contribution to the Congress consisted of far more than compliments: for example, apart from Ernst Bernheim, no less an authority than Karl Lamprecht also spoke on intellectual trends. Meanwhile, the French participation was smaller, and the appraisal lower, at least in the view of Charles Bernier of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts writing in the Revue historique. Though praising the zeal and courtesy of the hosts, along with a recreational programme so hospitable that it threatened to overwhelm the cause of science, Bernier criticised the organisation of the Congress, especially its dispersal and lack of centre, and the earlier delay in sending out official invitations, the main reason for the paucity of French delegates. As a consequence of this delay, insufficient financial support could be found for greater attendance from across the Channel: ‘it seems that in this time of entente cordiale, and with England so close to us, France could have and should have occupied a greater place at the Congress.’28 Possibly, too, albeit unwittingly, Bernier was expressing misgivings about the prevalence of the Teutonic idea, which tended to exclude the contribution of France to European civilisation. However, even American cousins, integral members of the Teutonic grouping, were not totally happy with the arrangements made in the mother country. Writing a report in The American Historical Review, J.F.Jameson perhaps let the organisation of the Congress down lightly with the observation: ‘It is to be expected that British individualism, which has had such brilliant results in history, should have its compensation in an organizing power, for such occasions, inferior to that of some other nations’, in particular Germany. Again, tempering criticism with indul-gence in a passage concerning the importance of personal contact in a science such as history in which the human element plays so large a part, Jameson commented: More of that pleasure and profit might have been had if there had been easier means of finding members, inevitably scattered through a great city, or if it had not been for the English ‘custom’ of not introducing, but they were had in a very rewarding measure. On the sessions of the Congress, there was perhaps a further element of damnation through faint praise in Jameson’s estimation: ‘papers which by extraordinary originality and power were 97


destined to alter signally the maps of their respective fields were not numerous—but the general level was high, and the total contribution to the science much more than respectable in quantity.’ More explicitly, the American commentator noted that not only did more than half the programme, some forty papers, relate to British history, but another substantial part, about twenty papers, touched on it. And so: An American could not help thinking it to be a strange fact that, of more than a hundred papers presented by British subjects, only one was concerned wholly, and another partially, with the history of the United States, a country embracing nearly two-thirds of the English-speaking population of the globe. A paper by Jameson himself on ‘Typical Steps in American Expansion’ helped to redress the balance somewhat, along with further contributions from his American colleagues who numbered about twenty, compared with about 450 British out of a grand total of 680. European representation included sixty-five from Germany, thirty from Russia (including some Poles), twenty-five from Austria-Hungary, and only twenty-two from France, about the same number from the Netherlands and Belgium together, and more than twice as many as from Scandinavia. There were just a few delegates from other parts of Europe, from Latin America and Japan. Here, quantitatively, was a further reflection of the biases evident in the proceedings of the Congress.29 In one sense, the spirit of the Congress was that of Lord Acton, who had died in 1902. A.W.Ward talked there in ‘pious remembrance’ of Acton’s ‘characteristic breadth of knowledge and depth of critical insight…ardour for the advancement of historical studies, unfailing candour of judgement and generosity of sympathy’.30 Yet Acton might well have been surprised by some of the arguments advanced at the Congress by delegates from a country which he had considered to be mostly inert in Universal History—Russia. For example, A.S.Lappo-Danilevsky gave a wellreceived lecture in French— ‘L’idée de l’état et son évolution en Russie depuis les troubles du XVIIe siècle jusqu’aux réformes du XVIIIe’. More generally, delivering the presidential address to the Legal History Section in which Lappo-Danilevsky was to present his paper, the émigré Paul Vinogradoff sought to suggest ‘the 98


connecting links between the various researches in Roman and English, German and Slavonic, Civil, Canon, and Common Law’. He went on to observe: The fundamental unity of our study may be realized from two main points of view. They are provided by continuity on the one hand and by similarity on the other. There are streams of doctrines and institutional facts which pass through the ages and cross national boundaries from one historical formation to another. These constitute what may be called the current of cultural tradition. Again, the solutions of legal problems on different occasions fall into groups according to similarities and contrasts, for which there is a common basis in the nature of the problems themselves. This gives rise to the application of the comparative method. The continuity of culture and comparative jurisprudence produce the atmosphere of what might have been called International Law, had not the term been appropriated to other uses.31 (Needless to say, Vinogradoff made no reference in his paper to the immediate problems of tsarism in his homeland, nor to the as yet obscure critic of his views—V.I.Lenin.) Going back in history beyond the formation of International Law, two entire sessions at the Congress were devoted to recent advances and results of archaeological exploration in southern Russia. However, the Russian delegation’s sense of apartness was reflected in the presentation of a formal protest about the exclusion of the Russian language from the proceedings of the Congress, especially significant in view of general agreement on St Petersburg as the venue of the next Congress. J.F.Jameson commented on this choice as he speculated about the possibility of the Congress one day coming to the USA: Doubtless the journey would seem difficult to many historians, and after going to St. Petersburg in 1918 it may be natural to wish to assemble in 1923 in some capital more central to western Europe, and the summer climate of Washington, or any other American city, would seem too hot to even the most philosophical of European historians.32 99


The years 1918 and 1923 would both come to bear a significance different from that contemplated by J.F.Jameson in 1913. Recording his impressions of the Congress at the beginning of 1914 in Nauchnyi istoricheskii zhurnal, E.V.Tarle of St Petersburg regretted the fact that the attendance in general was poor, and that in particular there was an almost complete absence of French colleagues. He was also disappointed that the English press was preoccupied by the alarming news from Europe, in particular the Balkan peninsula; the only exception was The Times, and even that newspaper for the most part published its reports on the Congress away from the main pages and in very small print. While he was pleased to note that the atmosphere was one of serious interest rather than ‘scientific ecstasy’, Tarle was sorry that general questions of the philosophy of history were largely untouched. In this respect in particular, he observed: The Congress expressed, on the one hand, the disorder and confusion in generalising thought characteristic of our time, and, on the other, the greatly increased exactitude. It may be deplored that there is no sign of any new fundamental formulations of methodological problems, new interesting generalisations capable of moving science forward. However, at the same time, it is impossible not to discern that fortunately in recent years that dilettantism has ceased which (especially in Germany) not so very long ago brought very facile and arbitrary solutions to the most complicated historico-philosophical questions.33 To some extent, in early 1914 Tarle was already mulling over some of the ideas that he would put forward in 1922. He was also perhaps voicing Franco-Russian disquiet at exclusion from the Anglo-Saxon worldview. But, of course, his outlook would be modified enormously by the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Events from August 1914 would have a shattering impact even for other delegates, not least for the Anglo-Saxons. In 1902, in an influential work on Principles of Western Civilisation, Benjamin Kidd could write: The native Teutonic habit of mind, underlying the English, American, and German character, represents, of necessity, certain qualities—tenacity of purpose, determination in the 100


presence of opposition, love for action and hunger for power, all tending to express themselves through the State —which were the necessary equipment of that military type which has won in the supreme stress of Natural Selection its right of place as the only type able to hold the stage of the world in the long epoch during which the present is destined to pass under the control of the future.34 From 1914 to 1918, natural selection exerted its supreme stress on one of the three Teutonic nations, Germany, while another, America, went from strength to strength. In England, where the First World War made an impact traumatic enough, we find a variety of responses from the men who had played leading parts in the Congress of 1913. Paul Vinogradoff, among many other major contributions to the peace, wrote of the necessity to update the system first indicated by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws. For Lord Bryce, it had been ‘a war of Principles for Righteousness against Wickedness’. After the victory, it was necessary to consider how to prevent future wars and encourage the spirit of freedom and democracy, in particular by means of the League of Nations. But Lord Morley indicated a different reaction in the Preface to his Recollections published in 1917. Although he expressed a loyalty to reason and desire for wise policies, he declared that the war and his country’s action in it had led to his retirement from public office. Moreover, in Morley’s estimation, ‘The world is travelling under formidable omens into a new era, very unlike the times in which my lot was cast.’ Such a valedictory attitude helped to form the view that ‘he was generally regarded, during his last years, as sharing with Mr. Hardy the position of doyen of English men of letters.’ And for Thomas Hardy himself, in one evaluation at least: The war had so barbarized taste, encouraged selfishness, and increased knowledge at the expense of wisdom that another Dark Age threatened, and the only hope for the world seemed to be an alliance between religion and complete rationality ‘by means of the interfusing effect of poetry’. And yet, as Comte had said, progress was never in a straight line, and perhaps the regression was drawing back for a leap forward. He hoped, though forlornly, that it was so.35 101


Farewell to old England was in part welcome to the new USA. Sadness in the hedged fields of Wessex was accompanied by exuberance in the unfenced lands of Wisconsin, and the centre of the English-speaking world was poised to move considerably to the west of longitude 30 where Lord Acton had placed it in 1896. In the USA, Frederick Jackson Turner had recently observed that with the closure of the American frontier in 1890, the first period of American history had closed four centuries from the discovery of the continent, and after one hundred years of life under the constitution. Then in that same year of 1896, he recommended ‘the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries’. Meanwhile, those outlying islands did not include those forming the United Kingdom, and there was still much cultural deference before British and other European models over the ocean. Yet, for example, a loud note of independence was struck in the first volume of the American Historical Review, published also in 1896. In an essay entitled ‘History and Democracy’, W.M.Sloane observed: ‘It seems to be the opinion of the keenest observers beyond the Atlantic that the old world today is weary of the past.’ While Europe yearned for modernity and futurity, the tendency ‘from experience towards theory, from adaptation towards experiment, from progress on traditional lines to advance on untried paths’ was still ‘in no sense characteristic of America’. But the easy circulation of ideas throughout the world might introduce that tendency into the USA, and Sloane warned: ‘if it comes or when it comes, and a conservative democracy guiding itself by the lights of history is transmuted into a radical ochlocracy moving by impulse or steering by wreckers’ beacons, then, as it takes no prophetic gift to foretell, we shall have anarchy and ruin.’36 Twenty years on, fears such as Sloane’s were beginning to seize the souls of many of his fellow-Americans as they prepared for entry into the First World War. After the victorious end to the war alarm rose to epidemic proportions as a consequence of the Russian Revolution in the great ‘Red Scare’ of 1919. However, at the same time, there was quiet satisfaction, even not so quiet celebration, at the thought that the torch of civilisation might be returning from ‘over there’. Even the normally prosaic American Historical Review could break into verse, quoting:

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Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers! Relative affluence should allow the American Historical Association to encourage ‘a wide variety of laudable enterprises, both those which will specially advance historical scholarship in America and those which will be useful alike to us and the historians of burdened Europe’.37 As often, the ‘spirit of the age’, or at least some elements in it, can best be caught through an examination of some episodes in the career of a single individual, although in this case the example chosen is far from typical. Having resigned from Columbia University in 1917 in solidarity with two colleagues dis-missed for opposing the war policies of the former President of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, Charles A.Beard set off in 1921 to see for himself the predicament of Europe. On his return, he gave a series of lectures in 1922 at Dartmouth College, published in the same year under the title Crosscurrents in Europe Today,38 and described by the author himself as ‘a collection of notes’ which he hoped would be pertinent ‘to the great case of Mankind vs. Chaos’. Among Beard’s notes were several on the Russian Revolution. From the first, he observed, Lenin had never been deceived by ‘the childish phantasy that paper decrees would establish the new heaven and the new earth’ and had demonstrated since the October Revolution ‘the doctrine of the pragmatist’. In 1922, it seemed to him ‘fairly safe to guess’ that Russia would evolve into ‘a huge peasant democracy’ and that ‘a form of state capitalism’ would take ‘the place of communism’. Throughout Europe, socialists had ‘laid Marx on the shelf’, having discovered that ‘party programs do not make plows’. As for that other great force, nationalism, Beard hoped that statesmen would come to see that its ethnic and geographical bases had nothing to do with prosperity, and that ‘some kind of a general economic constitution’ would be adopted throughout the continent. Meanwhile, with or without nationalism, the ‘new America’ would be forced by the ‘paralysis of Europe’ to look upon the Pacific region as ‘the new theatre’.39

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To move on a further four years for an afterword, as the Prefatory Note to the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica rightly observed in 1926: In fifteen years, as a result partly of physical conflict unparalleled for scale, violence and intensity; partly of the full and manifold working of influences which had begun to appear before the War, there has occurred a universal revolution in human affairs and the human mind. Because of this universal revolution, and the consequent uncertainty of the future, the editor J.L.Garvin decided that it was ‘almost unquestionably right to depart from the principle of Olympian judgment practised by The Encyclopaedia Britannica at long leisure in more stable times’. Nowhere was such a departure more noticeable than in a contribution entitled ‘English-Speaking Peoples, Relations Of’ by John St Loe Strachey, former editor and proprietor of The Spectator among other journalistic activities, and author of such books as The Adventure of Living, Economics of the Hour and Problems and Perils of Socialism. This subject had never before appeared as such in the encyclopaedia, but was now considered by Strachey to be ‘perhaps the greatest of all causes at the present moment’. Because of its importance, the utmost care was needed in its development and maintenance. In particular: Misunderstanding is the chief and disintegrating force in human affairs. It is that which poisons and disturbs the body politic. It acts as sepsis does in the body natural. This is particularly the case with the cause of amity among the speakers of the English-speaking tongue. Misunderstandings, on both sides of the Atlantic, spring up like mushrooms, and with them arise distrust, suspicion, soreness and wounded pride. Thoroughly good intentions use vague and infelicitous language. Their words are misrepresented, and have reactions, evil instead of good. They are suspected of selfish and sly propaganda! Yet, all the time, the supposed propaganda was launched in perfect good faith, and without a thought of taking advantage. But, naturally, the repelled well-wisher is deeply hurt to see himself what he calls ‘cruelly misunderstood’. What is 104


wanted is to make absolutely clear the aims of those who speak the language of Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton, of Washington, Lincoln and Emerson. The objection could be made, other than to Strachey’s emotive language, that he juxtaposed three literary figures from England with one literary figure and two statesmen from America. But to help avoid what he called ‘the friction of alarm’, Strachey, ‘a convinced and life-long supporter of Anglo-American amity and goodwill’, went on to set out: (1) what the friends of understanding wanted; (2) why they wanted it; and (3) how they proposed to get it: 1 True friends of good understanding sought amity not to crush other races or to exalt their own, but rather, through the link of language and the consequent intellectual liaison, to make use of the opportunity for human betterment thereby arising. 2 This was wanted for the reason that in an understanding between those who speak the English tongue is to be found the instrument that will save the civilisation which has been built up with so much toil and anguish, high hopes and high endeavour, from going the way of Egypt and Persia, of Athens and Rome and of a hundred noble races and mighty empires. If people of good will did not act together, then they might drift ‘into a long series of wars which will sap the vitality of the white races and expose the civilised world, as we know it, to incursions from the barbarians of our epoch’. 3 How to arrive at such a goal? There must be forbearance on both sides of the Atlantic: ‘as zealous Englishmen have got to avoid the slightest appearance of wishing to catch and lead Americans, so zealous Americans must avoid the slightest appearance of wishing, as foolish people would say, “to drag John Bull chained at their chariot wheels”.’ Both must make it clear to the whole world that they did not wish to dominate it. They must learn a different kind of propaganda from that of the French Jacobins who had proclaimed: ‘Be our brothers, or we will slay you’, and remember the words of Tennyson: ‘How pure at heart and sound in head,/With what divine affections bold…’40 105


Implications that England was the senior partner in the union may be found here, and, indeed, in some senses, England continued also to dominate Great Britain culturally speaking until after the Second World War, which produced another ‘universal revolution in human affairs and the human mind’. However, the First World War had indeed shaken the foundations of European civilisation, including those of the offshore islands, while pro-moting a shift in the centre of gravity of the wider Atlantic community.41 In this chapter, we have examined German, French and English approaches to the question of Western world order in the early years of the twentieth century, all sharing assumptions about the superiority of European civilisation at the same time as expressing distinctive national viewpoints. We then went on to consider how historians meeting in London in 1913 set out their views, nearly all Eurocentric, even Anglocentric. We have then looked at aspects of the impact of the First World War on several historians, most of whom had been present at the London Congress. What, it may be asked, has happened to constitutional and revolutionary order, and to the pH test? To answer these questions as simply as possible: constitutional order has provided much of the subtext of this chapter, nearly all the ideas discussed in it coming from academics and intellectuals who believed in measured progress; in the pH test, the nature of the neutral white has changed, the ‘universal indicator’ now beginning to consist not only of Europe but also of the USA, which was assuming a much greater importance in both English-speaking and Atlantic worlds, even if some years would elapse before it became dominant. We shall look at this process, along with the marginalisation of Europe’s continental frontier, the USSR, in Chapter 4.

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4

SOME APPROACHES TO WORLD ORDER, 1923–62

Was the Second World War a greater historical watershed than the First? To a considerable extent, the answer depends on generation. That is, older respondents would tend to say no, younger would probably say yes. A further influence would be location. For example, few Japanese would fail to answer in the affirmative. There are other pertinent aspects of time and space: history does provide a seal of approval, partly because of some inherent veneration for maturity, partly because with the passage of the years the wood becomes more distinguishable from the trees. Before the First World War, references to the Great War meant an earlier conflict. During and even after the Russian Revolution, there were references to the Great Revolution meaning the earlier, French upheaval.1 As far as place is concerned, the Second World War was more completely a global affair, while the First was more centred on Europe. This was partly because in little more than two decades, the world had shrunk, with improvements in communications and transport as well as armaments. In this chapter, continuing the historiographical survey of the twentieth century begun in the previous chapter, we shall consider some of the observations of a further series of historians, which will take us from 1923 to 1962, when the shooting wars had been followed by the Cold War, and when Western world orders were at least beginning to make some accommodation for the rest of the globe. As before, constitutional and revolutionary orders, along with the pH test, continue for the most part to form a background to the discussion, although occasionally coming to the foreground.

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SOME APPROACHES TO WORLD ORDER

PIRENNE AND EUROPE, 1923 In the spring of 1923, the Fifth International Congress of Historical Sciences or Studies met in Brussels, Belgium, ten years almost to the day after the Fourth Congress in London. A keynote address entitled ‘On the Comparative Method in History’ was given by Henri Pirenne, who had spent some of the inter-vening period in a prisoner-of-war camp, and who began by recalling the earlier, happy experience in London. He remembered in particular the appeal of Lord Bryce for international agreement based on historical solidarity, and the decision to meet again in 1917 in St Petersburg.2 Alas, in 1917, civilisation was undergoing the most terrible crisis ever, and all energies were devoted to its resolution. St Petersburg had become Petrograd, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 made a Congress there impossible. Peace had ensued, but had given the world neither security nor serenity. How many problems still had to be solved, exclaimed Pirenne, and how much moral and intellectual disar-ray could be observed, along with disturbance of social and economic equilibrium. In spite of all these and other difficulties, historians had resumed their pursuit of truth with as much detachment as possible, in the spirit of Louis Pasteur, who had observed: ‘It is a question of fact, and I approach it without any preconceived idea. I can only yield to experience, whatever the answer.’ And now, among these facts were all those accumulated during the war, which had in general enlarged the nature of the subject. During the war, the belligerents had requisitioned for their use two sciences in particular—chemistry and history. One had provided explosives and gas, the other pretexts, justifications and excuses. But their fate had differed: chemistry could serve armies and preserve its nature, even make precious discoveries, while history lost its essential qualities of criticism and impartiality. This loss could always be found in time of war, yet to interpret princely genealogies and discuss treaties as under the Ancien Régime was no longer enough: now the morale of one’s own people had to be maintained by, among other methods, academic attacks on the enemy. However, such work had served only to demonstrate the lack of a scientific basis for the excesses of nationalism, for racial theories. There was no such phenomenon as pure race, and various peoples had developed at differ-ent rates not because of racial characteristics 108


but because of different circumstances. This meant that at any given time the peoples of the world belonged to various stages of development. Nevertheless, they all went through comparable stages, and the only way to understand their individuality was to compare their experiences. Only in such a manner was it possible to achieve scientific knowledge. This was a demanding task, and the objection would be raised that it was beyond any single individual historian. But no chemist could know all of chemistry, still less all of nature. Specialisation was therefore as necessary in chemistry as in history, but in both from a point of view that was universal. The universal approach to history had been established up to and during the eighteenth century, but romanticism and nationalism had introduced diversity in the nineteenth century. This was far from being an entirely backward step, since the search for local colour and differences between peoples had made history more ‘lively, picturesque and thrilling’ than it had ever been, at the same time as the criticism of sources and enquiry into all branches of social activity—law, customs and economy, for example—had made the subject richer and more precise. Deservedly, the nineteenth should be called the century of history. However, this achievement must be considered scholarly rather than scientific. Apparently, as the field of history wid-ened, its vision became narrower, ever shrinking as it approached the present, that is as nationalism and imperialism asserted themselves, and produced an exclusiveness in the approach to the past. The consequent lack of impartiality might be unwitting but it was certainly fatal: The prejudices of race, politics and nationalism are too powerful for man to escape if he does not place himself outside their grasp. To liberate oneself, it is necessary to raise oneself to the heights from which history appears as a whole in the majesty of its development, the passing passions of the moment become calm and subside before the sublimity of the spectacle.3 Pirenne claimed no originality for his views, and saluted the manner in which others had put them forward before the war; Henri Berr, for example, was still engaged in a great project begun in 1920 with the title ‘The Evolution of Humanity’.4 But Pirenne 109


believed it necessary to emphasise that the only way of arriving at the desired destination was via the comparative method. That was the only way to allow history to free itself from the idols of sentiment and become a science. History would also become a science to the extent that it adopted for national history the point of view of universal history. And as it did so, it would become not only more exact but also more humane: ‘The scientific will go hand in hand with the moral gain, and nobody will complain if it one day should inspire in peoples, through showing them the solidarity of their destinies, a patriotism more fraternal, more aware (conscient) and more pure.’5 Unfortunately, even tragically, as is well known, the hopes held out by Pirenne were being dashed almost as he spoke. Indeed, it could be argued that the impact of the First World War, the Russian Revolutions and their aftermaths were such that his address was a vain appeal for historians to meet an impossible standard. Certainly, Pirenne himself appears to have surmounted the effect of his own harrowing experiences, and could therefore be forgiven for daring to suggest that others might follow suit. Several historians indeed did, but the sequel was not just a matter of personal choice, and some brave souls were overwhelmed during the following interwar years. In Western Europe, all too evidently, the aspirations of Pirenne as voiced in 1923 came to less than they might have done. Owing to the effect on historians and other individuals of the persistence of ‘war guilt’, both levelled as a charge and stemming from self-recrimination, and, later, of the gathering clouds of a further great conflict, the hopes for a new European cosmopolitanism and for a wider outlook accommodating other continents were far from realised. And when we turn again to consider Europe’s outliers in this new phase, we shall see that, for various reasons, both the USSR and USA were less involved in Western civilisation than previously, for both internal and external reasons. Yet the picture is not all gloom. Pirenne himself persisted through the rest of his life, not only completing his multi-volume history of Belgium but also endeavouring to look outwards. For example, just before his death in 1935, he completed in draft a study of the relationship of two great figures of the early Middle Ages, arguing that ‘without Mahomet, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable’. He enjoyed a close relationship with Marc 110


Bloch and other leading figures of the French Annales school.6 Stemming in some ways from the ‘synthesis’ movement initiated by Henri Berr in 1900, the Annales school did as much as any other group during the inter-war period to point the way forward, struggling to overcome the restrictions of nationality and tradition.7 Even as Italy and Germany succumbed to dictatorship, some of their nationals managed to escape the strident chorus of xenophobia, although they either fell prey to per-secution or went into emigration. 8 No branch of Nazi historiography was as warped as that dealing with the East, the land promised by the Führer as Lebensraum.9 And although some of Eastern Europe resisted the urge to respond in kind, intense nationalism developed also in the alleged home of class-based internationalism, the USSR. E.V.TARLE AND THE USSR, 1923–48 The ups and downs of academic life in the USSR from the incapacity of Lenin to the death of Stalin, 1923–53, are well illustrated in the career of an individual whose earlier work we have already referred to, E.V.Tarle. During the 1920s, he was able to coexist with his Marxist colleagues, and, indeed, was elected to full membership of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1927. But the reckoning came soon after. In 1928, he was due to attend the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo but was withdrawn at the last moment. In the same year, he was attacked as a ‘pseudo-Marxist’ and ‘economic-materialist’. In 1930, he was arrested, and soon implicated in a ‘plot’ to restore the monarchy. He spent five years in exile in Kazakhstan. However, in 1934, the pendulum of party favour swung back, and Tarle returned to energetic activity for another twenty years or so, collecting many honours on the way as well as undergoing further, if lesser, difficulties. Less an orthodox Marxist than a somewhat circumspect conformist, Tarle wrote patriotic histories of the War of 1812 and the Crimean War, among many other works, too many to describe or even list.10 Here, in consonance with one of this chapter’s basic aims, emphasis will be on the contemporary conflicts, the First and Second World Wars, through to the Cold War. In 1927, Tarle brought out a major study, Europe in the Age of Imperialism, 1871– 1919, with a second, revised edition soon following in that, for 111


him, fateful year 1928. According to his opponents, in this interpretation of the origins of the First World War, Tarle made three cardinal errors: he denied the intensification of the class struggle during the years 1872–1914; he considered that Germany rather than the Entente powers was responsible for the outbreak of hostilities in 1914; and he argued that, following the BrestLitovsk Treaty of March 1918, German policy in the East strengthened the resolve of the Entente in the West. For a combination of reasons, as much to do with Soviet foreign policy in 1928 as with deviations from Marxist or Leninist interpretations of imperialism, Tarle’s analysis of the origins and immediate sequel of the First World War helped to bring about his personal temporary downfall.11 Tarle’s estimate of the impact of the war on Europe was less controversial, or at least less central to the attack made on him in 1928 by his opponents. Certainly, in his view, the losses had been enormous all round. Although there had been rhetorical exaggeration in such phrases as ‘The end of Europe’ and ‘The ruin of the West’, the unvarnished truth could be seen in mortality figures. Leaving aside Turkey and the Balkans in general and the massacre of the Armenians in particular, omitting civ-ilian losses resulting from the British blockade of Germany and from influenza throughout Europe, concentrating indeed on the military losses of the major powers, the figures showed that two million Germans were killed or missing; those next worse affected were Russians, Austro-Hungarians and Frenchmen. As far as material losses were concerned, a far from complete indi-cation could be given by figures for the internal and external debt of a number of powers, greater and smaller, in millions of dollars at the beginning and end of the war: these indicated that payment for the war had been made by Russia, Germany, Britain, France and the USA, in that descending order. Of course, most of the US debt was internal, to its own citizens. As far as the European powers were concerned, the war was an economic catastrophe for victors and vanquished alike, and they were all in various degrees of debt to the USA, sending $665 million in interest across the Atlantic in 1920 alone. But the USA had no interest in crippling Europe either financially in particular or economically in general. Along with economic disaster went social dislocation. In some respects there was reversion to passive attitudes known long before 112


1914, in others widespread activity of a newer kind, especially among workers. Governments feared that the comparative stability of the nineteenth century was an aberration, and that there would be a reversion to instability, possibly in the form of a new revolution. But the apt observation was made that the situation was more revolutionary than the people, and by about 1924 a kind of recovery was noted in many parts of the continent, with some reassertion of European self-confidence and a comparative fall in American dominance.12 About twenty years later, this time discussing the consequences of the Second World War, Tarle was far less moderate and objective in his tone. He began with a bold declaration of the importance of the Great October Socialist Revolution as the mightiest of the world-historical turning points experienced by humanity in many centuries. This made the Soviet Union’s salvation of Europe and Asia all the more significant for those anxious to oppose the emergence of world fascism and reactionary aggression. This was a far cry from the Tarle of the earlier or even the later 1920s, now wanting to emphasise, for example, that at the Paris Peace Conference, the Soviet government was never referred to as such, but rather as the ‘Maximalists’. After the Intervention had failed, Tarle suggested, there ensued in America and Europe a period of hangover after the immediate post-war excitment. On the one hand, none of the capitalist powers wanted any rival to secure economic advantages in its dealings with the Soviet Union. On the other hand, all those powers feared the consolidation of the USSR, and consequently embarked on provocations, such as the infringement of the immunity of Soviet embassies. These assaults became more serious in the 1930s, with the rise of the fascist powers which the Western powers hoped would do their dirty work for them. But the repulse of the Japanese at Khasan and Khalkin Gol in 1938–9 was followed by the immediate frustration of Western hopes that Hitler would attack on the European flank. The French government imprisoned thousands of communists, and allowed the Nazis to occupy Poland without one shot fired on the Rhine, before its own quick collapse in 1940. The treacherous invasion of the USSR by the fascist hordes was greeted by much of the Western press as another certain victory for them. But, after the first deceptive appearances confirming such a view, the scales fell from their 113


eyes as the Red Army went from Stalingrad to Kursk and on to its great victory. First the Japanese, and then the Nazis and the Allies came to realise that the Soviet Union was strengthened, not weakened, by the Great October Socialist Revolution. The Allies’ part in the Red victory was far from the ‘decisive’ contribution claimed, while the much delayed D-Day crossing of the Channel was only finally undertaken due to fear of the rapidity and completeness of that victory. Only now was it fully realised that, having crushed with an iron hand any possibility of behind-the-lines activity by a ‘fifth column’, Soviet power was sufficiently developed to deal the mortal blow to Hitler and his bandit forces. Advancing into Eastern Europe, the Soviet forces had cleared country after country not only of ‘the brown plague’, but also of centuries-old feudal oppressions and appalling spiritual poison. In particular, the abolition of the Prussian Junker class had effected a profound social transformation and acted as a symbol of hope for further progress. Meanwhile, in a reactionary policy culminating in the Truman Doctrine, the British and American governments had been supporting the most anti-democratic politicians in Greece. Such evident suppression of popular aspirations had led only to greater unity among the Slav and nonSlav peoples of Eastern Europe and their stronger, united support for the only power that could save them from the fate suffered by the Greeks, Spaniards and Indonesians. Similar unity and support were being demonstrated outside Europe by those who aspired to self-realisation, the Indonesians and the Koreans, Indians and Egyptians. At the same time, the Soviet Union acted not only as protector of democracy and independence, but also as a guarantor of world peace. Tarle asserted: ‘The possessors of money bags were seized by a seductive illusion of invincibility.’ But their threats of thunder and lightning (so far only verbal) were breaking against the granite wall calmly erected before them. They could not win the diplomatic struggle—for example, reject the argument that the Soviet Union as one of the victorious powers had the right to participate in the settlement of the question of the German Ruhr. Nor could they overcome the fact that the Soviet Union was the only world power that was socialist, seeking prosperity without the princes of the stock exchange and the kings of oil and steel, and opposing the draconian anti-worker legislation of the USA 114


and its allies. Millions of workers throughout the world helped to defend the USSR against the neo-fascists and transatlantic followers of Nazism. In the autumn of 1947, Tarle noted, there would be two significant anniversaries: 800 years since the founding of Moscow as capital of a great state, and thirty years since the transformation of that state into a socialist power. How many exciting comparisons, how many ideas were evoked by the thought of these happily coincidental celebrations, among them the occasions during the country’s 1,100-year history, for example during the Napoleonic invasion, when Russian military might had helped to save Europe. To be sure, at other times that same power had acted in a more threatening manner. Undoubtedly, the Great October Socialist Revolution had produced a much greater power, exclusively for progress. Concluded Tarle: The struggle for the preservation of peace between peoples and for the social progress of humankind is now associated throughout the world with the image of Moscow, old and new, and of a mighty world power of which the Kremlin is the heart and brain.13 There can be no doubt that in the year 1947 the Kremlin was looked upon throughout the world as the centre of the communist movement, although from 1949 Red Russia was to be joined by Red China in the even more formidable Moscow-Peking axis symbolising hope for the world—or a threat, since in the West especially its strongest bastion, the USA, the spread of communism was viewed in a manner diametrically opposed to that of Tarle. Needless to say, the Cold War isolated historians in the USSR as well as distorting historical analysis throughout the world, and the fact that the West has been deemed the victor does not in itself mean that the Western range of interpretation is correct. Much the same might be said about the period between the wars, the rise of Italian fascism and German Nazism combining with the consolidation of Soviet power to produce an international climate in which objectivity was difficult, if not impossible, to maintain, even in the more pluralist West, crushing the hopes of Pirenne.14

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C.A.BEARD AND THE USA, 1923–48 A perspective on American academic life from after the First to after the Second World War may be gained through an examination of episodes in the career of Charles A.Beard. Like his Soviet counterpart, E.V.Tarle, Beard was by no means a consistently orthodox figure, and was often at odds with the establishment, although without such dire consequences. Like Tarle, too, Beard was a man of great energy in a wide variety of fields, including the production of many books and articles. Neces-sarily, therefore, the following discussion will be highly selective. Before 1917, Beard’s career ran along fairly normal lines, combining university teaching with social awareness and intellectual curiosity, the latter showing itself in the ‘New History’ movement which he joined along with James Harvey Robinson. This called for a broadening of the subject in economic and other directions, while engaging the attention of the ‘common man’ as well as the statesman. Then, although supporting the USA’s entry into the First World War, he resigned from Columbia University over the issue of academic freedom to oppose government policy, and remained an independent scholar for most of the rest of his career. His two best-known works were An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, published in 1913, and The Rise of American Civilization which he brought out with his wife and collaborator, Mary Ritter Beard, in 1927. A controversial figure, Beard was subjected to many criticisms, including those visited upon E.V.Tarle (albeit in very different circumstances) of ‘economic determinism’ and ‘pseudo-Marx-ism’. Largely, on the constitution Beard argued that there were two major property-based groups: the Hamiltonian for finance, industry and the city; and the Jeffersonian for self-sufficiency, agriculture and rural life. American civilisation’s rise marked a triumph for Hamilton over Jefferson, especially after the post-humous showdown of the Civil War, but there was still some hope for Jefferson’s republican virtue updated in an ‘industrial democracy’. The Crash of 1929 followed by the Depression of the 1930s turned Beard from a belief in science and technology to a search for new explanations of the great economic calamity and new sources of historical understanding. On the first count, he lost the belief he had previously held (as for most of their careers, although not always 116


in the 1790s, had Hamilton and Jefferson) in international trade. His hopes that Franklin Roose-velt’s ‘New Deal’ would concentrate on national planning were dashed even before what he came to see as the betrayal of entry into the Second World War. His last major work, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, published in the year of his death, 1948, gave full rein to his sense of betrayal. As his death approached he was less than happy at the declaration of the Cold War, suspicious of the Marshall Plan and aghast at the Truman Doctrine.15 At the end of 1933, Beard gave his Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, ‘Written History as an Act of Faith’, declaring: Having broken the tyranny of physics and biology, contemporary thought in historiography turns its engines of veri-fication upon the formula of historical relativity— the formula that makes all written history merely relative to time and circumstance, a passing shadow, an illusion. Upbraided by a colleague for his economic determinism originating in Marxism, for his alleged belief that To discover causation is pure illusion: to offer any other interpretation than one based on a bold philosophy is to leave history to be the prey of prejudice’, Beard retorted: I cannot speak for others, but so far as I am concerned, my conception of the economic interpretation of history rests upon documentation older than Karl Marx, Number X of the Federalist, the writings of the Fathers of the Republic, the works of Daniel Webster, the treatises of Locke, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, and the Politics of Aristotle—as well as the writings of Marx himself. In furtherance of his relativist beliefs, Beard developed an interest in the work of German idealist historians, in particular Friedrich Meinecke. This provided the main theme of an article he wrote with Alfred Vagts in 1937, entitled ‘Currents of Thought in Historiography’. They suggested that if Meinecke’s work did indeed enter controversy, its spirit was that of the elusive search for truth, and his concept of Historismus contained nothing of the opprobrious. Meinecke claimed that his Historismus was ‘one of 117


the greatest spiritual revolutions which Occidental thought has undergone’, overcoming the belief in the stability of human nature and even more in the power of human reason put forward by the natural rights school since the later seventeenth century. His emphasis was on the unique: ‘each time…has its own style’; for him: ‘The quintessence of historism consists in the replacement of the generalizing view of historico-human forces by an individualizing view.’ Setting out Meinecke’s position, Beard and Vagts both elaborated and criticised it. Among the figures lighted on by Meinecke as his predecessors were Montesquieu and Burke. He argued that The Spirit of the Laws had helped to undermine the main weakness of the Enlightenment, which was its judgement of the past by the standards of the present. Montesquieu had suggested that nature was a force of feeling which should be given its own way, although he did not resolve the contradiction between nature as moral cause and as physical cause, and fell some distance short of grasping the individual character of the historical personality. For his part, Burke had launched the strongest arguments against the French Revolution as the consequence of natural rights, in favour of ‘saints and knights’ and ‘pious endurance of the world as it is’. Comparing Meinecke’s 1936 two-volume work on Historismus with his earlier studies, Beard and Vagts found the influence of society and economy on idea and interest more closely indicated. At the same time, they criticised him for being more aware of this influence on those he disliked than on those he liked, and for not making a proper distinction between the conditions in which French, British and German thought evolved. Hoisting him with his own petard, they wrote that historism, as defined by Meinecke, was: an outgrowth of the bureaucratization of German intelligence, a function of the servitude imposed upon business enterprise in Germany, where its development occurred late, with the aid of only a small intelligentsia and under the dominance of a military and civil bureaucracy. This bureaucracy, though out of sympathy with the rising capitalism on which it mainly lived, did not greatly restrain the specific interests which finally got control of the Reich, namely, the heavy industries and large-scale agriculture…. Meinecke, the historian of State 118


Reason, in truth, belongs to the penultimate generation of historians who uphold and justify by history the rule of that bureaucracy and whatever may be behind it. However, historism would be different in Germany from other countries: Neither the content nor the purpose nor the implementation of American historiography can be the same as that of historism in Germany or its counterpart in other countries of Continental Europe, unless we are to believe that an encompassing social environment makes no impress on written history. And so, having weighed up the alternatives, ‘the historian may, if he can, decide whether he desires to be a maker of history after the style of the Enlightenment or a victim of it in the manner of Ranke and Meinecke.’ In conclusion, Beard and Vagts made a number of further observations concerning currents of thought in historiography. Analogies with physics and biology, they suggested again, were on the way out, allowing a return to history as actuality and to the historian’s subjective or psychological nature. As Croce among others had indicated, theory and practice tended to con-form to each other, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding; in other words, neither theory nor practice existed in a ‘pure’ state. In such circumstances, each historian would develop a ‘scheme of reference’, liberal, fascist, Marxist or other. While such labels were sometimes used too broadly, perhaps, it would be wrong to think that each historian could develop a unique ‘scheme’. Equally, given any ‘scheme’, there might be scrupulous and critical use of sources and facts and, so far, a degree of scientific exactness. Certainly, it was impossible to return to the type of historism ‘under which the historian imagined himself able to know history as it had actually been. That philosophy, for such it was while denying philosophy, has been wrecked beyond repair.’ At the same time, historians had moved on from the view that written history was exclusively concerned with military, political and diplomatic events. They now accepted as integral parts of their province aspects of biological and psychological enquiry, for example ‘biometric investigations of genius, character and family traits’. Indeed, ‘historiography 119


penetrates all specialities and reveals more clearly to them the all encompassing medium of history as actuality’. And so, to quote the last words of Beard and Vagts at some length: Slowly it dawns in contemporary consciousness that historiography so conceived furnishes such guides to grand public policy as are vouchsafed to the human mind. They may be frail guides, but what else have we? The public policy of each country turns in part upon the posture and trends of domestic events. On them historiography so conceived must report. If its reports are meager, inaccurate, partial, haphazard, and marked by fear, negligence, and indifference, so much the worse for grand public policy. If they are full, accurate, comprehensive, systematic—the fruits of tireless industry and a bold conception of historical obligations—so much the better for grand public policy. Even when they repudiate it, deny it, and seek refuge in the dust of analytical philology, historians have a public responsibility: the kind of history they write, whether good or bad, helps to make history in spite of their efforts to escape from the outcome of their own labors. As the full-ness of their responsibility unfolds in the consciousness of historians, historiography will rise in the estimation of those who serve it and of the society which it serves, for weal or woe.16 During the inter-war years 1923–41, the belief that historians should serve society was reflected in the pages of the American Historical Review, although few practitioners of the subject went as far as states such as Wisconsin, which passed a law in 1923 that there should be no falsification in textbooks on such important subjects as the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Indeed, as the Second World War got under way warnings were given against imposing such orthodoxies: let there be no repeat or continuation of the ‘America First’ slogans or ‘Red Scare’ excesses that had impinged upon intellectual freedom after the Russian Revolution and First World War. There were distant echoes of the ‘Red Scare’ even in Charles H.Haskins’s article of 1923, ‘European History and American Scholarship’. After noting that the Communist Manifesto had first come out in the revolutionary year of 1848, he observed: ‘two 120


generations later Bolshevism appears in the lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest’. But the main emphasis, if also inter-nationalist, was also more academic. Haskins affirmed: Young or old, Europe and America are now in the same boat, along with the still older Orient, all common material for history. The historian’s world is one; let him interpret it as one, in relation both to scholarship and to the molding of public opinion. At about the same time, however, reporting on the recent International Congress of Historical Sciences in Brussels, Waldo G.Leland pointed out that there had been poor attendance at experimental sessions on American history, and that interest had been greatest when there had been some connection with European history. Five years later, at the Oslo Congress, the position had changed little if at all, J.F.Jameson observing that there was wide recognition of the political, economic and social strength of the USA, but still little or no interest in American history.17 Up to this point, virtually all the major contributions to the American Historical Review had concerned what might be called ‘Atlantic civilisation’ and its roots in the Middle East, although at the end of the 1920s ‘the still older Orient’—Chinese history — made an appearance. Presidential addresses and other broadbased articles considered such themes as law in history, social psychology and ‘The Newer Ways’. This last piece came in 1929 from James Harvey Robinson, who said with some pride but also perhaps a tinge of regret that the ways of ‘New History’ which he and Charles Beard had advocated years previously had now been accepted by many, even most of their colleagues. It was now accepted in principle that world history should be pursued on an objective basis.18 But not many of them practised what was preached, and questions still arose about the nature of objectivity. Soon, Charles Beard was to give his famous answer in ‘Written History as an Act of Faith’, which he then enlarged and modified in ‘Currents of Thought in Historiography’ co-written with Alfred Vagts. In the 1930s considerable attention was given to European currents of thought, not only German but also Italian. Benedetto Croce was pressed to visit the USA to enlarge upon his increasingly popular views, but he regretfully declined the invitation. Instead, 121


he sent messages across the Atlantic, arguing against materialistic and racialist interpretations of history, and warning of a new Jacobinism based on abstract concepts of humanity. He declared: ‘In its eternal essence, history is the story of the human mind and its ideals in so far as they express themselves in theories and in works of art, in practical and moral actions.’ Croce offered encouragement for international co-operation towards realistic common aims.19 A possible vehicle for such aspirations was the International Congress of Historical Sciences meeting in Warsaw and then in Krakow, in August 1933. The American Historical Review’s correspondent, Fred Morrow Fling, who had been in Oslo in 1928, feared that, although the Warsaw Congress was better attended, it was even more chaotic. There was much confusion in meetings and languages alike, with English coming third, after French and then German, as a common means of communication. There were in fact few Germans present, Fling regretted, while the Russians in attendance concentrated on a section they had suggested, Histoire des mouvements sociaux (sociaux actually meaning socialistes). Fling did not mention American history, which presumably meant that it was still conspicuous by its absence. Overall, he gave heavy emphasis to his conclusion that historical research was atomised ‘at a time when humanity is perishing for a vision of history as a whole, which the historian alone can give’.20 Just conceivably, although not very perceptibly, there was some progress by the time of the last International Congress of Historical Sciences to meet before the outbreak of the Second World War, in Zurich in 1938. As in 1923 in Brussels, the American rapporteur on this occasion was Waldo G.Leland, who indicated that of 1,185 registrations, 1,097 were from Europe, followed well behind by forty-nine from North America and seven from South America, nineteen from Asia, eleven from Africa and two from Australia. There was no representation at all from the Soviet Union, but some from Eastern Europe, where the location of the next Congress was to be decided in the following year. And Prague turned out not to be the place for such a decision in 1939, nor 1943 the most appropriate year for the proposed Congress. In 1938, the year which decided Prague’s fate, Leland noted much desire for peace and friendship, and, regarding the international crisis, ‘many interesting and some sensational ante122


cedents and parallels…presented and discussed with animation’. At the end of the 1930s, as in ‘Educating Clio’, a report on the most recent American Historical Association meeting, there was much interest in what history could learn from other disciplines, and at least some reflections of a wider international outlook. But, as the Second World War was breaking out, overseas interest in US history was still undeveloped, even in the USA’s main partner in the English-speaking union, the United Kingdom; there, however, ‘Public interest in the subject of America mounted after the collapse of France’ in 1940.21 Arguably, the fall of France and its sequels in 1941, notably the attack on the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and on the USA by imperial Japan, increased public interest in very nearly the whole world. After 1945 concerned citizens everywhere took a much wider view than was customary in the 1930s. But at what a price, and with what a downside—for the Second World War was soon followed by the equally global Cold War. International conflict of whatever kind is not conducive to objective historiography, which was pursued with great difficulty in the years following 1945. JAN ROMEIN AND THE COLD WAR, 1948–62 Having examined the period up to 1948 through aspects of the careers of E.V.Tarle and C.A.Beard, we will now approach the dual impact, at once broadening and distorting, of the Cold War years by considering, again in an overlapping manner, the life and some of the works of Jan Romein, a comparatively unknown Dutch historian who lived from 1893 to 1962. This survey will also provide a recapitulation of what has gone before, as we see how three of Romein’s articles updated the arguments of his predecessors. As a child at the turn of the century, Jan Romein often went to Rotterdam Zoo, where he was especially attracted by an irrigation device in the hothouse of tropical plants. Consisting of two buckets which filled and emptied alternately, the device taught Romein that ‘motion in one direction prepares for a movement to the opposite, and even in such a way as to change at sudden and always unexpected moments’. As a student, he was deeply affected by the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was also much influenced by Jan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, published 123


two years later. It made him say to himself, ‘This is the way, and no other way, that I want to learn to write.’ In a lecture on Huizinga in 1946, Romein spoke of the combination in Waning of understanding and vision. In another lecture in 1957 enlarging on this combination, he talked about ‘integral history’, encompassing: ‘psychology, philosophy, sociology, the arts, political science, economics, religion, the ways in which life, society, and human beings are viewed, the knowledge of all the sciences and literatures, and not least, the connections and interrelationships among groups, families, and generations.’ In order to meet its challenges Romein argued that it was necessary not to make a hierarchy of the subjects involved, or a centre with peripheries, but rather to adopt a ‘holistic’ approach, rendering a vague, mystical idea such as ‘Spirit of the Age’ into a scientific insight. Huizinga was ‘a seer’ but ‘no thinker’ and his work was ‘many-sided’ rather than ‘inclusive’. Further guidance had to be sought elsewhere, therefore, in a mature update of Romein’s experience in Rotterdam Zoo—the dialectical process, operating in totality as demonstrated by Karl Marx.22 Calling himself a Marxist, and sometimes labelled a Trotskyist, Romein followed no party line, and had in fact more or less given up party activity two years or more before his formal expulsion from the Communist Party of the Netherlands in 1927. His career held back to some extent by his ideological outlook, he showed himself to be a staunch patriot in 1940 soon after a belated appointment as associate professor in the municipal University of Amsterdam in 1939. Although the German occu-pation had been imposed, he gave a lecture entitled ‘The Origins, Development and Future of Dutch History’, concluding with the declaration: ‘Remember that you are scions of our beloved country; to be true to its ideals and do not flinch’. Interned for part of the war (like his non-political model Huizinga), Romein emerged in 1945 to be appointed a full professor, to continue work on Dutch and wider history, including the theory of history. Gaining a reputation in ‘Theoretical History’, Romein was invited to visit the USA to lecture on the subject. Unfortunately, his other reputation as a Marxist meant that he was refused a visa in 1949; he could therefore accept another invitation, to lecture in newly independent Indonesia instead. Two interlinked courses given there in 1951–2, one on Asian, one on European 124


history, encouraged him to develop a third line of thought in addition to ‘integral history’ and Marxism, the ‘Common Human Pattern’. Two books were published from the courses that Jan Romein gave in Indonesia, Aera van Europa in 1954, and De Eeuw van Azië in 1956. The first had a subtitle which translates as ‘European History as Deviation from the Common Human Pattern’, while in the Preface to The Asian Century, an English version of the second, the author expressed his belief that in this deviation he had found ‘the final cause of the temporary domination of Asia by the Europeans’. His later years were largely devoted to a collaborative enterprise, Part VI of the UNESCO History of Mankind,23 and on his largest, although uncompleted work, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900. The second of these brought him back, no doubt, to his childhood memories of the irrigation buckets at Rotterdam Zoo. Certainly, they formed the introduction to a posthumously published paper, ‘Change and Continuity in History: The Problem of “Transformation”’. From 1893 to 1962, Romein’s lifetime, a great transformation had indeed occurred in Europe and the world. Against that background, let us take a closer look at the evolution of his ideas through articles published in 1948, 1958 and 1964. The first of them, ‘Theoretical History’, was an outline of a course of study introduced at his suggestion to the University of Amsterdam in 1945. Addressing the same sort of subject as Lamprecht, Berr and Acton before the First World War, and Tarle, Pirenne and Beard after it (as we have seen in earlier analysis), Romein considered his themes in a manner appropriate for the period following the Second World War. His essay is divided into five parts. The first part briefly explains that the title was taken from the realm of science and seemed preferable to the alternative ‘historiology’ since this implied pure description, while ‘theoretical history’ made clear that the emphasis was on explanation. The second part echoes Croce and other predecessors in its assertion that ‘the structure of even the simplest historical event originates in the mind of the historian, not in the facts which provide merely the material’. This had now become a commonplace, amounting to ‘the paradox that a historian’s value lies primarily in what he knows about man, rather than in what he knows about the past’. In the third part of his argument, Romein sets out to fix the frontiers of 125


theoretical history, and urges us to imagine them as forming the following four sides to a central square: (a) theoretical history as sometimes used in the eighteenth century to denote ‘hypothetical, ideal, conjectural, natural, or generalized history’; it falls short of the twentieth-century variety, because it, like (b) philosophy of history, soars beyond the discipline rather than lodges within it; (c) is historical method in the sense of considering ‘the nature of historical truth rather than the means of pursuing it, which is better thought of as technique’; and (d) separates theoretical from practical history, the latter dealing with topics possessing a time sequence and geographic unity, the former with topics which are conceptual rather than temporal or spatial. In other and simpler words, according to Romein, ‘theoretical history deals with developments and concepts, and establishes its case by comparing historical phenomena and developments in different periods and places.’ Turning to the fourth of the five parts of his argument, Romein lists a further series of salient features, the five provinces of the territory of theoretical history. These are: (a) theoretical problems and problems of method; (b) the study of the pattern and rhythm of history; (c) the breakdown of the past into periods and recognition of the driving powers in history; (d) some topics beyond ordinary historiography; (e) the study of historiography. To look at them more closely, in particular at the questions that they pose: (a) How to retain the advantages of specialisation while eliminating the disadvantages? How to arrange established facts into a pattern? Does objectivity exist, or is history dependent on subjectivity and value judgements? And is history governed by laws, especially of causality? (b) Are the patterns and rhythms of history to be explained in terms of biology or another science? Are there ages of integration and disintegration, of progress and decline, or a mixture? (c) How should periods be organised, and should breaks between them occur at peaks of development or at the ends of eras? How to define terms such as romanticism or imperialism or, more difficult, individualism? How to establish the relationship between a leader, the masses and the environment, or between state, society and individual? (d) How to organise comparative studies of, say, dictatorship or revolution? or of the ever growing power of the state? or of medieval myths, of the monarchy or the papacy? or of historical phantoms? Of the last of these, 126


Romein noted: ‘The phenomenon may be interpreted differently as the pursuit of phantoms from the past or as the projection of present ideals into the past; in either case its appeal derives from the illusion that one’s daydream was at one time reality.’ And he cited Jan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History and Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process among examples of what theoretical history could achieve, (e) Here again, best to quote Romein: In short, historiography is to the historiologist what the document is to the writer of history. Just as the latter organizes his archival material, the former will acquire as wide as possible an acquaintance with historiography before starting in. The latter never tires of browsing through archives; the former is an indefatigable reader of the great book of history, for the tragedy of human triumph and defeat, of human endeavor and error, fascinates him as nothing else. The fifth and last part of ‘Theoretical History’ begins with the ringing assertion that this subject fulfils a practical purpose. To teach students what they themselves may find in books is not enough; nor is it enough to train them in historical research. Romein saw history as a triptych, with the left panel depicting historical research, the right theoretical history, and both sides achieving their full meaning only from the centrepiece representing historiography. Concluded Romein in 1948: The writer of history, the research worker, and the historiologist should all three collaborate harmoniously in training young people to find in their profession the satisfaction to which they are entitled—to which they are entitled because they have been born into a world which through our rather than their fault has become so degraded that one would wish to leave it, were it not for this very opportunity to provide young people with the happiness we older men have not found.24 After 1948, in the short run the outlook became darker for old and young, men and women alike, and for Jan and Annie Romein in particular. As already mentioned (p. 124), his Marxist 127


associations, however unaffiliated, were enough for him to be denied entry to the USA in 1949. His alternative visit to Indonesia, however, was more than fruitful for his wider perspective, and, returning home to Amsterdam in 1952, he soon began to publish fresh thoughts about world history. These were placed before an international public in 1958 with the publication of an article ‘The Common Human Pattern: Origin and Scope of Historical Theories’. Here, Romein approached a theme to be found at least as far back as Montesquieu, but he concentrated for the most part on the interpretations of professional historians. In the nineteenth century, he began, scholars argued that history was a science like any other, and that they should therefore seek to enunciate laws or at least establish systematic recurrence of phenomena. However, around 1900, a reaction against this assertion began, with a division made between natural and social science, and some doubt being put forward about the inclusion of history even in the second category. So much did the reaction grow that any historian who still discussed laws of history was generally looked upon as a worker in a different field, a philosopher. Then, in the early 1930s, the pendulum started to swing in the other direction. One reason was a shift in the definition of natural science, following the discovery of random movements within the atom and the popularisation of Einstein’s theory of relativity. While there was no support for reviving the old analogies between history and physics or chemistry, the feeling grew that the discipline did require some kind of theoretical background. What was theory? Basically, ‘a shorthand note of reality’, and as such necessarily ‘a simplification of reality’, one-sided, to an extent distorting and even erroneous. But, in answer to the question ‘what is scientific truth?’, a biologist had answered earlier in the century ‘an error of today’, and there probably never would be in any science a theory wholly and permanently beyond question. Why was this so? There were three reasons: a natural tendency for generalisation to lead to exaggeration; a desire to broaden theory to cover possible objections; and, most importantly, the circumstance that the structure of reality was always too complex for full coverage. Thus, in science, theories that were once central became eccentric or even obsol-ete. They had served their purpose through stimulating fresh insights, and 128


should also be saluted as, for their time, ‘the highest peak of human creative power’. Among historical theories or concepts, Romein selected for special mention the ideal-type, seen by Max Weber as ‘a rule with which to measure reality or a standard by which to gauge other measures’ (not ideal in the sense of approaching perfection). His own ideal-type, at least in preliminary form, was the theory of the Common Human Pattern (CHP), derived from earlier thoughts and from the Asiatic experiences of 1951 and 1952, ‘gathered in the subconscious, unpredictably emerging and being shaped by the cold air of reason’. This theory was ‘the summary in one concept of a mass of separate characteristics of human behaviour which was valid everywhere in the world before European development since the Renaissance diverged in the most fundamental respects’. Before describing them, Romein considered it necessary to dispose of two misunderstandings: he did not mean to imply that any culture which was not West European was primitive or that West European divergence from the CHP was in any way unsound or regrettable, or anything other than just different. The CHP’s characteristics could be described in two ways: in themselves or as mirrored in divergence. To take the latter first, it started with the Greeks, distinguished by ‘their objective attitude towards nature, by their rationalism, by their capacity for abstract thought as well as for exact observation’. They were followed by the Romans, distinguished by ‘their gift for organiz-ation and its application to state, society and technique’. The divergence could also be seen in Christianity which, unlike all other world religions, became a church with ‘a consciously hierarchical, centralized and hence more effective form of organ-ization’. Then came the emergence of selfgoverning medieval cities, leading to an independent ‘middle class’ between the upper and lower class. The Renaissance began with the attempt to assimilate the classical heritage, but outstripped it with ideas of individualism and progress. And the centralised national state was also purely European in origin. Individualism, developed through Protestantism and other traits listed above, contributed towards the growth of capitalism, as did expansion beyond Europe. Romein continued: Enlightenment is so essentially a completion of what the Greeks began and the Renaissance continued that it only 129


can be imagined in the pattern of European divergence. The same applies to historism, the idea that man and his institutions are historical categories originating from something else and becoming something else; an idea which only can occur in a dynamic society. (On historism, see again the present chapter, pp. 117–20.) Such differences led to revolutions, American, French and Russian as well as the Industrial Revolution, and to imperialism, all working to separate Europe from the CHP. Of what did this Common Human Pattern consist? Its most remarkable characteristics were six in number, nature, life, thought, time, authority and work: nature—feeling part of it, knowing how to make use of it when necessary but not seeking to dominate it; life—accepting that it is essentially worthless, a transition to another existence in the cosmic whole; thought—in images not concepts, concretely not abstractly, with much less interest in conscious organisation, in church or state; time—‘but a succession of todays’, with no saving of time, or capital, or any conception of progress; authority—of the gods, the prince, the father, the teacher and the book, either absolute or non-existent; work—a necessary evil, the very word signifying worry and pain, and no work ethic or worship as in the West. Understanding the CHP was not just a matter of erudition in Romein’s view; observation of life, especially through travel, was also necessary. Of course, closer study and inspection might reveal further divergences from the CHP, which in any case had to be seen as an ideal-type concept, but meanwhile, the CHP could throw light on social attitudes, cultural relations, economic problems and political phenomena. For example, at its frontier, the Bolshevik Revolution was characterised by the weak resistance of the once dominant classes. Why was this? One common answer was exemplified by the perceptive American journalist visiting Russia in the summer of 1917: The general attitude of the educated minority towards the tragic sweep of events was surprisingly often that of mere bewilderment and a sort of passive melancholy, as if the storm raging outside their pleasant drawing rooms and country houses were some untoward act of nature they were powerless to affect. 130


The submissiveness of the Russian bourgeoisie could be contrasted with the active resistance of the Finnish, a reflection of the fact that the former was less touched by divergence from the CHP than the latter. Furthermore, nobody wrote more pro-foundly about the two different attitudes to life and death than Leo Tolstoy in his story ‘Three Deaths’ (of a rich woman, a poor man and a tree). Conceding that its value could be only relative, Romein concluded with an affirmation: I think that the theory of the Common Human Pattern is true for us here and now and hence an instrument for reaching a better understanding of the relation between East and West. And no man of good will will deny that such understanding is essential to a better relation between the two worlds; nor will he deny that this relationship is the principal task of mankind in the present epoch.25 The ‘present epoch’ of the late 1950s was not the same as that of the early 1900s, when European civilisation was seen far less as a deviation and much more as the main road of civilisation. Equally, while some of Romein’s truth lives on after him, it has been much refined through the completion of the process of decolonisation and its aftermath. For Romein’s death in 1962 came at a time when perhaps the greatest transformation in human history was in full swing. The nature of that transformation which included much besides decolonisation will be investigated below (pp. 134–7). For the moment, we will consider a by no means irrelevant posthumously published article on this very question, ‘Change and Continuity in History: The Problem of “Transformation”’, stemming from his childhood acquaintance with the dialectical structure of irrigation by bucket in Rotterdam Zoo, and thus ending where he began. An illustration selected from history was the transformation in Europe from about 1889 to the First World War, the theme of his longest (and also posthumously published) book, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900. This consisted of the disintegration of the ‘modern’ worldview based on the thought of Descartes and Newton, and many other developments, political, economic, social and cultural, on different levels of profundity and superficiality (see Chapter 3, pp. 78, 87). In order to make his view of transformation as clear as possible, Romein managed to isolate a 131


number of types, from the more deliberate to the less conscious. The first of these was synthesis, which could be both crude and subtle. Nearer the former end of the spectrum was the fashionable attempt in the USA to reconcile religion and Freudianism. Commenting with some memory of his own personal history probably not too far away, Romein wrote: The argumentation goes that both structures aim at saving souls. In fact, this is only the trivial response to a situation in which one does not want to give up the benefits of psychiatric treatment, but is no more prepared to part with that testimony of anti-communism which has become one of the most important social functions of religion today. Towards the latter end of the spectrum was the synthesis of Aristotelianism and Platonism at the inception of modern thought from Copernicus to Newton—‘perhaps the most important and most influential of all spiritual changes’. Sharp and constant criticism could become ‘more creative’ than the ‘creation’, as Oscar Wilde put it, and was most appropriately found in Bible criticism, which had undermined literal acceptance of the Word of God. This was the second type of transformation, while the third was ‘supplementation’ or ‘adaptation’. This could be more subtle and on occasion less deliberate than criticism or synthesis, and could be illustrated from examples taken from the history of Marxism around 1900. Plekhanov in his short work The Role of the Individual in History and Lenin in his What Is To Be Done? might not have strayed far from the thought of Marx and Engels, but both gave it a new slant, while Bernstein made a more conscious adaptation in his formulation of revisionism. Still more subtle and unconscious was a fourth type, the ‘mistake’. This could be detected in ether-theory, which helped to lead from classical to modern physics, and also in the ‘turnover’ within positivism from objectivism towards psychologism. But perhaps the clearest example was in painting, which, like literature, went through a phase ‘of turning away from the outside towards the inside’. Gauguin expressed in a nutshell how the Impressionists conveyed reality: ‘The art of painting is something that merely consists of what our eyes are thinking.’ In addition to synthesis, criticism, supplementation and ‘mistake’, there were two further types of transformation. The fifth was the 132


consequence of intensification, for example the close attention given to religion throughout the nineteenth century leading to ‘sociology of religion’. The sixth was ‘transformation by accuracy’, the circumstance that ‘one degree of greater precision in establishing facts would unsettle conclusions already reached, and that such uncertainty would create new problems’. Beyond these types of transformation, there was a shift of emphasis, a life going beyond the razor’s edge, or old ideas necessarily expressing a new thought—‘on which it stumbles and which at best it must drag along in its motion’. All these transformation types prompted the general conclusion that the important quality shared by them was ‘a shift of values: and, after all, values are the criteria of our thought and action’. Of course, history was a bottomless discipline, but the problem of ‘turnover’ could be usefully approached through a carefully used formula. The essence of the problem of transformation was to be found in ‘the dialectical unity of two seem-ingly absolute and completely irreconcilable opposites: continuity and change’. In fact, they were only relative opposites, like light and shadow. As far as a formula was concerned, such daring men as Lenin and Einstein had to start with the given: originality was to be found in the stream of continuity, but, equally, continuity could still be found in the stream of change. Putting his argument in the most compressed manner possible, Romein offered his own E = MC2: A --> A(b) --> B(a) -->B. The formula was to be explained in the following manner: A is a given value expressed in thought on a given date; (b) is an added value, added to A since A started to function in a changing situation. The addition of (b) gives therefore a different emphasis to A. In the prolongation of this process, the emphasis (b) tips the balance by becoming the main value B, whilst the former main value A is reduced to an accessory value (a). In the end, B may be receiving the value of minus A, but this need not be so. At any rate B will always incorporate A, though A be dissolved. Insisting that his formula had only marked a modest theoretical breakthrough, Romein nevertheless expressed the hope that ‘it would advance by a few steps towards understanding the way dialectical motion in history goes, and 133


towards finding some sort of historical theory of evolution, or at least part of it’. In such a case, historical evolution would also proceed a small step at a time, micro-processes leading to macro-processes. For example, an infinite number of transactions in capitalism led to the arrival at the end of the nineteenth century of imperialism — ‘a new type of banking and monopoly; the great landslide in which, for the first time, the masses became part of the existing nations and could interfere in world development.’26 TOWARDS A NEW WORLD ORDER, 1962 AND AFTER A century on from that transformation and Romein’s birth, more than thirty years after his death and the enunciation of his formula, the role of the masses may not appear quite so active, while other transformations of at least equal, probably greater, significance have occurred. Without any intention to diminish the worth of Romein’s contribution to the understanding of the processes of history, let us recall that the year of his death, 1962, was near the beginning of a decade of overall significance throughout the world. Arguably, our own age does not begin before the 1960s, or, more precisely before the latter part of that decade. In an essay entitled ‘1968, Revolution in the WorldSystem’ first published in the spring of 1989, Immanuel Wallerstein put forward six theses: 1 The year 1968 brought a revolution in and of the world system. 2 The primary protest of 1968 was against US hegemony in the world system (and Soviet acquiescence in that hegemony). 3 The secondary, but ultimately more passionate, protest of 1968 was against the ‘old left’ systemic movements (for example, against Stalinism). 4 Counterculture was part of revolutionary euphoria, but was not politically central to 1968. 5 Revolutionary movements representing ‘minority’ or underdog strata need no longer, and no longer do, take second place to revolutionary movements representing presumed ‘majority’ groups.

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6 The debate on the fundamental strategy of social transformation has been reopened among the antisystemic movements, and will be the key debate of the coming twenty years. Without entering into a debate with Wallerstein, or even spelling out his six theses, we may note that even he would probably want to make some reformulations in view of developments since the spring of 1989 when his essay was first published, beyond his suggestion in 1991 that: ‘The regime changes of 1989 were…the outcome of the latent, continuing revolt of 1968.’27 How much more, then, would Romein have wanted to revise at least some of his views which now have even more of a period ring about them. Moving towards a conclusion, let us note at least some of the developments unnoticed by him. Altogether, they make necessary an approach to world order which he could not appreciate. This is neither a criticism nor an excuse, just a bald statement of the fact that the world is in a constant state of flux, with each generation of historians taking up new challenges regarding the distinctive feature of their discipline, the passage of time. Let us take one, but the most important, example of how significant circumstances have changed since Jan Romein’s death in 1962, the problem of the environment. To be sure, there was some awareness of these problems some years before 1962. In 1948, for example, Romein’s formula of transformation, A --> A(b) --> B(a) --> B, had been preceded by another, a ‘bioequation’ expressing ‘certain relationships— almost universally ignored—that every minute of every day touch the life of every man, woman and child on the face of the globe’: C=B:E. Here, C indicates the carrying capacity of any given area of land, that is its ability to afford food, drink and shelter. B stands for biotic potential, or the ability of that land to produce plants, especially for food, but also for shelter and clothing. E indicates environmental resistance, or limitations imposed by the environment. So, the carrying capacity is the resultant of the ratio between the other two factors. This ‘bioequation’ was devised in 1948 by William Vogt, drawing on a number of earlier authorities stretching as far back as Malthus and Darwin. While his Road to Survival may not have made the impact it deserved, later publications from Rachel 135


Carson’s Silent Spring of 1962 onwards did succeed in bringing an increasingly serious problem to wide public attention in the Western world.28 Another book published in 1962, the year of Romein’s death, and also very influential until it was overtaken by ever more activity in the global village, was Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy,29 in a sense doing for new electronic sounds and sights what Rachel Carson’s book did for ominous silence and disappearance in nature. But Jan Romein could not have read it, nor could he have had more than an inkling of the Cuba Crisis, the most serious crisis since 1945 because it took us closest to nuclear war. He could not have known that subsequent hopes for limitations of nuclear and other armaments would be frustrated as vast stockpiles built up in the USA, USSR and elsewhere. He died before the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution’ and the escalation of the Vietnam War, the events of 1968 and significant phases in the process of decolonisation, while the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself must have been beyond his wildest flights of fancy. He may have had some idea of the imminence of space travel, intercontinental telecommunication and the spread of computer use, but he could not have appreci-ated the full extent of the technological or third industrial revolution which was about to bring a new meaning to his concept of the Common Human Pattern. In this chapter I have attempted to illustrate how the high hopes for universal history of Henri Pirenne and others after the First World War were dashed by developments in the following decades. The approach has been individual rather than general. That is to say, representative figures, Tarle, Beard and Romein, have been taken into consideration rather than the work of their colleagues overall. Other members of the great guild could have been selected: for example, from the United Kingdom alone, Toynbee, Carr and Barraclough. Each of their careers provides much material pertinent to the discussion of approaches to world order.30 However, our choice was far from random, for Tarle and Beard reflected developments in Europe’s two outliers, the USSR and USA, while Romein did the same for Europe itself. Between them their careers throw light on the pre-war and post-war years, clearly indicating that the terms of the pH test had radically changed. However much it might be disguised by such concepts as ‘the English-speaking peoples’ 136


or ‘the Atlantic community’, the USA had indeed established hegemony in the world system; in other words it had become the ‘universal indicator’ to which Europe and the USSR would react. And so, while taking notice of the fact that the globe had in many ways shrunk, world order was still Western world order, and normally much more constitutional than revolutionary.

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So far, Russian history has not appeared very much centre-stage. Some reference was made to the pre-revolutionary school as developed from Karamzin to Kliuchevsky, rather more to the Soviet school as represented by E.V.Tarle. In addition, Catherine the Great’s views on the question of a constitution were considered, as were the views on revolution and its sequel of, among others, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Why has there not been more? Basically, because the book is less about the approach to Russian history in detail, more about its general relationship to Western interpretations. Thus we have seen how Montesquieu and Marx placed Russia at the margin of Europe, and how Western professional historians continued to do so in the twentieth century. While the number of such scholars specialising in Russian and Soviet history has expanded enormously, even we, for the most part, have tended to pursue the subject in the context of some Western overview, normally some kind of ‘constitutional’, more rarely a variant of the ‘revolutionary’, world order. And both groups, albeit for different reasons, have found it difficult to share the outlook of our colleagues in the USSR and Russia. Recently, for nearly all of us, in whatever situation and of whatever persuasion, the events occurring in the later 1980s and early 1990s have meant searching reappraisal, and this chapter will attempt to reflect at least some of the ideas that have been put forward. I shall make some specific suggestions for the further pursuit of the study of Russian history in addition to remarks about the broader context.

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THE ACTION, THE TIME, THE PLACE To begin with a comparison of something simple, a football match, with something complex, the process of history. Football, or soccer, is played in virtually every country in the world.1 Its basic principles are indeed simple, with two teams each of eleven players attempting to score goals while preventing the other from doing so. A spectator ignorant of the sport would need further explanation of the rules, the role of the referee, and so on, yet would understand much of what was happening in a match without difficulty. On the other hand, there is always something to learn, and the most experienced coach cannot comprehend football’s every nuance. In particular, nobody can predict the outcome of a ninety-minute encounter between two sides of approximately equal ability and achievement: often there will be complaints that the side that deserved to win in fact lost, and the result could turn on extreme misfortune. For example, the losing team could come near to scoring on numerous occasions, while the winning team successfully seized its one opportunity. Television replays reveal referees’ errors, lend-ing fresh substance to the traditional lament of losers that they were robbed. On the other hand, a traditional argument asserts that over the course of a whole season such bad and good luck balance out, and the team that wins a league must be at the very least among the best, even if a victory or a series of victories in a knockout cup competition might be more dependent on random factors beyond any calculation. On the whole, the historical process is more like a league than a cup competition: although it does not always run smoothly, sooner or later the strongest forces will triumph. But there can be infinite debate about the nature of power, and how it is wielded. And the contest continues perpetually, with the ‘field’ constituted by the whole world, the ‘teams’ constantly varying, and no referee or agreed rules. Moreover, there are no spectators, for however much the media, especially television, might indicate otherwise, we are involved in the latest stage of the great game. Equally, in spite of similarly deceptive appearances, there are no replays, or alternative courses of events, in history. We might discuss the past, even learn from it, but we can never recover it. For this and other reasons, historical interpretation will always involve a search for the unattainable. If the most 139

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impartial spectators, versed in the rules and assisted by video evidence covering a match from all angles, could not be expected to reach agreement about all aspects of its outcome,2 how much less might historians who can only aspire to impartiality reach con-sensus on the infinitely more complex task of assessing an event or process in their area of expertise. To superimpose any kind of order on apparent chaos involves a vast number of presuppositions and value judgements even before the collection and evaluation of the evidence begin. To say it again, the majority of Western historians will tend towards a ‘constitutional’, a minority towards a ‘revolutionary’, world outlook. All we can hope for, then, is greater refinement of techniques, improved definition of terms, and better presentation of arguments. However, let us be clear, both the football match and the rest of history did happen. And at least one further proposition is incontrovertible: there is just one world, or at least just one world inhabited by human beings and other distinctive living creatures that we are at present aware of. One day, through space travel or communication, we may encounter other sentient forms, but they are extremely unlikely to be exactly the same as those of our world. Meanwhile, human beings have reached the moon in person and have explored other planets through the agency of scientific instruments. We may come to colonise them. It is conceivable that our advanced technology could be used to protect our earth against meteoric or other invasions from outer space. But at the present time two other eventualities appear more likely: one of them is our mutual destruction through war or accident; the other is global poisoning or other mortal upset of the ecological balance.3 Of course, there can be dispute about how far back we can trace the realisation or even the actuality of one world, as well as about how far into the future it will contine. Yet this brings us on to a second constant: the existence of time, which is the necessary point of departure for the study of history. If there is no movement through time, there can be no such study. And while there may be frameworks of interpretation ignoring the distinction between past, present and future, the daily lives of most people are organised around such movement, even if it is the rise and fall of the sun or passage of the seasons rather than any more elaborate measurement of time 140

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from seconds to centuries. Some kind of periodisation, then, follows from awareness of time, and historians have normally talked of ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary periods of history. Equally, in order to make sense of the world, we customarily divide it up into a number of different segments. Let us consider these first before returning to the problem of periodisation. Broadest of all has been the division East-West, and more recently North-South. The first contrasted the West with the Orient, or Near, Middle and Far East, or advanced civilisation with backward civilisation or no civilisation at all. The largest state in the world since the beginning of modern times, Russia, was in something of an exceptional midway frontier or even ‘Eurasian’ position until the Russian Revolution of 1917, even more from 1917 until the onset of the Cold War following 1945. Then, it was placed firmly in the East, which with the formation of the socalled Moscow-Peking axis after the Chinese Revolution of 1949 seemed for a few years to become a formidable monolith indeed. North-South has become a normal global division since the acceptance of the concept of the Third World from the 1960s, especially since the end of the Cold War, from the late 1980s. Some analysts now envisage a developed or at least semi-developed North setting up a firm frontier to inhibit the incursions of indigent millions from the South.4 Here as elsewhere, there are exceptions, most notably Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. More traditional, of course, has been the division into continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America and Australasia, although they have not always been uniform labels for kinds of civilisation. Most familiar since the nineteenth century is the division into nations or states or nation states; this division remains dominant towards the end of the twentieth century, with the land surface of the whole world so divided except for the Arctic and Antarctic polar regions. However, smaller areas of concentration are possible, with reductions embracing units as small as a single village. These can appear meaningful enough to their inhabitants, some of whom still spend a whole lifetime preoccupied by the arduous routines of rural life. For example, there are still inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands for whom the capital city Inverness is in many

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respects foreign territory. Focal points would be much more localised in less advanced societies. Here, and hitherto, there has been difficulty, even impossibility, in discussing place without frequent reference to time. History is indeed a kind of ‘space-time continuum’, and, as we have just seen, time cannot be discussed without frequent reference to place. To take a key example, the concept of modernisation has been applied to some parts of the world as still in progress whereas in others it has been deemed to be complete. Strictly speaking, however, we need to recognise that such parallel development is impossible. The 1990s are the 1990s for everybody, for the most backward and the most advanced together. There are other weaknesses in the concept of modernisation, too. For example, it seems to consist of two processes, one of which is modernisation and the other what may be called ‘contemporarisation’. This latter point requires some recapitulation, perhaps. Let us first assert, as many would agree, that modern history begins in the middle of the seventeenth century, with a prior period of early modern or pre-modern history beginning around 1500. Following modernity, there is contemporaneity, again with an early or pre-period. Here, there would be less agreement, but let us assert that contemporary history proper begins in the 1960s, with its prologue commencing in the 1890s.5 At the centre of the two phases are the second and third Industrial Revolutions: the former, supplementing the original Industrial Revolution earlier in the nineteenth century, was of oil and steel, the automobile and the aeroplane, following coal and iron, the railway and the steamship; the latter is perhaps more accurately called a scientific-technological revolution, with new forms of energy and communication (see The Economist list, p. 5 above). Genetic engineering is perhaps the most significant of further likely developments. To illustrate the immediately foregoing argument, let us consider how a country completing the process of modernisation would still lag far behind another which was well into the process of contemporarisation. History does not proceed in such a neat manner, of course, and the two processes may be observed in operation simultaneously. However, to include, say, the arrival of electricity in the same category as that of atomic power, or the conquest of illiteracy along with the introduction of 142

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widespread viewing of television, is to make too broad a use of a single term. This sweeping application of the term ‘modernisation’ has contributed to various kinds of confusion, including the emergence of the term ‘post-modernism’. Confined mostly to the world of the arts, and relating in particular to the term ‘modernism’ employed from the early twentieth century onwards, post-modernism consists of a selective use of past styles in order to reflect the spirit of an age of fragmentation. Arguably at least, it thus takes appearance for reality, since the world towards the end of the twentieth century is in fact a smaller, more interdependent unit than ever before.6 Of course, nobody can fully understand the present, which, because of its closeness to us, is more confusing than the past. Since the Second World War, a major determinant of academic investigation has been the Cold War. Now, in the 1990s, it is deemed to be at an end (even if the continued existence of enough firepower for global annihilation might make that conclusion a little premature), but readjustment to the new circumstances in academic as well as other circles is incomplete. At least, the tendency remains strong for analysis to be based on the confrontation between the market and state control, democracy and dictatorship, all of them over-simplified. Yet the old saying, study the past as if it were the present, the present as if it were the past, retains much of its validity. Applying it, we may compare the Cold War with old schisms, and detect reflections of our own partiality in that of our fore-bears. We may also see through patterns of past events how the course of history has previously been determined, and how it may be projected through the years to come. Thus, there is a case for saying: study the past as if it were the future, and the future as if it were the past. Here, however, there are dangers, especially of too much emphasis on variability, that is on what might have happened via what might be about to happen. To put the complex relationship between different phases of time as succinctly as possible, the future allows free will, the present offers choice, and the past is determined. And so, in history, there are no alternatives, but only turning points. Equally, to return again from time to the other primary consideration of place, the basic premise must be reasserted that the world is one, and the course of history therefore fundamentally unilinear. This means that no part of the world 143

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can claim to be unique and that the only yardstick is global, with no exceptions, only variants. No other approach can aspire to be scientific. As well as time and place, there is also a third desideratum, then, of manner, method or action. Here, some clarification may be gained through two kinds of comparisons. The first of them will be with the constitutional and revolutionary orders of Montesquieu and Marx examined in earlier chapters, the second through a fresh juxtaposition of American and Russian history discussed in earlier books. Before moving on, however, let us attempt to set out our argument in schematic form: c. 1500–1900 c. 1900–

Modernisation=Westernisation= Europeanisation Contemporisation=Westernisation= Europeanisation+Americanisation

During the process of modernisation, the pH test begins with Europe and can be applied to America and Russia as ‘alkali’ and ‘acid’ frontiers. During the process of Contemporisation, the pH test begins with Europe but continues with the USA. The USA ceases to be a frontier, while the USSR becomes even more of an ‘acid’ frontier than was tsarist Russia for much of its existence. Europe now becomes in some senses an ‘alkali’ frontier. From approximately the 1960s, the process of globalisation begins to take over from Americanisation, thus rendering the pH test even more difficult. MONTESQUIEU, MARX AND WESTERN WORLD ORDERS Montesquieu died in 1755 and Marx in 1883, yet the influence of both is still with us, even if more obviously in the latter case. Of the former, Isaiah Berlin argues that ‘Montesquieu’s views have far more relevance to our own situation than those of his nineteenth-century successors.’ Against Marx and other ‘terrible simplifiers’, ‘whose intellectual lucidity and moral purity of heart seemed to make them all the readier to sacrifice mankind again and again in the name of vast abstractions upon altars served by imaginary sciences of human behaviour’, Berlin 144

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asserts that ‘Montesquieu’s cautious empiricism, his distrust of laws of universal application, and his acute sense of the limits of human powers, stand up so well.’7 He recommends the author of The Spirit of the Laws as an advocate of constitutionalism as well as of the preservation of civil liberties, moderation, peace, internationalism and many other ideals. In 1955, when these remarks were first published, the ideas were standing up so well, presumably, in comparison with the Soviet view of Marx in particular. Now, nearly forty years afterwards, in a less adversarial context, Berlin’s evaluation is still in reprint. In the context of this book, I have made use of Montesquieu for three purposes: as ‘an advocate of constitutionalism’; as an example of eighteenth-century Eurocentricity; and as a basis for the universal indicator pH test of American and Russian variations of the European norm. In recapitulation, let us look again at some of the basic arguments of The Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu insisted that he did not treat laws, but the spirit of the laws, beginning with the relations that laws have with the nature and principle of each kind of government, and then going on to various conditions and aspects of the laws under each kind of government—republican, monarchical, despotic. While law in general is ‘human reason insofar as it governs all the peoples of the earth’, and the ‘laws of each nation should be only the particular cases to which human reason is applied’, Montesquieu also asserted that ‘Laws should be so appropriate to the people for whom they are made that it is very unlikely that the laws of one nation can suit another.’8 Today, in its broad sense, one kind of government appears largely to have superseded the others: in the new world order, one of the three kinds of government, the republican, is declared to be predominant, especially in its democratic form. However, before we examine this claim, and its application today, we might do well to investigate the early origins of the term ‘democracy’. The West’s first known political theory also proposed three kinds of government: rule by one, by some, or by all. In the mid-fifth century BC, democracy or ‘equality under the laws’ was said to have three distinct advantages: the whole community would participate in decisions; officials would be selected by lot, rather than elected; and officials so selected would be publicly accountable. Such direct and constant 145

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democracy was a far cry from the norm of today. As Paul Cartledge puts it: The idea that a prime minister [or president] should not only not be directly elected but also not be directly responsible to the people, and even then formally responsible only at intervals of years, would have been incomprehen-sible to them. On the other hand, the exclusion from the ‘people’ of both women and slaves meant that Athenian democracy was also in some key ways more restricted than ours.9 For Montesquieu, about two and a half centuries ago, democracy was one of two forms of republican government, rule by all; the other was rule by some, or aristocracy. Rule of one could be either monarchical or despotic. Our present exercise of invoking Montesquieu’s old world order so as to redress the balance of the new might best be advanced by examining in particular his exposition and application of the principles of democracy. For example, he observed in Part I that: The political men of Greece who lived under popular government recognized no other force to sustain it than virtue. Those of today speak to us only of manufacturing, commerce, finance, wealth, and even luxury. When that virtue ceases, ambition enters those hearts that can admit it, and avarice enters them all…. Formerly the goods of individuals made up the public treasury; the public treasury has now become the patrimony of individuals. A concomitant and promoter of virtue was frugality: ‘As each one there [i.e. in a republic] should have the same happiness and the same advantages, each should taste the same pleasures and form the same expectations; this is something that can be anticipated only from the common frugality.’ Montesquieu was not the enemy of commerce under democracy: Certainly, when democracy is founded on commerce, it may very well happen that individuals have great wealth, yet that the mores are not corrupted. This is because the 146

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spirit of commerce brings with it the spirit of frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquillity, order, and rule. Thus, as long as this spirit continues to exist, the wealth it produces has no bad effect. The ill comes when an excess of wealth destroys the spirit of commerce; one sees the sudden rise of the disorders of inequality which had not made themselves felt before. But, to say it again, ‘love of democracy is love of equality’, and ‘love of democracy is also love of frugality’. Therefore, all kinds of contracts had to be regulated, including inheritances: ‘For if it were permitted to give one’s goods to whomever one wanted and as one wanted, each individual will would disturb the disposition of the fundamental laws.’ Moreover: So far as luxury is established in a republic, so far does the spirit turn to the interest of the individual. For people who have to have nothing but the necessities, there is left to desire only the glory of the homeland and one’s own glory. But a soul corrupted by luxury has many other desires; soon it becomes an enemy of the laws that hamper it. The inculcation of the right spirit in a republic necessitated ‘the full power of education’, which would inspire ‘love of the laws and the homeland…. But there is a sure way for children to have it; it is for the fathers themselves to have it.’ Mothers, and women in general, do not receive the most positive mention throughout The Spirit of the Laws, but Montesquieu does find evidence in Muscovy, England, Africa and the Indies to observe that women ‘succeed equally well in moderate government and in despotic government’. By ‘moderate government’, Montesquieu means moderate monarchy, his own first preference, and therefore his finding that women may succeed in it is praise indeed.10 To reiterate the main purpose of the present brief exercise, however, we are concerned not only to apply the arguments of Montesquieu’s masterpiece to the present day, for example to the excesses of ‘individualism’ broadly considered, but also to indicate how far the world has moved on since the middle of the eighteenth century as well as underlining the continued necessity of a global interpretation. For example, we may readily accept that his remarks concerning laws in relation to defensive and 147

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offensive force have little or no continued resonance. Much the same might be said about laws in relation to climate and to commerce. In an age of multinational companies, man-made threats to the environment and firepower exceeding the wildest dreams and nightmares of the eighteenth century, the world including Europe of the period preceding the Industrial and French Revolutions appears remote indeed. On the other hand, if we measure the chronological distance separating us from the publication of The Spirit of the Laws, we must recognise that it amounts to no more than three lifetimes of little more than eighty years each, the kind of span to which an increasing number of people are becoming accustomed, at least in the Western world. In a figurative sense, if the art of Montesquieu is not of yesterday, it is of two days before yesterday. Again in a figurative sense, the science of the day before yesterday was Marx, whom we have made use of in this book as an advocate of revolution, an example of nineteenth-century Eurocentricity, and as a further basis for the universal indicator pH test of variations of the European norm. But here the parallel with Montesquieu ends, for while it might seem eccentric to nearly everybody to look through The Spirit of the Laws for guidance on today’s problems, there are many who would think of looking nowhere but in Capital and the other works of Marx for such assistance. In this respect, we should perhaps recall that Marx himself not only declared himself unwilling to be included among ‘Marxists’, but also set out with his own emphases what he believed to be the originality of his contribution: And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historic phases in the development of production (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.11 148

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Since Marx is not known to have disclaimed these assertions, we may assume that he continued to regard them as key aspects of his thought. We may also assume, therefore, that nobody who does not subscribe to them can in the fullest sense be a Marxist. The question also arises of whether Marx’s claim to be an innovator was justified. The probable answer would be to concede (2) and (3) of the above assertions, but to dispute his exclusive right to (1), for the connection between the existence of classes and particular historic phases in the development of production was fairly well established during the Enlightenment of the later eighteenth century, for example in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and other works of the Scottish Enlightenment. To be sure, the proletariat does not make a full appearance in them because that class was far from completely developed before the nineteenth century. Even at the time of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, it was at an embryonic stage even in industrialising countries. Within less than one of our long generations, Marxist analysis of economic development moved on from Capital to the higher stage of Lenin’s Imperialism. The industrial proletariat reached maturity. Yet within less than two of our long generations, that same working class or proletariat is in the process of advanced dissolution. That is to say, its rise and fall were intimately bound up with the first and second stages of the ‘Industrial Revolution’. Now that the third stage is upon us (although the first and second stages of course remain significant) belief in (2) and (3) of Marx’s original tenets is difficult to sustain, unless they are adapted to include the Third World. A further problem for Marxism as a living ideology is the point made by Engels and quoted in Chapter 2 to the effect that ‘every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science’. If the whole of terminology in chemistry were radically changed about once in twenty years, and Marxism were an analogous science, as Engels suggested, should it not also make fundamental shifts in its terminology? The points about the proletariat and science would no doubt meet with vigorous criticism from today’s Marxists, whose numbers may be smaller than before 1989 but whose zeal is not necessarily dimmed. They still include avowed followers of Lenin and Trotsky, and even of Stalin, while others of a non-affiliated nature still display their own version of the red badge of 149

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unorthodoxy. There have been energetic ‘scientific’ attempts to expound a Marxist ‘social theory for a post-Leninist world’, and to reconcile Marxism with ecology. Meanwhile, beyond the proletariat, there still remains the age-old problem of the peasantry with its world-wide variations, a problem insufficiently addressed by Marx.12 The multifaceted and even amorphous nature of the Marxist movement has been one reason why the opposition to it has also often been ill-defined. Before 1991, and even to some extent since, ‘Marxism’ and ‘neo-Marxism’ have been used as blanket terms of opprobrium applied to all sociologists and others prepared to use the word ‘class’ or to attempt to inject system into historical and other forms of academic enquiry. This has posed a threat to almost anybody attempting to use the approach of the Enlightenment, which had already devised a form of ‘historical materialism’ before Karl Marx was born. As a consequence, other forms of interpretation of a clearly opposite persuasion have achieved a popularity which they may not have fully deserved.13 Moreover, at the same time, history as ‘science’ has suffered, while history as ‘art’ has prospered, but often in an aberrant manner, under the influence of post-structuralism and post-modernism, with their emphasis on subjectivity. Even worse, but for similar reasons, academic and other analysts have given up the attempt to approach their subject with any consciousness of the world as a whole, arguing that only subjects of smaller focus can be legitimately tackled in isolation. In too full a sense, this has been an abdication of responsibility. These are strong words and err perhaps on the side of rhetorical exaggeration. On the other hand, the movement towards universal history begun in the eighteenth century took a real step forward around the year 1900, albeit with a major emphasis on the national framework established in the nineteenth century. Then, because of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the ensuing European ‘civil war’ and unrest in the wider world, the Second World War and the Cold War, a long period of further setback occurred. Now, towards the end of the twentieth century, with a widely expressed hope for a new world order (and at least equally widespread alarm at world disorder), the time has come for further advances, which should not ignore old achievements, but equally should take notice of new circumstances. 150

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This is not simply an intellectual exercise, but also a response to a critical situation made up of several different components. In the first place, there is an unstable international situation, economically and politically, all too evidently premised on the monstrous imbalance North-South. Second, before any kind of real disarmament has been achieved, there are possibilities for new kinds of warfare, biological as well as thermonuclear. Of overriding seriousness, however, is the problem which is not so much international as global: the threat of environmental pol-lution leading towards ecological disaster. Where shipwreck is imminent, all hands need to be on the pumps. Again, this might have the smack of alarmist delirium for academic and other colleagues who might in any case consider that, whatever the broader circumstances, the best recourse is the continuance of the traditional pursuits of scholarship. Certainly, the aim here is not to deride centuries of worthy achievement. We will return, indeed, to the question of their significance after some discussion of the second kind of comparison announced earlier in this chapter: after Montesquieu and Marx, American-Russian history. The Cold War ended in 1991 or even before, at some point after 1985. Or did it? Arguably, we must wait for a few years, knowing as we do how history has been full of surprises. While the situation throughout the former Soviet Union remained volatile, a considerable variety of scenarios seemed possible: for example, the Commonwealth of Independent States could follow the Union into dissolution, and an even more complete collapse could ensue; there could be an attempt to restore some kind of USSR. With the capacity for mutual destruction still in assured existence, a goodly share of it distributed around the former Soviet Union, the path to a new Cold War, or even a hot one, is not impossible to imagine. To look on the bright side, if the Cold War has gone for ever, further questions arise. Who won it? ‘Not necessarily the USA’ could be a guarded answer, ‘Germany and Japan’ a somewhat more adventurous but not necessarily inaccurate one. Who lost it? Obviously the Soviet Union, but arguably also the USA, even the whole world including Germany and Japan. For the great conflict distorted the global economy, polity and culture for forty years or more, and presented humankind with the distinct possibility of annihilation. Even those who have argued that ‘the balance of 151

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terror’ guaranteed stability during the period following the Second World War would no doubt agree that an alternative method would have been preferable, and that its legacy has not necessarily constituted a new equilibrium. Although we might say, then, provisionally at least, that ‘the last great game’ is over, the new world order is not yet firmly in place as a guarantee against replay. Moreover, in almost any foreseeable future global alignment, the relationship between the USA and Russia will remain of great importance. This is the basic reason for the continuance of comparative American-Rus-sian history, if—at least for now—a history less of adversaries than of collaborators. In its search for a new stability, moreover, Russia’s attempt to devise a new constitution involves a consideration of the American precedent in particular. The similarities as well as the differences between the USA and Russia, and their history, must be closely examined in any such exercise.14 In the first place, then, the discussion is geographical, or rather geopolitical. Along with Europe, Russia and North America (that is, the USA plus Canada and Mexico) make up most of the North in the basic North-South world division. If the line which separates the North from the South proceeds from the Atlantic around Europe, then somewhere near the frontier of the former USSR to take in Japan before crossing the Pacific, the land mass of the more developed section of the world thus demarcated consists predominantly of Russia and North America, and, somewhat ironically, is more than half empty or at least uninhabited. The vast bulk of the world’s population is to be found in the South, and may exert ever greater pressure on the other major section. This basic set of circumstances throws new light on the ‘classical’ geopolitical theories, which may be divided into two groups, concentrating respectively on land and sea. The former focused on the concepts of the ‘heartland’ and ‘Mitteleuropa’, and was of great interest to thinkers considering the Eastern European front in the First and Second World Wars, along with the Russian Revolution and Cold War. The latter, conceived as the British Empire was beginning to give way to the USA as the leading thalassocrat or sea-power in the English-speaking world, indeed (apart from Germany and Japan) in the world as a whole, was also adapted in the twentieth century in the wake of the great events just listed. For example, the Washington Conference 152

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con-vening in 1921 attempted to keep a balance between the world’s major naval powers, and in particular to guarantee that the Pacific Ocean continued to deserve its name. After the Second World War and through the Cold War, the USA and (later and to a lesser extent) the USSR came to dominate the major oceans, with the Pacific and Atlantic moving towards an adjustment of their relative importance: the Pacific Rim could become dominant. However, a new dimension to geopolitics arose during the Second World War, land and sea being joined by air. And during the Cold War, this assumed prime significance as the aeroplane was overtaken by the rocket, bringing into consideration trans-polar routes not only for civil aviation but also for attack and defence by missiles. Earlier predictions of the northward course of world empire now took on a meaning previously unthought of, and have still perhaps to reach maturity in the ongoing tension between North and South. Space remains the final frontier.15 Within the historical ‘space-time continuum’, the USA, the USSR and their predecessors evolved throughout the modern and contemporary periods. At first, it was not apparent that the USA on the transoceanic frontier of Europe would develop more rapidly than Russia on its transcontinental frontier. However, during the contemporary period especially, the USA became the greatest of the great powers before becoming the senior superpower. In a real enough sense, then, although differences must be allowed for, ‘the West has been where the East is going’. In other words, in the 1980s, Market outcomes replaced full employment and advancing equality as the regulating principle for public life in North America, Western Europe, and parts of Latin America. Along with civic liberties, they beckoned as the salvation from worn-out modes of authoritarian politics in the East. And so, from 1989 especially, the former Soviet bloc has been attempting to follow the USA and other parts of the West.16 Since August 1991, with the collapse of the USSR, Russia and other former constituent republics have been seeking a rationale for their continued independent existence in a manner giving rise almost simultaneously to hope and despair, and shaking up interpretations 153

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of the past at the same time as suggesting various scenarios for the future. All we can do here is assert the continued relevance of American-Russian comparative history, not as a recommendation for Russia to follow the American path, but as an aid to understanding.17 Further study could lead to an update of the insights gained from the pH test applied by those ‘universal indicators’, Montesquieu and Marx. To be sure, there are difficulties in this exercise, for along with the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a loss of a sense of historical direction. While the American Revolution and constitution retain their vitality for most citizens of the USA, with some of them choosing to find advice for today in such documents as Washington’s Farewell Address, many of the citizens of reconstituted Russia appear to have lost whatever confidence they ever had in the Russian Revolution and Soviet constitutions. For example, in 1991, Sergei Alekseev, a much-published jurist, called for an end to state monopoly and of ‘the war of every man against every man’, and for the creation of a new government based upon the social contract. In this exercise, Alekseev argued that it was also necessary for all due consideration to be given to the concepts of natural law and private law, both previously alien to the Russian and Soviet tradition. Equally, he sought division of powers along the lines put forward by Montesquieu and others, with particular emphasis upon the independence of the judiciary.18 He also made specific reference to John Locke, some of whose basic ideas dating back to 1688 were adopted, wittingly or unwittingly, by the political bloc Russia’s Choice in its slogan of 1993: Liberty, Property, Legality. Did this mean that Russia was more than three centuries behind the times? To answer this and other questions there is a desperate need for a sense of historical direction to be rediscovered in Russia (and no doubt also in many of the other former republics of the USSR). Let us proceed to discuss this problem. RUSSIAN HISTORY: ALTERNATIVES AND REVISIONS The approach here is well described in an observation made less than a year after October 1917 by Paul Miliukov: The Russian Revolution is like some mighty geological eruption which playfully throws off the thin crust of latter154

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day civilizations and violently hauls to the surface those remnants of long-hidden and long-gone epochs of terrestrial history which dimly recall the past. In the same manner, the Russian Revolution has laid bare to us the entire structure of our history which till now has been partially obscured by the thin veneer of recent cultural accretions. The study of Russian history in our time has taken on a novel and peculiar interest, for by means of the social and cultural layers laid out upon the surface by the great upheaval the attentive observer can trace graphi-cally the history of Russia’s past.19 In general, what went for 1918 goes also for the aftermath of other upheavals from August 1991 to October 1993 and beyond. In particular, the ‘layers’ must now involve the Soviet accretions as well as tsarist formations. In the context of the twentieth century, it was a long time from October 1917 through August 1991 to October 1993. The world situations in these years differed enormously, while in Russia and its environs there were huge changes in context from the events surrounding the Winter Palace in Petrograd to those enveloping the White House in Moscow. However, as always, the path to historical understanding proceeds through synchronic and diachronic comparison, in this case necessarily moving back beyond the ‘Soviet Union’ in space and the twentieth century in time. The chronological perspective cannot come entirely from the past, since understanding depends on some sense of the future. And so, like E.V.Tarle in 1922, we have to think of ‘the next task’. We can agree with him that recent catastrophes have struck deep into the psychology of that numerically insignificant group of people who have chosen as their life’s work the investigation of humanity’s past, with ‘old phantoms and lies’ being replaced by new ones, and a profound shock even to the strongest intellectual self-confidence. We can echo his fear that just at this difficult period of loss of faith in the correctness of a whole range of their former convictions, the historians who have undergone this cataclysm are subjected to new and powerful temptations, their intellect is diverted from its direct scientific importance by powerful, often uncertain influences. 155

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We can agree with him that academic exchange with Europe and America could and would have to be one source of fruitful thought in conditions of continuing cataclysm but also that ‘fact gathering’ must not be abandoned, that indeed: ‘The more powerful, the more authentic the generalising thought, the more it needs the erudite and erudition.’ 20 On the other hand, although stimulation and even inspiration are to be found in Tarle’s article as a whole, we have to recognise that Russia, the West and the world have all moved on since 1922, and that we must think further for ourselves. Much the same must be said about updates of a whole range of interpretation originating in the period following the Russian Revolution, from monarchist through republican to anarchist, from communist through socialist to liberal, from exclusively Russian through Eurasian to global.21 And so, our own consideration of ‘the next task’ will begin with alternatives and then go on to revisions. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, there has been much debate about whether a different path could have been followed through and after the Russian Revolution. Was it necessary for Nicholas II and then Kerensky to fall in 1917? Could the harsh-ness of war communism have been avoided, or the New Economic Policy continued? Was the Stalin dictatorship inevitable? and so on. Meanwhile, the search for alternatives has continued deep into history. At least ten attempts at significant reform have been identified in the pre-Soviet period, tending towards constitution before the final collapse in revolution: 1 By Ivan the Terrible in the 1550s. 2 At the end of the Time of Troubles and the beginning of the reign of Michael Romanov in the 1610s. 3 In the period leading up to the assumption of power by Peter the Great in the 1680s. 4 At the end of Peter’s reign in the 1720s. 5 By Catherine the Great in the 1760s. 6 At the accession of Alexander I in 1801. 7 With the Decembrist Revolt of the 1820s. 8 After the Emancipation of the Serfs in the 1860s. 9 At the end of the reign of the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II, 1879–80. 10 During and following the Revolution of 1905. 156

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The last of these ‘alternatives’ has been given the most attention in recent years, perhaps, but possesses no greater right to significance than the first. Had Ivan the Terrible succeeded in putting Russian absolutism on a firm foundation in the 1550s, avoiding the turbulence of much of the later part of his reign, the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century would have been avoided, and so Russia could have taken a different path, affecting the wider world through the Thirty Years War and beyond. If there has been one crossroads for Russian history, why indeed should there not be many?22 In any case, ultimately, ‘alternatives’ are of limited use to the historian. However numerous and however attractive, the possibilities of what might have happened are of minor significance compared to what in fact did happen, and ‘counterfactual’ analysis is important for the light that it throws on the actual rather than on an imaginary past, for the help that it affords in what remains a task of almost infinite complexity, in spite of an inherent exaggeration of the power to choose. For a choice ‘is the peak of a causal chain that runs back to the origin of life and down to the nature of atoms and molecules. It is a chain with a million influences and a little statistical variability thrown in.’ Of course, ‘People often reject deterministic accounts of behaviour because of the fear that they reduce human beings to mere predictable puppets.’23 On the other hand, to quote the old examination question, it is always necessary in historical enquiries to give ‘reasons for your choice’. Reason for choice is little distance from determinism. As far as the study of Russian history in particular is concerned, zakonomernost (literally ‘regularity of law’ but perhaps more appropriately rendered according to context in some other way) was not a Marxist-Leninist superimposition, but could be found previously at the basis of explanation in the works of the great pre-revolutionary historians, Soloviev and Kliuchevsky. Let us take two collective attempts made in 1991 to reappraise the development of the otechestvo, or fatherland, bearing in mind that times of crisis bring with them particular problems, noting indeed some overtones of Tarle’s ‘The Next Task’. The editor of ‘History of the Fatherland’ (Istoriia otechestva), S.V.Mironenko, pointed out that to make up the deficit of preceding years, there had been several new editions of the writings of the outstanding scholars of the nineteenth 157

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and early twentieth centuries, Karamzin, Soloviev and Kliuchevsky. Unfortunately, however: The unsatisfied interest in acquiring knowledge of the most varied aspects of the history of the fatherland has led to a wide popularity for cheap publications, the authors of which speculate on the previous prohibition of many themes and subjects and, accommodating the public’s views on history and its personages, describe the history of Russia as a mixture of thoughtless cruelty and, no less vacuous, but equally no less desirable for Philistine taste, ‘forbidden themes’. As an antidote to such sickness, Mironenko and his collaborators offered history without colouring or distortion, but not in a full, systematic and detailed manner. Instead: It consists of popular-scientific essays, each of them devoted to one or another decisive moment, when the course of social development led to cardinal turning points in politics (or attempts at such turning points), when new contradictions emerged and were then resolved, defining the further movement of society for years, decades and even centuries. In a word, the book is devoted to ‘critical points’ in history, at which the dialectic of social development appeared to it fullest extent. And it was natural [zakonomerno] that they in particular have aroused and still arouse discussion.24 The role of the individual should not be neglected, argued Mironenko, as did the collective producing ‘Our Fatherland’ (Nashe otechestvo), stopping some way short, however, of the cult of personality. ‘Those days have gone’, they asserted, ‘when we had only one Leader, one Party, one Ideology, one Textbook.’ On the other hand, while there would be no uniformity of presentation among them, the collective suggested that history as politics projected into the past was an adequate definition as far as the fatherland was concerned, with two opposed tenden-cies— towards reform and counter-reform. For too long, Russia had been the only country with an unpredictable past, and even now it was a study justifying the mistakes of the present by reference to 158

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analogous mistakes in the past. Meanwhile, just as in 1953 at the death of Stalin the whole country shuddered as it contemplated the future, so there were many people in 1991 apprehensive that they might be left without history. Unfortunately, the ‘natural tendency’ (zakonomernaia tendentsiia) was still to follow the ‘traditional’ Soviet course of interpretation, even though many, even too many, different views were being put forward. And so there was a moral and civil imperative for the full study of the ‘Soviet’ peoples over all the centuries. Such study necessarily included economic-social, political-military and cultural-religious aspects, but, among them, there was a special requirement for the revival of political history, for example along the lines of A Political History of Contemporary Europe: Evolution of the Parties and Political Forms, 1814–1896, by Charles Seignobos (see above, p. 86). Of course, this should not involve overpersonalisation, but certainly would include the question of alternatives of political leadership as well as of reform and counterreform, and other aspects of development.25 Meanwhile, there was also recourse to alternative interpretations of Russia’s past put forward in the pre-revolutionary period by Russian thinkers, for example by P.I.Chaadaev, K. N.Leontev and V.S.Soloviev. Respectively, they attacked the Byzantine heritage, defended it, and argued for a reconcili-ation between western and eastern Christianity. A.F.Zamaleev lamented that the October Revolution had suppressed the universalism and godliness of Russian idealism: ‘But the past lives in the sphere of the spirit, it does not die in the national consciousness. And it is necessary to know it.’26 Almost a superabundance of alternatives presented themselves in the early 1990s, as they did in the years following 1917 (see p. 68 above). But, as towards its beginning, so towards its conclusion, this book is set against such an approach to history in favour of a more determinist zakonomernost. At the very least, so to speak, the only occasion on which the past can be changed is when it has not receded beyond the present. And here, of course, there is an important part to be played by the study of history, which also deserves the most serious approach towards objectivity for ‘its own sake’. In the search for new approaches, a fundamental necessity is to integrate Western worldviews more fully with the study of Russian history. To the extent that historians incorporate the 159

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Russian past more fully in wider schemes, comparative or global, they make it less unpredictable. Relegating alternatives to their proper place, they promote zakonomernost. Without unnecessary diversion from discussion of philosophies of history, they assist the comprehension of the Western world system. All too conscious of the problems involved in the analysis of a single document, let alone the incorporation of such detail into a general pattern, made sceptical by their exposure to the manner in which the best-laid plans have gone so often askew in the past, historians tend to have less confidence in grand schemes than do their colleagues in the social sciences. Nevertheless, at least now and again, most historians are prepared to look around them from the vantage point of their area of specialisation, and then to adjust their overall interpretation if any such shift appears justified. Certainly, from the consolidation of the profession of history at the beginning of the twentieth century, at least some practitioners have attempted to look at the subject in the round. Let us glance again at how they have done so in successive periods before we attempt to establish what worldviews are appropriate for the end of the twentieth century. Chapter 3 considered the move from European towards Atlantic order. In 1905 in What Is History?, Karl Lamprecht suggested that the greatest problem facing the scientific history of humankind was the deduction of a universal law from the history of the most important communities, that is those European countries like Germany which had undergone modernising experiences, along with the USA and Japan. In 1911, Henri Berr published La Synthèse en histoire: son rapport avec la synthèse générale, asserting that a scientific synthesis of history might be reached through the study of causality and lead on to open perspectives on causes in nature, on evolution as a whole. Before then in 1896, in Great Britain where there was far less talk of history as a ‘science’, much more of it as a branch of general literature, Lord Acton put forward a plan for ‘a history of the World’ in which he explained what he meant by ‘Universal History’: ‘distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the memory’. Realised, his plan would act as a chart and compass for the coming century, and also establish ‘in what measure history might be able to afford the basis for a true philosophy of Life’. Acton was closer in spirit to 160

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Lamprecht, a fellow Teuton, than to Berr, whose thought was more abstract in a tradition developing from at least as far back as Descartes. But all three were clearly, if not always explicitly, Eurocentric. In the works just cited, Acton was the only one of the three to refer specifically to Russia, observing that a retrospect of its history should be given ‘when it emerges, under Peter the Great, thereby following the natural order of cause, not that of fortuitous juxtaposition’. Until then ‘inert’, it was not ready for inclusion in the mainstream of ‘Universal History’, which flowed much more strongly on Europe’s other, transoceanic frontier, where the USA had produced ‘a community more powerful, more prosperous, more intelligent and more free than any other that the world has seen’. Acton died in 1902, yet his name was recalled in ‘pious remembrance’ at the International Congress of Historical Sciences or Studies meeting in London in 1913. On the other hand, the ‘worldview’ evident at that Congress differed somewhat from his, with rather more attention being given to Russian history and very much less to American history than he might have liked. The heavy emphasis was on the European tradition, especially English, Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, without much explicit inclusion of the USA.27 Chapter 4 described some approaches to world order from 1923 to 1962. The First World War and the associated Russian Revolution of 1917 led to a significant shift in emphasis. Soviet Russia was soon cut off, along with much of its prehistory; the Teutonic idea was dead, but the USA moved towards closer inclusion in a reformed Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking group. Viewed posthumously, Acton’s worldview was on the rise, even if this was not fully realised until after the Second World War. More immediately, in 1923 at the Fifth International Congress of Historical Sciences or Studies in Brussels, the torch of universal history was taken up by the Belgian Henri Pirenne, plac-ing his trust ‘On the Comparative Method in History’, an approach recommended by the Oxford professor of jurisprudence Paul Vinogradoff and others before 1914, and now appearing ripe for development after 1918. In such a manner, Pirenne believed, the ‘prejudices of race, politics and nationalism’ could be transcended, and the scientific go hand in hand with the moral gain.

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Alas, Pirenne’s hopes were soon dashed as the ‘prejudices of race, politics and nationalism’ reared their ugly heads more blatantly after the First World War than before. The comparative method, indeed any method, of universal history found it difficult to make headway, although there were some advances such as those achieved by the successors of Henri Berr in the Annales school. For all its avowed internationalism, Marxism-Leninism increasingly became a thinly veiled vehicle for Soviet patriotism, as was illustrated by some of the writings of the historian E.V. Tarle on the First and Second World Wars. Meanwhile, in the USA, there were comparable feelings of apartness, the result of continued domestic belief in the exceptionalism of American history and continued lack of European interest in what still seemed to be an exotic subject. But Charles A.Beard was not alone in taking on board the Historismus of the German Friedrich Meinecke, the quintessence of which was to be found in ‘the replacement of the generalising view of historico-human forces by an individualising view’, which emphasised the unique, each time having its own style. To be sure, Meinecke had become ‘the historian of State Reason’ while American adherents of Historismus might try to guide grand public policy rather than becoming embodiments of it. The Second World War was in many ways a greater watershed than the First, with the subsequent Cold War leading to an intellectual divide even wider than that between the two wars. But there were as before at least a few bold spirits trying to transcend the limitations of the period, for example the Dutch historian Jan Romein. His journey towards understanding could be marked by three milestone articles. In ‘Theoretical History’, 1948, Romein made a distinction between the theoretical ‘historiologist’ and the ‘writer of history’: Just as the latter organizes his archival material, the former will acquire as wide as possible an acquaintance with historiography before starting in. The latter never tires of browsing through archives; the former is an indefatigable reader of the great book of history, for the tragedy of human triumph and defeat, of human endeavor and error, fascinates him as nothing else. In ‘The Common Human Pattern: Origin and Scope of Historical Theories’, 1958, Romein drew on his experience of several years in 162

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Indonesia to discuss the manner in which Europe was a deviant from the CHP. This article revealed a much broader consciousness of the world as a whole than can readily be found in the works of other historians discussed in this book. It also made a reference, of considerable significance in the present context, to Russia, which Romein saw as occupying a frontier position in the CHP between East and West. For example, in the view of this self-styled Marxist and sometime Trotskyist, the Bolshevik Revolution was characterised by the weak resistance of the once dominant classes, including the submissiveness of the bourgeoisie, a predicament not to be found in nearby Finland. Posthumously, Romein’s ideas on ‘Change and Continuity in History: The Problem of “Transformation”’ were set out in 1964, at the precise time that the greatest transformation in human history was under way. Like the other articles, this one deserves at the very least the brief analysis devoted to it in Chapter 4. Here, let us just note that, like them, it stands in its own right and also reflects the moment at which it was composed. In both respects, therefore, Romein’s hopes are realised that ‘it would advance by a few steps towards understanding the way dialectical motion in history goes, and towards finding some sort of historical theory of evolution, or at least part of it.’28 This modest aspiration has a different ring from the more confident hopes of Lamprecht, Berr and Acton at the beginning of the twentieth century, or even the tempered optimism of Henri Pirenne in 1923. (Would many of us write, as Pirenne did, of history as a whole appearing ‘in the majesty of its development’, of ‘the sublimity of the spectacle’?). How different again is our viewpoint from the 1990s. Nevertheless, our selective tracing of historical thought through the two world wars and the Cold War gives us an informed sense of direction and prepares us for our final task, which is to turn to Russian history in the light of Western worldviews, and to suggest specific directions in which further research might move. Before that exercise, a final word on history as art and science. Remembering that the English language is less inclusive in its use of the word ‘science’ than most of its continental counterparts, we may nevertheless reassert that history as art has received more support in the English-speaking world than elsewhere. Here, more emphasis is given to the ‘contingent and unforeseen’, to the role of individual and/or group perception. Without difficulty, 163

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therefore, there can be easy enough acceptance along this line of enquiry of the concept of post-modernism. While, carried to excess, it reduces the study of history to fiction, it also provides a latter-day reminder of the weakness of positivism and the necessity to accommodate rela-tivism. On the other hand, for those pursuing their discipline as a science, there has been a stronger tendency to borrow such overarching ideas from the physical sciences, positivist then relativist. I have myself in this book and elsewhere adopted the metaphor of the pH test, writing of European and later American culture as a ‘universal indicator’, but also suggesting that the pH test becomes less appropriate with the arrival of globalisation. Now, the next task could be to adapt the approach of ‘complexity’, that is ‘to dynamical interactions at the edge of chaos’. Without doubt, the whirlpool and other images used by some of the advocates of ‘complexity’ recall the ‘earthquake’ of Miliukov and the ‘cyclone’ of Tarle. To be specific, here is a passage from Roger Lewin’s Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos: I thought about the repeated pattern of the rise and fall of states through history. This was in October 1991, just a few months after the failed coup in the Soviet Union and the brink of collapse of that once great power. George Bush had proclaimed the events in Eastern Europe, of which the disintegration of the USSR became part, as ushering in a ‘new world order’. I remembered a conversation with Chris Langton, animated as always, in which he pulled out a copy of the results of a computer evolution model. ‘Look’, he’d said. ‘You can see these two species coexisting in a long period of stability; then one of them drops out and all hell breaks loose. Tremendous instability. That’s the Soviet Union’, he’d said, pointing to the species that drop-ped out. ‘I’m no fan of the Cold War, but my bet is that we’re going to see a lot of instability in the real world now it’s over. That is, if these models of ours have any validity at all.’29 Because of the difficulty of predicting human behaviour, even analysing it, historians might want to avoid acceptance of such models, while nevertheless informing their approach with some

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awareness of ‘complexity’. Could it be that ‘complexity’ is the scientific counterpart of the artistic post-modernism? Here, for the moment, I will say no more than that to seek alternatives is a less satisfactory approach, both artistically and scientifically, than to look for revisions. Certainly, at least as many of the latter could be suggested now as were listed of the former. Indeed, let us take the list of ten recorded above (p. 156) and substitute revision for alternative. (To be sure, this bypasses further questions of considerable significance concerning medieval history—the nature of Kievan civilisation and of the Mongol impact to name but two.) 1) To what extent should the reign of Ivan IV be considered absolutist or proto-absolutist? In other words, to what extent was Muscovite Russia conforming to a European pattern of socio-political development in the later sixteenth century? 2) How significant was the participation of Muscovite Russia in the ramifications of the Thirty Years War during the reign of the first Romanov, Michael? An answer here has further implications for definitions of Europe in the early modern period. 3) To what extent was Muscovite Russia a participant in the mid-seventeenth-century political crisis sweeping Europe, and how comparable was its experience in the following resolution? 4) How remarkable an individual was Peter the Great, and to what extent were the innovations associated with his name revolutionary? Needless to say, this key figure in Russian history needs constant reappraisal, not least in the context of early eighteenth-century Europe. The immediate aftermath of his death in 1725 might also be viewed in a comparative manner. 5) How remarkable an individual was Catherine the Great, and how seriously should we take her ‘enlightened absolutism’ in the 1760s and later as opposed to that of, say, Frederick the Great of Prussia or Joseph II of Austria? As argued in Chapter 1 above, Catherine’s constitutionalism bears comparison with that of the American Founding Fathers, both as first conceived and in reaction to the French Revolution. 6) What was the impact on Russia of the French Revolution and Napoleon and how was it reflected in developments during the early years of the reign of Alexander I? How does the Russian adaptation compare with that of other European states and societies? 165

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7) In what ways was the Decembrist Revolt comparable to events elsewhere in the 1820s? How did French, American and other foreign influences adapt to Russian soil? How distinctive was the early-nineteenth-century Russian nationalism emerging after the failure of the Decembrist Revolt, for example its guiding concept of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’? Again, the American comparison as well as the European dimension are worthy of investigation. 8) To what extent should the Emancipation of the Serfs of 1861 be assessed in a wider framework? In particular, this involves the Emancipation of the American Slaves in 1863, but might also include other events of the period in Poland and even China. 9) To what extent should Russian imperialism be assessed in a wider framework? In other words, was Alexander II’s Chancellor Gorchakov justified in his assertion that, like Russia: ‘The United States in America, France in Africa, Holland in her colonies, England in India, were all forced to take the road of expansion dictated by necessity rather than ambition, a road on which the chief difficulty is to know where to stop’? Much of Western writing on this subject has concentrated on the empires of Western Europe, omitting both Russia and the USA, whose experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bears comparison, as ever. 10) Was the Russian Revolution of 1905 from below or above, and how does it fit into the pattern of Western agitation at the beginning of the twentieth century including concepts such as the ‘general strike’?30 Certainly, this chapter has argued, in the wake of Paul Miliukov, that revolutions, whether in 1905, 1917 or 1991, oblige us to examine afresh the entire structure. On the other hand, quite obviously, nobody can hope to begin to encompass them all, nor indeed can anybody alone hope to achieve a completely acceptable overall view. Therefore, the above suggestions are put forward in conjunction with the following remarks of a group of colleagues made at a conference entitled ‘Revisioning History: Imperial Russia’. For example: ‘Russia and the West’ should be a ‘theme of research in history, not a historical research tool’; moreover, the Russian experience should be evaluated within ‘a cosmopolitan scale of values’ and a framework of ‘world history’. While Russian ‘differences’ should not be 166

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converted into ‘abnormalities’, it should be noted that in Russian history, ‘long periods of slow or negligible change ended with sudden transformations’, producing a ‘cultural pro-clivity to repudiate tradition and reject the past’. Cultural history, including the popular variety, should provide many topics for research, and help to ‘deinstitutionalise’ institutional history while encouraging the study of personal interactions.31 These remarks take us far beyond the ten suggestions listed above and towards a comprehensive reappraisal likely to keep us all busy for years to come. WORLD HISTORY, PURE AND APPLIED To repeat the question posed at the beginning of this book, what is history? For all the undoubted worth of E.H.Carr’s book with that title, we might still ask ourselves if that is the right question. Or should we rather be asking ourselves: what is history for? Immediately, the objection will be raised that this is to move away from disinterested pure enquiry, entering into the realms of applied, and therefore biased, utility. But let us also admit at the outset that there are a number of questions that cannot be answered in the first mode, yet assume huge importance in the second. For example, what is electricity, or even (at least for many) what is life?32 Certainly, history has been subject to misuse of varying kinds, both Left and Right, both Whig and Tory. In The Whig Interpretation of History, Herbert Butterfield criticised the tendency in many historians ‘to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’. On the other hand, according to one of Herbert Butterfield’s successors as Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Hugh Trevor-Roper, high table talk in his more recent day included assertions that: ‘the Revolution of 1688 was a crime, the Enlightenment a disaster; that Bishop Warburton was the profoundest thinker of the eighteenth century and Dr Pusey of the nineteenth’; that the confessional state ‘should never have been replaced by a plural society’; that ‘the wrong side’ won the First World War and that Hitler should have been allowed to win the Second.33

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Leaving aside the question of who said what in the course of a squabble in a Cambridge college, we are forced to recognise that an extreme right-wing interpretation of the past appeared in the early 1990s to be on the rise in much of the Western world, and in the Eastern, too. As communism rolled back from Berlin to Moscow, the principles of Adam Smith, or rather a distorted version of them, seemed to be moving immediately into the vacuum thus created. Along with the enthronement of ‘market forces’ sometimes went a fascism asserting its own view of a ‘new order’ aiming ‘to mobilise the masses through slogans and myths pregnant with historical and cultural resonance for those alienated from the liberal status quo and its international-ist Marxist alternatives’.34 Is there no place left, then, for pure history? At the very least, the argument could be put forward that The Wealth of Nations needs to be understood in the context of the period of its composition, the decade or more before its year of publication, 1776, and in the context not only of the whole corpus of the work of Adam Smith, but also that of the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole. Nor should it be forgotten in the context of pure history that among the most lyrical celebrants of capitalism were Marx and Engels, who declared in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 that the bourgeoisie had been ‘the first to show what man’s activity can bring about’.35 If we move on to the observation that neither the free market economy as advocated by disciples of Adam Smith nor socialist society as envisioned by followers of Marx is appropriate for the world of the 1990s, we return from pure to applied observation, no doubt. But for an increasing number of historians, perhaps, it is difficult to see either ‘classic’ set of arguments as the end of ideology. Are some of us adopting a new, green approach to replace the red or the blue? Will history under the pressure of the process of globalisation join with the social sciences in a pandisciplinary merger with earth and life sciences, in order to produce a unified description of the way our planet functions? Will Clio pay homage to Gaia? And, as previous disciplinary demarcation disputes are forgotten under the pressure of fresh circumstances, might we not through this application arrive at renewed pandisciplinary purity? Avoiding such large-scale questions, the economist J.K.Galbraith argued late in 1992 that monetarists and socialists should 168

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sink their differences to help the world rise from recession. He argued: ‘The broad lines of the modern mixed economy are here to stay. What remains is the task of making the system work better and for all the people. Ours is not an age of broad theory. It is an age of pragmatic thought and action.’ 36 Yet, for many other observers, pragmatism would not be enough: at least, some kind of worldview would remain necessary, as both an explanation of the past and a vision for the future. On the other hand again, the perspective of world history does not necessarily mean all that such a grandiose label might imply. For ‘it is an approach rather than a huge pile of facts, not so much an amassment of knowledge as an awareness of relationships, less a burden on the mind than a challenge to the imagination.’ To take one example prompted by my own location, the history of Aberdeen and its hinterland cannot be understood in isolation. Our dim understanding of prehistoric peoples and their stone circles is illumined by considering them in a context that is at least European, and the dawn of history is discerned more clearly in the light of the knowledge from Tacitus and elsewhere that this region marked the most north-erly probings of the intercontinental Roman Empire. Aberdeen’s first university was founded in 1495 as an extension of the aspirations of Papal Rome as well as for more parochial reasons, the second in 1593 as a widening of scarcely less universal ambitions emanating from Calvinist Geneva in addition to pro-moting the personal ambitions of the Earl Marischal of Scotland. Both institutions brought an academic component into a distinctive local culture evolving from the construction of the stone circles, and before. The divines, students and mercenaries of the early modern period, the missionaries, explorers and empire builders of the later, were among those operating on an increasingly broad scale, while all the way through there have been many dealings with the rest of the British Isles, Scandinavia and the Low Countries at a more local level through to the most far-flung— to whalers sailing to Arctic waters and clippers sailing to China and Australia. The paving of the streets of London lined the pockets of granite merchants with gold, investment in American railroads netted as much silver as the activities of the North Sea herring fleet. For better or worse, there have also been far-reaching strategic considerations, most recently NATO listening posts and air bases, at a time when the local economy has been deeply 169

CONCLUSION

affected by a more peaceful activity of global dimensions, the extraction of the glittering prize of oil. And so, local history increasingly becomes what in a real sense it has always been—world history; and we must be careful not to let Grampian, Scottish, British, English-speaking, European or other regional definitions obscure this basic circumstance, which embraces the even greater and more fateful divisions of East-West and North-South. The need to assign due proportions, to appreciate distant affinities, constitutes a challenge posed with a new urgency.37 For in a highly volatile situation, where a week can be a long time not only in political activity but also in historical significance, the shape of things to come is even less clear than before. However, as old hopes and fears come to the surface to join new ones, we can if anything be more confident that the future cannot be discussed without constant reference to the past. At the same time, to carry on such discussion within a national or other restricted framework is at best a distortion, at worst an encouragement of a ‘new order’ of fascism, a danger already indicated. Here, significant instances may be located in Europe, from Spain, Portugal and Italy through France and Germany to all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia. In Romania, the first inter-ethnic disturbances after the revolutions of 1989 broke out when the Hungarian minority began to com-memorate the 1848 revolution in which Romanians and Hungarians had been opposed. The new regime continued to put forward for its own benefit a nationalist view of history not dissimilar from that of its ‘communist’ predecessor, including a dismissal of Hungarian and other minorities. A distinct note of anti-Semitism could be detected in the charge that Jewish party members had been largely responsible for bringing Bolshevism, terror and crime to Romania. A blinkered view of ancient history, with heavy emphasis on the predecessor Roman province of Dacia, was still in evidence. All the successor states to the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires found themselves looking back to their origins, while the former components of the Russian Empire examined again the manner in which their own nationality had been suppressed not only after 1917 but also before.38 Concluding where we began, with the elections of 1993 and their aftermath, the results showed a significant rise in support for the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who captured just under a 170

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quarter of the votes. While foreign observers lamented the reassertion of Russia’s special place in the world, there was much domestic discussion of what nationalism should mean as the twentieth century comes to a close, with some arguments more assertive than those of Zhirinovsky, as well as others more moderate. There was also much consideration of the inappropriateness for Russia of the Western ‘market economy’ and ‘democracy’, with some suggestion of the creation of ‘corporate democracy’ and even more of the revival of the Soviet Union.39 All this debate had implications for historical interpretations of world order and Russia’s place in them, encouraging our pursuit of the topics and themes listed above (pp. 165–7). One of the active participants in the debate was the distinguished expert on Russian culture in general, Academician D. S.Likhachev, who had previously asserted that in his country ‘emotional principles’ always meant more than the logical.40 With respect, one could argue the converse: that the concepts of zakonomernost, or regularity of law, and mirovozzrenie, or world outlook, both implying logic rather than emotion, had always meant more in Russian than their equivalents in some other European languages, especially English. Possibly, the relative weight given to considerations of history and world order in Russia and the West will appear more exactly to the extent that the American political scientist, Samuel P.Huntington, becomes justified in his suggestion that ‘World politics is entering a new phase…. The great divisions among humankind and the domi-nating source of conflict will be cultural.’41 To be sure, such a scenario will not facilitate the cause of objective academic enquiry. On the other hand, through the pursuit of comparative and other boundary-breaking methods, there could be maintained a clear counter to xenophobia and milder forms of exclusiveness, as well as a closer approach to objectivity. And as far as the discipline given most attention in this book is concerned, in a real sense, the purer the history, the more efficacious the application.42

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INTRODUCTION 1 Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson, Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World, London, 1994, p. 70. 2 Paul Dukes, trans. and ed., Russia under Catherine the Great: Volume One, Select Documents on Government and Society, Newtonville, 1978, pp. 32–5, 123. In 1918, the Russian historian and politician Paul Miliukov wrote: What strikes the foreign observer of contemporary affairs, what is for him the first key to the external sphinxlike silence of the Russian people, has long been known to the sociologist and student of Russia’s historical evolution. For the latter, Lenin and Trotsky lead movements far closer to Bolotnikov, Razin and Pugachev—to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our history—than to the latest words of European anarchosyndicalism. (Paul N.Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, Vol. 1 ed. Richard Stites, Gulf Breeze, 1978, p. 1) 3 Richard Pipes, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis, Cambridge, Mass., 1959, p. 15. A modified view has been given by Carol S.Leonard, Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia, Bloomington, 1993, p. 71: ‘In its impact on society, the manifesto was one of the major acts of legislation in the hundred years preceding the abolition of serfdom. By detaching service from land tenure, this enactment was decisive in the development of estates’ rights.’ In 1993, Pipes himself wrote: ‘The Nobility Charter of 1785…marks the beginning in Russia of private property in the true sense of the word.’ See ‘Was There Private Property in Muscovite Russia?’ (in response to two articles by George G.Weickhardt), Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, 1994, p. 530. The Charter of 1785 and other aspects of Catherine’s policies will be discussed in Chapter 1. 4 Paul Miliukov, the Kadet leader, wrote: ‘The idea of private property has had a stunted development here…the principle of the national-

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5 6 7 8

9 10 11

ization of the land, in the sense of the supreme right of the state to land, is an ancient Muscovite principle’ (quoted by Richard Wortman, ‘Property, Populism, and Political Culture’, in Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, eds, Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, Oxford, 1989, p. 30). On the same page, Wortman goes on to point out: ‘Among the political groups that formed before 1905, only the Marxists expressed support for the notion of property, at least during the bourgeois stage that most of them believed must precede the socialist revolution.’ Quoted by David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 46, 205–6. The Economist, 25 December 1993–7 January 1994, pp. 87–91. See, for example, Jeremy Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe, London, 1990, pp. 131–6. And see Note 2 above. William Scott, trans., ‘Robespierre’s Speech of 25 December 1793’, in R.C.Bridges and others, Nations and Empires: Documents on the History of Europe and on its Relations with the World since 1648, London, 1969, pp. 77–9. Emile Boutroux, ‘Descartes and Cartesianism’, Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 4, Cambridge, 1907, pp. 779, 784–5, 799. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. and intro. F.E.Sutcliffe, Harmondsworth, 1985, pp. 30–1. I owe this reference to George Molland. I accept many, if by no means all, the arguments of Ernest Gellner in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, London, 1991, and Reason and Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality, Oxford, 1992. 1 MONTESQUIEU AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER

1 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M.Cohler, Basia C.Miller and Harold S.Stone, Cambridge, 1989 (hereafter The Spirit), pp. xi, xli. The Foreword was first printed in the 1757 edition. This chapter owes much to the translation and edition produced by Anne M.Cohler and her colleagues. 2 See, for example, Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company’, Historical Journal, Vol. 24, 1981, p. 318: ‘why did Hobbes make so little use of his special knowledge? The answer must lie mainly in his disdain for anything that might tie his argument to empirical questions of fact.’ Locke’s The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and other American connections are also well known, yet he made very little specific reference in his two Treatises on Government. In both cases, as Malcolm suggests for Hobbes, it is quite possible that data at their disposal would contradict the view of the ‘state of nature’ presented by Hobbes and Locke. On Montesquieu’s sources, see Muriel Dodds, Les Récits de voyages: sources de l’Esprit des Lois de Montesquieu, Paris, 1929, pp. 11–12. 3 Louis Althusser, Montesquieu: la politique et l’histoire, Paris, 1964, pp. 8– 9. Isaiah Berlin is among many others to accord Montesquieu similar

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4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25

distinction. See Chapter 6, note 7. Among other contenders would be Giambattista Vico, whose Principles of a New Science was first published in 1725. The Spirit, pp. xlv, 333. Ibid., p. 337. But Montesquieu also refers to science on pp. 4, 231–3. Ibid., p. 722. Ibid., pp. 63, 158, 237, 357, 461. Ibid., pp. 283–4, 290, 355. Montesquieu’s observations about Africa recall those of Hobbes on the state of nature. On Asia, he makes a distinction between the north, that is Siberia, and the south. See p. 279. Ibid., pp. 8, 37, 59, 159, 250, 289–90, 294, 391. Ibid., pp. 280, 355–6, 392–3. Ibid., pp. 137, 167–8. Ibid., p. 137. Silas Deane quoted by J.Miller, Triumph of Freedom, 1775–1783, Boston, 1948, p. 586. By ‘new state’, Deane obviously meant recently acquired political power rather than cultural tradition, especially in the case of Russia. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, pp. 27–31. Benjamin F.Wright, intro. and ed., The federalist, Cambridge, Mass., 1966, pp. 4–5. Paul M.Spurlin, Montesquieu in America, 1760–1801, New York, 1969, pp. 258–61; The Spirit, pp. 131–3. Anne M.Cohler, Montesquieu’s Comparative Politics and the Spirit of American Constitutionalism, Lawrence, Kan., 1988, p. 149. Wright, The Federalist, p. 337. Paul Dukes, ‘Jonathan Boucher: Tory Parson, Teacher and Political Theorist’, University of Washington MA Thesis, 1956, p. 16. Quoted in Wright, The Federalist, pp. 296–7, 141–2. Hamilton makes a specific reference to Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, the source for the observation on dogs (whose author I have been unable to trace), but might also have aspects of Montesquieu in mind. Needless to say, there were many stories of the ‘dogs cease to bark’ type about Russia. Dukes, ‘Jonathan Boucher’, pp. 34–5. Malinovskii’s translation is entitled Otchet general-kaznacheia Aleksandra Gamil’tona, uchinenny Amerikanskim shtatam 1791g. o pol’ze manufaktur i otnoshenii onykh k torgovle i zemledeliiu, St Petersburg, 1807. I owe this reference, and the accompanying comments, to Ms Paola Ferretti, who has completed a PhD dissertation on Malinovskii at Cambridge University. See also N.N.Bolkhovitinov, The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775–1815, Cambridge, Mass., 1975 (first published in Russian in 1966). Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography, Oxford, 1961, p. 176. The Spirit, pp. 221, 233, 316. Paul Dukes, intro. and ed., Catherine the Great’s Instruction (Nakaz)

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26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

to the Legislative Commission, 1767: Russia under Catherine the Great, Vol. 2, Newtonville, Mass., 1977, pp. 9–33. A second major source was Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments. Other influences included Adam Smith before the publication of The Wealth of Nations. See A. H.Brown, ‘Adam Smith’s First Russian Followers’, A n d re w S k i n n e r a n d T h o m a s Wi l s o n , e d s , A d a m S m i t h : B i c e n t e n a r y E s s a y s , Oxford, 1975. For an additional and alternative version, see Victor Kamend-rowsky, ‘Catherine II’s Nakaz, State Finances and the Encyclopédie’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol. 13, 1979. See also Marc Raeff, ‘The Empress and the Vinerian Professor: Catherine II’s Projects of Government Reforms and Blackstone’s Commentaries’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series, 7, 1974. See, for example, David Griffiths, ed., ‘Catherine’s Three Charters of 1785’, with contributions from Robert E.Jones, George Munro and Roger Bartlett, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol. 23, 1989; O.A.Omelchenko, Kodifikatsiia prava v Rossi v period absoliutnoi monarkhii: vtoraia polovina XVIII veka, Moscow, 1989; ‘Zakonnaia mon-arkhiia’ Ekateriny II, Moscow, 1993. On p. 382 of ‘Zakonnaia monar-khiia’, Omelchenko concludes that Catherine’s reforms took absolutism as far as it could go without changing its essential nature. In his mostly admirable work, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Vol. 2, London, 1970, Peter Gay gives an unbalanced view of Catherine and the Founding Fathers, dismissing the former for her policy towards serfdom, while excusing the latter for their policy towards slavery. The Spirit, p. xliv. Sbornik imperatorskogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, Vol. 23, p. 481. V.Sirotkine, ‘Restauration absolutiste ou compromis avec la révolution? Un mémoire peu connu de Catherine II’, in A.Narotchnitski and others, eds, La Révolution française et la Russie, Moscow, 1989. Ibid. Sbornik, Vol. 23, p. 593. Ibid., Vol. 33, pp. 293–4 S.Bogoiavlenskii, ‘Rossiia i Frantsiia v 1789–1792gg: po materialam perliustratsii donosenii frantsuzskogo poverennogo v delakh v Rossii Edmona Zhene’, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, Vol. 33–4, Moscow, 1939. For the context, see Paul Dukes, October and the World: Perspectives on the Russian Revolution, London, 1979, Chapter 2. Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission, New York, 1973, pp. 17–19. Quoted in ibid., pp. 108–9. Frederick J.Turner, ed., ‘Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States, 1791–1797’, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1903, Vol. 2, Washington, DC, 1904, pp. 202–11. Ammon, The Genet Mission, pp. 30–1, 54–7. Quoted in ibid., p. 63. Washington would no doubt cast himself in the role of Cincinnatus or some other Roman Republican leader. See, for

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40 41

42 43 44 45 46

47 48

example, Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment, New York, 1984. Saul K.Padover, ed., The Washington Papers: Basic Selections from the Public and Private Writings of George Washington, New York, 1955, pp. 309–25. F.W.Raffety, intro., The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 4, Oxford, no date, pp. 346–7. Roger Bartlett considers that ‘both the ideas and the actions of the French Revolution were inaccessible in any direct or meaningful way to the mass of the rural Russian population’ (‘The Russian Peasantry on the Eve of the French Revolution’, History of European Ideas, Vol. 12, 1990). Raffety, The Works, Vol. 6, p. 367. Ibid., Vol. 6, pp. 156–7. The Spirit, pp. 22, 91, 118. Ibid., pp. xxiv-xxv. William Scott, trans., ‘Robespierre’s Speech of 25 December 1793’, in R.C.Bridges, Paul Dukes, J.D.Hargreaves and William Scott, Nations and Empires: Documents on the History of Europe and on its Relations with the World since 1648, London, 1969, pp. 77–9. Quoted by Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, London, 1983, p. 238. For an earlier exposition of the pH test, with some mention of Montesquieu but more of literary figures, see Paul Dukes, The Last Great Game: USA versus USSR: Events, Conjunctures, Structures, London, 1989, pp. 133–44. 2 MARX AND REVOLUTIONARY ORDER

1 Karl Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 1, London, 1942, pp. 16–18. 2 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 315. 3 François Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, Chicago and London, 1988, pp. 124–5. 4 Ibid., pp. 135–8. See also: And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals and art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their passion at the height of the great historical tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. (Karl Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 2, London, 1942, pp. 316–17) 5 David McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx: An Introduction, London, 1971, p. 36. Communist society here seems bourgeois or even feudal. 6 Furet, Marx, p. 190. 7 Ibid., p. 180; Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 2, p. 415.

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8 D.B.Ryazanov, ‘Karl Marx on Anglo-Russian Relations’, unpublished translation by Brian Pearce, pp. 28–9. 9 Ibid., p. 32. 10 Ibid., pp. 151–2. 11 Ibid., p. 32. 12 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. by Ben Fowkes and intro. by Ernest Mandel, London, 1976 (hereafter Capital), pp. 89–90, 111. On 7 July 1866 Marx wrote to Engels: ‘I am also studying Comte now, as a sideline, because the English and French make such a fuss about the fellow. What takes their fancy is the encyclopaedic touch, the synthesis. But this is miserable compared to Hegel’ (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895, London, 1943, p. 210). 13 Capital, pp. 27–36. The overall plan for ‘The Critique of Political Economy’ as in James D.White, ‘Marx and the Russians: The Origins of Dialectical Materialism’, unpublished typescript, p. 270. 14 Capital, pp. 91, 580, 940, 1014. 15 Ibid., p. 703. 16 As in Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘the Peripheries of Capitalism’, London, 1983, p. 139. In 1881, in the final version of a multi-drafted response to a similar question posed by the Russian revolutionary activist Vera Zasulich, Marx quoted from the French edition of Capital: At the heart of the capitalist system is a complete separation of…the producer from the means of production…the expropriation of the agricultural producer is the basis of the whole process. Only in England has it been accomplished in a radical manner…. But all the other countries of Western Europe are following the same course. He then went on to observe: ‘In the Western case, then, one form of private property is transformed into another form of private property. In the case of the Russian peasants, however, their communal property would have to be transformed into private property’ (ibid., p. 124, Marx’s emphases). 17 James D.White, ‘Marx and the Russians: The Romantic Heritage’, Scottish Slavonic Review, No. 2, 1983, including quotation from Capital, p. 52, and as amended in White’s unpublished typescript. See also Shanin, Late Marx. Marx had even more problems with Asia than with Russia. See, for example, K.N.Chaudhuri, ‘Tides of History? The Indian Ocean Societies’, Alan Ryan, intro., After the End of History, London, 1992, pp. 104–6. 18 V.Vil’son, Gosudarstvo: proshloe i nastoiashchee konstitutsionnykh uchrezhdenii, Moscow, 1905, pp. ii–iii. On Kovalevsky’s relations with Marx, see White, ‘Marx and the Russians’, and Shanin, Late Marx. Kovalevsky based his argument on a long study of socio-economic development in England, France and Russia from medieval times onwards. A major work was Ekonomicheskii rost Evropy do vozniknov-eniia kapitalisticheskogo

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19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

khoziaistva (‘Economic Growth of Europe until the Emergence of a Capitalist Economy’), 3 vols, Moscow, 1898–1903. Paul Dukes, ‘Klyuchevsky and the Course of Russian History’, History Today, July 1987, reprinted in Paul Dukes, ed., Russia and Europe, London, 1991. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, London, 1951, p. v. V.I.Lenin, Sochineniia, third edition, Vol. 8, Moscow, 1935. See, for example, V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, fourth edition, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1960, pp. 31–4. V.I.Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Moscow, 1970, pp. 15, 76, 82–4, 86, 88, 115 (hereafter Imperialism); David Jayne Hill, A History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe, New York, 1905. Imperialism, pp. 7–14. Quoted by Paul Vinogradoff, ‘Russia’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, twelfth edition, Vol. 32, London and New York, 1922, pp. 331–4. Leon Trotsky, ‘Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, thirteenth edition, Vol. 2, London and New York, 1926, p. 701. The most complete work in English is the trilogy by Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, London, 1985, 1991, 1994. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, London, 1965, pp. 25–37. For an alternative view, see Ian D.Thatcher, ‘Uneven and Combined Development’, Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1991. Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New York, 1969, pp. 132–3. J.V.Stalin, ‘The Foundations of Leninism’, Works, Vol. 6, Moscow, 1953, pp. 108–9, 196. ‘The Tasks of Business Executives’, Ibid., Vol. 13, pp. 40–1. Engels quoted by Boris Nicolaevsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, London, 1936, p. 374. Bernstein, ‘Marx, Heinrich Karl’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edition, Vol. 17, Cambridge, 1911, p. 811. On Bernstein and Kautsky, see, for example, David McLellan, Marxism After Marx, London, 1979. See, for example, Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–1922, New York and Oxford, 1986. See also Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, London, 1990. The Times, 14 September 1914; Quarterly Review, No. 223, April 1915, No. 228, July 1917; Contemporary Review, No. 111, May 1917, No. 115, June 1919, No. 119, June 1921. Vinogradoff, ‘Russia’, pp. 323, 329–30. E.V.Tarle, ‘Ocherednaia zadacha’, Annaly, No. 1, Petersburg, 1922. Ibid., pp. 5–13, especially 12–13. Ibid., pp. 13–14. Among examples of pseudo-history cited by Tarle were Dragoman Ukrainophiles writing of Provençal literature while thinking of the Ukraine, and Czechs writing of Ireland while thinking of Czechia.

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39 40 41 42 43 44

Ibid., pp. 14–15. Ibid., pp. 15–16. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., pp. 17–18. Ibid., pp. 19–20. ‘History was of course a great favourite, and French history in particular’ (John Keep, ‘1917: The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 20, 1969, p. 25). 45 For an interesting discussion, see Eric Foner, ‘Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?’, History Workshop, 17, 1984. Foner doubts that the question should be posed in Marxist terms. 3 FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS ATLANTIC ORDER, 1900–22

1 Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900, Middletown, Conn., 1978, pp. 296–8, 447. A Congress concentrating on diplomatic history had met in The Hague in 1898. For the origins of the Congress and a more positive view of the proceedings in Paris, see Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Die Ökumene der Historiker: Geschichte der Internationalen Historikerkongresse und des Comité International des Sciences Historiques, Göttingen, 1987. 2 Karl Lamprecht, What Is History? Five Lectures on the Modern Science of History, New York and London, 1905: ‘The immediate occasion came in the form of an invitation to take active part in the Congress of Arts and Sciences which met in St. Louis during the World’s Fair’ (p. viii). The first lecture was delivered in St Louis, while the other four lectures were given as part of the 150th anniversary of the founding of Columbia University, New York, all in the year 1904. 3 Ibid., pp. 185–6, 93–102, 107. 4 Ibid., pp. 190–227. 5 Henri Berr, La Synthèse en histoire: son rapport avec la synthèse générale, Paris, 1953, pp. xi-xvi, 1–3; compare Tarle, p. 74. 6 Ibid., pp. 222–3. 7 Henri Berr, En marge de l’histoire universelle, Paris, 1934, p. xi. See also Martin Siegel, ‘Henri Berr’s Revue de Synthèse Historique’, History and Theory, 9, 1970. 8 James Bryce, ‘John Emerich Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton’, Studies in Contemporary Biography, London, 1903, pp. 386, 392–4. 9 Acton, in ‘German Schools of History’, English Historical Review, Vol. 1, 1886, p. 35. See also the quotation from Bryce, ‘John Emerich’, p. 390: ‘It is the office of historical science to maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things.’ 10 John Nurser, The Reign of Conscience: Individual, Church and State in Lord Acton’s History of Liberty, New York and London, 1987, pp. 34, 109; Bryce, ‘John Emerich’, pp. 383–5. 11 ibid., pp. 84–7, 91–3, 100, 104–5. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The

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12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

American Revolution in the Political Theory of Lord Acton’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1949. Himmelfarb makes some interesting comparisons between the approaches of Lord Acton and Edmund Burke. Lord Acton, Longitude 30 West. A Confidential Report to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, New York, 1969. Romein, The Watershed, pp. 457–60. Charles Seignobos, A Political History of Contemporary Europe, Vol. 2, London, 1901, pp. 845–7. H.A.L.Fisher, A History of Europe, London, 1936, p. v. The Times, 1–10 April 1913. J.F.Jameson, ‘The International Congress of Historical Studies, held at London’, American Historical Review, Vol. 18, 1913, pp. 683–4, suggests that Bryce was chosen to be president, ‘we may assume, as best representing the cosmopolitan spirit in the historical thinking of England’. Presumably, the five or six European races were the British, French, German, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish or Italian; the eight great powers included Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Spain and the USA; and the two likely to join the top ranks were Japan and China. (Japan was already a great power, perhaps, but Bryce’s observation that ‘a few European tongues have overspread all the continents, except Asia’ suggests that he himself did not want to consider it a great power in a full sense.) The four religions must have been the Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Bud-dhist. Buddhism was perhaps the prime candidate for disappearance. I am grateful to Professor John Hargreaves for his comments on this passage. The Times, 4 April 1913, pp. 7–8. In Bryce’s absence, his address was read by Dr A.W.Ward. The Times, 10 April 1913, p. 5. The Times, 10 April 1913, p. 5. The Times, 5 April 1913, p. 6; 8 April 1913, p. 6. The Times, 5 April 1913, p. 6. The Times, 5 April 1913, p. 6. The Times, 7 April 1913, p. 11. The Times, 5 April 1913, p. 6; 7 April 1913, p. 11. The two papers withdrawn concerned Albanian history and Austrian administrative methods. See Erdmann, Die Ökumene der Historiker, p. 100. The Times, 4 April 1913, p. 8; 9 April 1913, p. 6; W. Michael in Historische Zeitschrift, No. 111, 1913, pp. 464–8; Erdmann, Die Ökumene der Historiker, pp. 86–96. Ch. Bernier, ‘Le troisième Congrès International d’histoire’, Revue historique, Vol. 113, 1913, pp. 216–18. J.F. Jameson, ‘The International Congress’, pp. 679–80, 682, 687, 690. The Times, 4 April 1913, p. 8. Paul Vinogradoff, ed., Essays in Legal History, read before the International Congress of Historical Studies held in London in 1913, London, 1913, pp. 3–4, 356–83.

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32 J.F.Jameson, ‘The International Congress’, pp. 686, 690. He cites a paper by Professor N.Bubnov of the University of Kiev, Les Titres scientifiques de la langue russe pour l’admission de la langue russe dans les congrès historiques internationaux, Kiev, 1913. See also A.G.Slon-imskii, ‘Uchastie russkikh uchenykh v mezhdunarodnykh kongres-sakh istorikov’, Voprosy istorii, No. 7, 1970. 33 E.V.Tarle, ‘Mezhdunarodnyi istoricheskii kongress v Londone (3–9 aprelia nov. st. 1913 g.)’, Nauchnyi istoricheskii zhurnal, No. 1, 1914, pp. 130–3. 34 Benjamin Kidd, Principles of Western Civilisation, London and New York, 1902, p. 363, quoted by W.H.Roobol, ‘In Search of an Atlantic Identity’, Yearbook of European Studies, No. 4, Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga., 1991, p. 6. 35 Paul Vinogradoff, ‘Historical Types of International Law’, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, Oxford, 1928, pp. 248–9; James Bryce, Essays and Addresses in War Time, London, 1918, Preface and p. 180; John Morley, Recollections, Vol. 2, p. 953; F.E.Halliday, Thomas Hardy: His Life and Work, London, 1972, p. 218. See also Keith G.Robbins, ‘Lord Bryce and the First World War’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 10, pp. 255–77. Bryce was among those who had previously believed in the existence of ‘Teutonic freedom’. 36 F.J.Turner, quoted in Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750, New York, 1989, p. 175. W.M.Sloane, ‘History and Democracy’, American Historical Review, Vol. 1, 1895–6, pp. 16–17. 37 ‘The American Historical Association, 1919’, American Historical Review, Vol. 24, 1919, pp. 353–4. 38 Charles A.Beard, Crosscurrents in Europe Today, Boston, 1922. 39 Bernard C.Borning, The Political and Social Thought of Charles A. Beard, Seattle, 1962, pp. 14, 37, 56–9, 66; Ellen Nore, Charles A.Beard: An Intellectual Biography, Carbondale, Ill., 1983, pp. 76, 84–6, 95–100. 40 Encyclopaedia Britannica, thirteenth edition, Vol. 1, London and New York, 1926, pp. vii, xxxiv, 1011–12. 41 Walter Lippmann coined the term ‘Atlantic community’ in 1917. See, for example, Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, New York, 1981, p. 111, as cited by Roobol, ‘In Search’, p. 7. 4 SOME APPROACHES TO WORLD HISTORY, 1923–62 1 See, for example, E.H.B.Rodger, Aberdeen Doctors, Aberdeen, 1892, p. 254, for a reference to the ‘Great War’, and Nina Platonova, ‘Nakanune Velikoi Revoliutsii’, Annaly, No. 1, 1922, for a reference to the ‘Great Revolution’. I owe the first of these references to Professor Roy Bridges. 2 See Chapter 3, pp. 90, 99. The meeting in St Petersburg was agreed for 1918, not 1917. 3 H.Pirenne, ‘De la méthode comparative en histoire’, Compte Rendu

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4 5 6 7

8 9 10

11 12 13

14

15 16

du V Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Brussels, 1923, pp. 19–32. See, for example, Henri Berr, En marge de l’histoire universelle, Paris, 1934. Pirenne, ‘De la méthode comparative en histoire’. RIM, ‘Pirenne, Henri’, in John Cannon, ed., The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians, Oxford, 1988. See, for example, Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–1989, Oxford, 1990. On p. 2 Burke writes: ‘The movement may be divided into three phases. In the first phase, from the 1920s to 1945, it was small, radical and subversive. After the Second World War, the rebels took over the historical Establish-ment…. A third phase…opened around the year 1968. It is marked by fragmentation…’ Georg G.Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography, Middletown, Conn., 1975. M.Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich, Cambridge, 1988. K.F.Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State, New Brunswick, NJ, 1962, pp. 13, 28, 43, 49, 56–63, 117–18, 146, 228; Ann K.Erickson, ‘E.V.Tarle: The Career of a Historian under the Soviet Regime’, Slavic Review, Vol. 19, 1960; E.I.Chapkevich, Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle, Moscow, 1977. Shteppa, Russian Historians, pp. 58–61. E.V.Tarle, Evropa v epokhu imperializma, 1871–1919, second edition, Moscow, 1928, pp. 488–97. E.V.Tarle, ‘SSSR—mirovaia derzhava’, Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR, No. 11, 1947, as in Sochineniia, Vol. 12, 1962, pp. 239–48. At least in this piece, Tarle omitted reference to the human and material issues far greater in the Second than in the First World War. There were no Soviet representatives at the International Congresses of Historical Sciences in Zurich, 1938, and Paris, 1950. See, for example, Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Die Ökumene der Historiker und des Comité International des Sciences Historiques, Göttingen, 1987, pp. 465, 471. In spite of their isolation, Soviet historians produced a considerable amount of work of considerable merit, for example on the medieval and modern West. See Alexander Kan, ‘Soviet Historiography of the West under Stalin’s Prewar Dictatorship’, Storia della Storiografia, Vol. 21, 1992. DAJ, ‘Charles Austin Beard’, Blackwell; Bernard C.Borning, The Political and Social Thought of Charles A.Beard, Seattle, 1962; Ellen Nore, Charles A.Beard: An Intellectual Biography, Carbondale, Ill., 1983. Charles A.Beard, ‘Written History as an Act of Faith’, American Historical Review (hereafter AHR), Vol. 39, 1933–4, pp. 225–9; Theodore Clarke Smith, ‘The Writing of American History in America, from 1884 to 1934’, AHR, Vol. 40, 1934–5, pp. 447–9; Charles A. Beard and Alfred Vagts, ‘Currents of Thought in Historiography’, AHR, Vol. 42, 1936–7, pp. 466–83. See also William Dray, ‘Charles Beard

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17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30

and the Search for the Past as It Actually Was’, Perspectives on History, London, 1980, pp. 27–46. AHR, Vol. 28, 1923, pp. 226–7, 650. AHR, Vol. 34, 1928–9, pp. 265, 270; Vol. 35, 1929–30, p. 245. AHR, Vol. 39, 1933–4, especially pp. 230–1. AHR, Vol. 39, 1933–4, pp. 269–73, Fling’s italics. AHR, Vol. 44, 1938–9, pp. 290–3; Vol. 45, 1939–40, pp. 505–32; Vol. 50, 1944–5, p. 75. There is no entry on Jan Romein in Blackwell. Information on him taken from: Maarten C.Brands, ‘A Memoir of Jan Romein’; Annie RomeinVerschoor, ‘Preface’; and Harry J.Marks, ‘Introduction’; all in Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900, Middletown, Conn., 1978, trans. Arnold J.Pomerans, pp. ix-xxxviii. Caroline F.Ware, K.M.Panikkar, J.M.Romein, History of Mankind, Vol. VI: Cultural and Scientific Development, London, UNESCO, 1966. Jan Romein, ‘Theoretical History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9, 1948, pp. 53–64. Jan Romein, ‘The Common Human Pattern: Origin and Scope of Historical Theories’, Journal of World History, Vol. 4, 1957–8. Jan Romein, ‘Change and Continuity in History: The Problem of “Transformation”’, in J.S.Bromley and E.H.Kossmann, eds, Britain and the Netherlands, Vol. 2, Groningen, 1964. See, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘1968: Revolution in the World-System’, Geographics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing WorldSystem, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 13–14, 65–7. And see Note 7 above. William Vogt, Road to Survival, London, 1949, pp. v-vi, 16–17; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, London, 1962. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, London, 1962. See, for example, William H.McNeill, Arnold J.Toynbee: A Life, Oxford, 1989; Christopher Brewin, ‘Research in a Global Context: A Discussion of Toynbee’s Legacy’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1992; R.W.Davies, ‘Edward Hallett Carr, 1892–1982’, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 69, 1983. Pieter Geyl, Encoun-ters in History, London, 1963, contains criticism of both Toynbee and Barraclough as well as of Jan Romein. 5 CONCLUSION

1 The most interesting exception is the USA, where basketball is the most popular spectator sport and bowling the most popular participant sport. American football, like Australian and Gaelic football, is a distinctive local variant. 2 To ask someone what a game of football was like is a simple request and usually gets a simple answer. Ask more than one body, however, about the same match and before long you’re left wonder-ing if they

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3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14

15 16

were all referring to the same event’ (Stewart Weir, The Scotsman, 13 April 1992). Compare the remark attributed to another journalist: ‘Football’s not about the facts, it’s about what happened.’ ‘A Near-Earth Asteroid Detection Workshop Aims at Averting any Untoward Collision’, The Observer, 20 October 1991. See, for example, Jean-Christophe Rufin, L’Empire et les nouveaux barbares, Paris, 1991. Compare Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History, London, 1967, p. 20. To attempt to define post-modernism is perhaps to risk a contradiction in terms. However, to adapt the football analogy, the spectators have joined in the game. Perhaps the most succinct definition of postmodernism come from Jean François Lyotard: ‘death of centres’; ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Montesquieu’, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, Oxford, 1991, pp. 130, 132, 160–1. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M.Cohler, Basia C.Miller and Harold S.Stone, Cambridge, 1989 (hereafter The Spirit), pp. 4–9. Paul Cartledge, ‘Cross Currents of Democracy’, History Today, February 1990, pp. 7–9. This subject is pursued to the present day in John Dunn, ed., Democracy: The Unfinished Journey 508 BC to AD 1993, Oxford, 1992. See also Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, London, 1992. The Spirit, pp. 22–30, 43–51, 98, 104–11, 135–41. Catherine the Great, of course, would like to have included herself here. Marx to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852, with his own emphases, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895, London, 1943, p. 57. See, for example, Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology, Oxford, 1991; Keith Graham, Karl Marx, Our Contemporary: Social Theory for a Post-Leninist World, London, 1992. See also A.G.Meyer,’ The End of Communism?’, Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, 1994. For arguments in the other direction, see Alan Ryan, introduction, After the End of History, London, 1992. See, for example, N.N.Bolkhovitinov, ‘Three Pine-Trees or Which Textbook of Democracy Should We Study?’, Soviet Literature, 1989, No. 11 (500), pp. 26–9. Nobody has done more than Academician Bolkhovitinov to investigate contacts between Russia and America, especially up to and including the sale of Alaska in 1867. From the American side, see Norman E.Saul, Distant Friends: The United States and Russia, 1763–1867, Lawrence, Kan., 1991, and the works cited therein. See Vilhjamur Stefansson, The Northward Course of Empire, London, 1922. Charles Maier, ‘The Collapse of Communism: Approaches for a Future History’, History Workshop, No. 31, 1991, pp. 53–6. In a sense,

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Maier’s conclusions follow on from those of Eric Foner. See Chapter 2, Note 45. 17 See for example, Colin White, Russia and America: The Roots of Economic Divergence, London, 1987, as well as my own works, most recently Paul Dukes, The Last Great Game: USA versus USSR: Events, Conjunctures, Structures, London, 1989. 18 Nezavisimaia gazeta, 6 November 1991. For a modification of Alek-seev’s assertions by a fellow lawyer, see W.E.Butler, ‘Civil Rights in Russia’, in Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, eds, Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, Oxford, 1989, p. 9: dismissing Russian civil rights as non-existent or inconsequential is not merely to lose sight of a major arena for political and social reform but also to indulge in a kind of axiomatic negativism that likewise continues to obscure our perceptions of modern realities in the Soviet Union.

19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Similar caveats might be expressed about some of the interpretations advanced since August 1991. Paul N.Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, Vol.1, ed. Richard Stites, Gulf Breeze, 1978, p. 1. See above, pp. 71, 74. See above, p. 68. Alexander Yanov, The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000, Oxford, 1987, p. 293; R.G.Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora, St Petersburg, 1992; Paul Dukes, ‘Russia and Mid-Seventeenth Century Europe: Some Comments on the Work of B.F.Porshnev’, European Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1974. Colin Blakemore, The Mind Machine, London, 1990, p. 272. Some might prefer to be puppets rather than monkeys. See, for example, Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, London, 1991, or Steve Jones, ‘The Language of the Genes’, The 1991 BBC Reith Lectures. S.V.Mironenko, ed., Istoriia otechestva: liudi, idei, resheniia: ocherki istorii Rossii IX-nachala XXv., Moscow, 1991, pp. 5–6. S.V.Kuleshov and others, eds, Nashe otechestvo: opyt politicheskoi istorii, Moscow, 1991, Vol. 1, pp. 4–7. A.F.Zamaleev and others, Rossiia glazami russkogo: Chaadaev, Leon-tiev, Soloviev, St Petersburg, 1991, p. 16. See more generally M.A. Maslin, ed., Russkaia ideia, Moscow, 1992. See above, pp. 96–8. See above, pp. 127, 133–4. Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, London, 1993, pp. 54, 60–1, 195–6. Of course, a number of works already go some way towards answering these questions, for example: 1) Many years ago, I heard a lecture given by the late Joel Hurstfield in which he doubted whether the inhabitants of Ivan the Terrible’s Russia were worse off than those of Elizabeth I’s England. See more

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generally N.S.Kollman, Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, Stanford, 1987. 2) B.F.Porshnev, The Thirty Years’ War: The Entry of Sweden and Muscovy, Cambridge, 1995. 3) Philip Longworth, Alexis: Tsar of All the Russias, London, 1984; Lindsey Hughes, Sophia: Regent of Russia 1657–1704, London, 1990. See also Paul Dukes, Chapter One, ‘The General Crisis of the Seven-teenth Century’, October and the World: Perspectives on the Russian Revolution, London, 1979. 4) E.V.Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Coercion in Russia, New York and London, 1993; E.V.Anisimov, ‘Peter I: Birth of Empire’, in J.Cracraft, ed., Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia, Lexington, 1994. Boris Yeltsin has written: ‘In a general sense Peter the Great’s reforms have not been achieved to this day. Although we have become Europeans, we have remained ourselves.’ I owe this reference to Dr Lindsey Hughes, who is completing a study of Russia in the age of Peter the Great. 5) See Chapter 1, Note 23 above. See also A.Kamensky, ‘Pod seniu Ekateriny’: vtoraia polovina XVIII veka, St Petersburg, 1992. Significant translations are to be found in David Griffiths and George E.Munro, trans. and eds, Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns, Bakersfield, Calif., 1992. 6) Dmitry Shlapentokh, ‘The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life’, in Joseph Klaits and Michael H.Haltzel, eds, The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution, Cambridge, 1994; Dukes, Chapter Two, ‘The Democratic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century’, October and the World. 7) Janet M.Hartley, Chapter Nine, ‘The Parting of the Ways’, Alexander I, London, 1994; David Saunders, Chapter Four, ‘The Decembrist Movement’, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801– 1881, London, 1992. 8) Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Cambridge, Mass., 1987. Steven Hoch argued for the comparison of post-Emancipation Russia with the post-Emancipation American South in the symposium described by Jane Burbank in Note 31 below. 9) Michael Rywkin, ed., Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, London, 1988, and other works by the contributors; Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, Russia and the New States of Eurasia: The Politics of Upheaval, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 289–94: ‘The Upheaval in Comparative perspective’. Geoffrey Hosking, who is completing a book on the Russian Empire, has written of a late tsarist ‘constitutional nationalism’ as a mixture ‘similar to that which Joseph Chamberlain had been preaching in Britain a few years earlier: an Empire for the common man’ (The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914, Cambridge, 1973, p. 106). 10) Bruno Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Percep-

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31

32

33

34 35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42

tion and Prejudice, 1848–1923, Cambridge, 1992; Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, London, 1990. Jane Burbank, ‘Revisioning History: Imperial Russia’, Slavic Review, Vol. 52, No. 3, 1993. The participants cited are Jane Burbank, Jeffrey Brooks, Michael Confino, Richard Wortman, Richard Stites, Gregory Freeze and David Ransel. E.H.Carr, What is History?, second edition, London, 1987. A colleague in a science department has defined electricity as ‘a proba-bilistic drift of probable particles’. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, London, 1951, p. v; The Independent Magazine, 9 December 1989, and subsequent issues, including vigorous rebuttals. Roger Griffin, ‘The Fascist Phoenix’, Politics Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1992. See more fully Roger Griffin, The Nature of fascism, London, 1991. In a review of a book on Scotland and the Slavs (Slavic Review, Vol. 53, 1994, p. 575), Dale E.Paterson refers to ‘the timely issue of whether the Scottish enlightenment of Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson succeeded in creating an intellectual tradition strong enough to support the current experiments in political and cultural liberalism in the post-communist Slavic nations’. For the quotation from The Communist Manifesto, see for example Karl Marx: The Revolutions of 1848, Political Writings, Vol. 1, ed. and intro. by David Fernbach, London, 1973, p. 70. J.KGalbraith, quoted in The Scotsman, 25 November 1992. Paul Dukes, Forum, History Today, June 1984. Among the most concise arguments is William H.McNeill, ‘A Defence of World History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, London, 1982. See, for example, Tom Gallacher, ‘Currency for the Return Ticket’ and Alison Utley, ‘The Empire Watchers Strike Back’, The Higher, 8 May, 28 August 1992. Recourse to history was attended with most xenophobia and violence in the former Yugoslavia and the Cauca-sian republics. See, for example, Iu. S.Kukushkin and others, Russkii narod: istoricheskaia sud’ba v XX veke, Moscow, 1993; L.A.Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia gosudarstvennost, St Petersburg, 1992 (reprint of a work on the monarchical state first published in 1904); Oleg Rumyantsev, Chairman of the Russian Foundation of Constitutional Reform, ‘Let’s Hear It for the USSR’, The Guardian, 10 August 1994. D.S.Likhachev, The National Nature of Russian History, New York, 1990, p. 18. Samuel P.Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3, Summer 1993, p. 22. This is to disagree with Herbert Butterfield, who wrote: ‘In reality, the poet, the prophet, the novelist and the playwright command sublimer realms than those of technical history because they recon-stitute life in its wholeness. The history of historiography may help us to keep

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the technical historian in his place’ (Man on His Past, Cambridge, 1955, p. 141). Compare E.V.Tarle and Jan Romein, pp. 74, 127 above. Arguably, the ‘technical’ historian helps to keep firmly on the ground the feet of those who seek ‘sublimer realms’. Certainly, there can be no history of historiography without ‘technical’ historians to help provide the historiography.

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INDEX

Aberdeen 169–70 Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron: death 98; and historical universalism 82– 7, 102, 125, 160–1, 163; influence 9; Liberal convictions 91 Adams, Henry 85 Africa 18–19, 60, 88 Alekseev, Sergei 154 Alexander I, Tsar 156, 165 Alexander II, Tsar 156 American Civil War (1861–5) 55 American Historical Association 103, 123 American Historical Review, The 97, 102, 120–2 American Revolution (War of Independence, 1775–83) 6, 8, 19, 22–4, 55, 83 Americas (North and South) see New World anarchists 68 Anglo-Saxon tradition 82, 161; see also English-speaking peoples Annales school (of historians) 111, 162, 182n7 Annaly: zhurnal vseobshchei istorii 76 Arakcheev, A.A. 69 aristocracy 146 Aristotelianism 132 art: history as 5, 150, 163 Asia 17–20, 125

Atlantic community 106 August Revolution (Russia, 1991) 46 Aulard, François Victor Alphonse 72 Babeuf, François Noel (Gracchus Babeuf) 48 Bacon, Francis 12, 22 Bailyn, Bernard 21 Bancroft, George 85 Barraclough, Geoffrey 136 Battenberg (Mountbatten), Admiral Louis, Prince of (later 1st Marquess of Milford Haven) 94 Beard, Charles A.: career and ideas 116–21, 125, 136, 162; and ‘New History’ 10, 85, 116, 121; Crosscurrents in Europe Today (lectures) 103; ‘Currents of Thought in Historiography’ (article; with Vagts) 117–21; An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution 116; President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 117; The Rise of American Civilization (with Mary Beard) 116; ‘Written History as an Act of Faith’ (address) 117, 121 Beard, Mary Ritter 116 Beccaria, Cesare Bonsena, Marchese de 22 Belgium: colonialism 60

189

INDEX

Berlin, Sir Isaiah 144–5 Bernheim, Ernst: ‘Die historische Interpretation aus den Zeitanschauungen’ (paper) 93, 97 Bernier, Charles 97 Bernstein, Eduard 66–7, 132 Berr, Henri: and Annales school 111, 162; influence 9; and universal history 86–7, 125, 163; ‘The Evolution of Humanity’ 109; La Synthèse en histoire 81–2, 160 Bismarck, Prince Otto von 86 Blackstone, Sir William 21, 28 Bloch, Marc 111 Boer War (1899–1902) 60 Bolshevik Revolution (October 1917): Beard on 103; bourgeois reaction to 130–1, 163; effect and impact of 69, 110; and freedom concept 2; historical support for 66; and Marxism 46, 50–1; Miliukov on 154–5; and overthrow of capitalism 68; Tarle on 113, 115 Boucher, Jonathan 24–5 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918) 112 Brissot, Jacques Pierre 33 Britain: and capitalist production 54; colonialism 60; constitution 23; cost of World War I 112; decline 82; economic dominance 50–1; and relations with USA 104–6; revolutions (17th century) 41, 49, 62; in World War I 61 Bryce, James, Viscount: on Acton 82–3; Liberal affiliations 91; presidential address at 1913 Historical Congress 88–90, 93, 108; on World War I 101 Bukharin, N.I. 70 Burke, Edmund: Beard on 118; and constitutional order 8, 15, 38; on French Revolution 38– 40; Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France 39

Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury 22 Bush, George 164 Butterfield, Herbert: The Whig Interpretation of History 167; Man on His Past 187n42 Cambridge Modern History 84–5 Cameralists 75 Cantemir see Kantemir capitalism: historical development of 92–3; and imperialism 134; Marx and Engels on 53–5, 168 Carr, Edward Hallett 136, 167 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 135–6 Cartledge, Paul 146 Catherine II (the Great), Empress of Russia: accession 2; adopts Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws 8, 15–16, 26–9, 43; autocracy 3–4; and constitution 27–9, 138, 165; on French Revolution 29–33; historical view of 6, 165; reforms 21, 28, 156; Nakaz 27– 8; see also Russia (Imperial) causality 81 Chaadaev, P. Ia. 159 Chamberlain, Joseph 60, 186n30(9) Charlemagne, Emperor 110 Charles I, King of Great Britain 41 Charles II, King of Great Britain 41 Charles X, King of France 86 Charter of the Nobility (Russia, 1785) 3 Chartists 50 chemistry 52, 108–9, 128 China: Cultural Revolution in 136; forms axis with USSR 115, 141; historical study of 80, 121 Christianity: Acton’s commitment to 83; influence on political rights 18 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of 72 class struggle 148

190

INDEX

climate: effect on political development 18, 20, 23; in North America 23–4, 36 Cohler, Anne M. 23, 42 Coke, Sir Edward 21 Cold War: and Cuba crisis 9; ends 143, 151; follows world wars 107, 162; Romein on 123; USSR and 141 collectivisation (USSR) 65 Columbus, Christopher 12 commerce: Montesquieu on 147 Common Human Pattern (CHP) 128–31, 136, 162–3 Commonwealth of Independent States (post-1991 Russia) see Russian Federation communism 48, 69, 136; see also Marxism-Leninism complexity 164–5 Comte, Auguste 52, 73, 93, 101, 177n12 Congress of School Extension Workers, USSR (1919) 62 conscience 87 contemporarisation 142, 144 Cook, Captain James 13 Copernicus, Nicolaus 132 Correggio 16, 52 Cossacks 3 Crimean War (1854–5) 51 Croce, Benedetto 86, 119, 121–2, 125 Cromwell, Oliver 41, 83, 176n4 Cuba: 1962 missile crisis 9, 136 Dante Alighieri 52 Danton, Georges Jacques 72 Dartmouth College (USA) 103 Darwin, Charles 52, 67, 135 Davidsohn, Commendatore Robert 96 Deane, Silas 21 Decembrist Revolt (Russia, 1825) 156, 166 decolonisation 131 democracy: and capitalism 4; origins of 145–7; in post-Soviet Russia 171

Descartes, René 11–12, 131, 161 despotism: Montesquieu on 17, 27–8; in Russia 28; Washington on dangers of 37 diachronic history 6 Disraeli, Benjamin 60 economic determinism 116–17 Economist, The (journal) 5, 142 Egypt: independence 114 Einstein, Albert 128, 133 Elias, Norbert: The Civilizing Process 127 Encyclopaedia Britannica 63, 67, 69, 104 Engels, Friedrich: death and inheritance 66; eulogy of Marx 45–7; influence on Marx 51; Preface to Marx’s Capital 52, 54; and scientific terminology 149; on US industrial development 55; The Communist Manifesto (with Marx) 8, 48–9, 56, 59, 120, 149, 168 England see Britain English-speaking peoples 78, 104– 6, 161 Enlightenment, The 129–30, 150, 167; see also Scottish Enlightenment Europe: global dominance 88–90; and modernisation process 144, 177n16; Montesquieu on supremacy of 15, 17–21; and North American separation 24–5 Federalist, The (journal) 22–4 feudalism 21, 28 Finland 131, 163 First World War see World War I (1914–18) Fisher, Herbert Albert Laurens 87 Five-Year Plans (USSR) 65 Fling, Fred Morrow 122 France: 1940 collapse 113, 123; and cost of World War I 112; representation at 1913

191

INDEX

Historical Congress 97–8; and scientific history 80–1 Frederick II (the Great), King of Prussia 27, 165 freedom see liberty French Revolution: Burke on 38– 41, 118; and constitutional government 8; effect on Russian and American constitutionality 29–33, 165; in historical context 6; influence in USA 34–8; Lenin on 62; Marx on 47–9; and monarchy 30, 33, 42; Tarle alludes to 75–6 Galbraith, John Kenneth 168 Garvin, James Louis 104 Gauguin, Paul 132 Genet, Edmond Charles 32–5 Genghis Khan 18 geopolitics 152–3 Germany: attack on USSR (1941) 65; colonialism 60; and cost of World War I 112; democratic majority principles in 93; Lamprecht on history of 79–80; Marx on 47, 49, 54; and natural selection 101; and rise of dictatorship 111; in World War II 113, 123 Gierke, O. von: ‘Zur Geschichte des Majoritätsprinzips’ (paper) 93 Glorious Revolution (Britain, 1688) 6, 83, 167 Gorchakov, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich 166 Gordon, Thomas 22 Great War see World War I (1914– 18) Greece, ancient 20–1, 129, 146 Greece, modern 114 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, Baron von 29, 31–2 Grotius, Hugo 15, 21 Guicciardini, Francesco 72 Haiti: slave revolt 26

Hamilton, Alexander 8, 23–5, 34, 116–17 Hardy, Thomas 101 Haskins, Charles H.: ‘European History and American Scholarship’ 120–1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 47, 75, 93 Hill, David Jayne: A History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe 61 historical materialism 80 Historismus (historism) 117–18, 130, 162 Hitler, Adolf 111, 114, 167 Hobbes, Thomas 18, 173n2 Hobson, J.A.: Imperialism 60 Home Rule (Ireland) 87 honour: concept of 23 Horace: Satires 54 Huizinga, Jan: Homo Ludens 127; Waning of the Middle Ages 123–4 Hungary 95 Huntington, Samuel P. 171 Hurstfield, Joel 185n30(1) imperialism 60–1, 67, 109, 134 India 80, 95–6, 114 Indonesia 114 International Congress of Comparative History, Paris (1900) 79, 87–8 International Congresses of Historical Sciences (or Studies): London (1913) 9, 87–100, 106, 161; Brussels (1923) 108, 121, 161; Oslo (1928) 111, 121; Warsaw and Krakow (1933) 122; Zurich (1938) 122 Italy: dictatorship in 111 Ivan IV (the Terrible), Tsar 156–7, 165, 185n30(1) Jameson, J.F. 97, 99, 121; ‘Typical Steps in American Expansion’ 98 Japan: 1938 repulse at Khasan and Khalkin Gol 113; attacks USA

192

INDEX

123; imperialism 60; in World War I 61 Jefferson, Thomas 34–5, 116–17 Jorga, N.: ‘Les Bases nécessaires d’une nouvelle histoire du moyen age’ (paper) 92 Joseph II, Emperor of Austria 165 Kadet Party (Russia) 3 Kantemir, Prince A.D. 26 Karamzin, N.B. 57–8, 76, 138, 158 Kautsky, Karl 67–8 Kerensky, Alexander Feodorovich 156 Khalkin Gol 113 Khasan 113 Kidd, Benjamin: Principles of Western Civilisation 100 Kliuchevsky, V.O. 57–8, 76, 86, 139, 158 Korea 114 Kovalevsky, Maxim 57, 76 Kropotkin, Prince Peter A. 68 Kursk, Battle of (1943) 114 Lamprecht, Karl: doctrine of universalism 79–81, 86–7, 125, 160, 163; at 1913 Historical Congress 97; influence 9; What Is History? 79, 160 land ownership 3, 56, 172n3, 173n4, 177n16 Langton, Chris 164 Lappo-Danilevsky, A.S.: ‘L’Idée de l’état et son évolution’ (paper) 98 League of Nations 101 Lee-Warner, Sir William 95 legality 4, 6 Leland, Waldo G. 121–2 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: Beard on pragmatism of 103; and constitutionalism 76; governmental reforms 62–3; and Marxist doctrine 44; originality 133; on revolutionary government 8, 57, 138; on Russian

development and progress 59; unmentioned by Tarle 76; Vinogradoff ignores 99; The Development of Capitalism in Russia 59, 62; Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism 60–2, 149; What is to be Done? 59, 132 Leontev, K.N. 159 Lewin, Roger: Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos 163 Liberal Democratic Party (postSoviet Russia) 1 liberty (freedom): as concept under Peter the Great 2; and French Revolution 34; Lenin on 62–3; and reforms 4; in Russia’s Choice 6 Liebermann, Felix 96 Likhachev, D.S. 171 Locke, John 6, 15, 154, 173n2 Louis Philippe, King of France 86 Luxemburg, Rosa 67–8 Lyotard, Jean François 184n6 Machiavelli, Niccolò 72 McLuhan, Marshall: The Gutenberg Galaxy 136 Madison, James 8, 22–4 Mahomet (the Prophet) 110 Malinovskii, A.F. 25–6 Malthus, Thomas 135 Marat, Jean Paul 41 Marczali, H.: ‘Count Széchenyi and the Introduction of English Civilization to Hungary’ (paper) 95 Marshall Plan 117 Marx, Karl: Beard on 103, 117; death and inheritance 66–7; and historical science 46–7; ideas and doctrines 45–50, 144, 148–9; Lamprecht criticises 80; on position of Russia 138; Romein on 124; and 1917 Russian Revolution 66–7; unmentioned by Tarle 76; world view 11; Capital 8, 44, 52– 6, 59, 76, 148; Communist Manifesto (with Engels) 8, 48–9,

193

INDEX

56, 59, 120, 149, 168; Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 47 Marxism-Leninism: development of 57; disestablishment of 5; as ideology 149; resisted in USA 44; revisions of 67, 149–50; and revolutionary order 8; and Soviet patriotism 162; and Stalinism 65, 76; Tarle accepts 10 Mathiez, Albert 72 Meinecke, Friedrich 117–19, 162 Mensheviks 68 Meyer, Eduard: ‘Ancient History and Historical Research in the Last Generation’ (paper) 91–2 Michael Romanov, Tsar 156, 165 Michelangelo Buonarroti 16 Miliukov, Paul 154, 164, 166 Mironenko, S.V.: (ed.) Istoriia otechestva 157–8 modernisation: concept of 142–4 monarchy: Burke on 40; Catherine II on 30–1; as form of government 146–7; and French Revolution 30, 33, 42; and nobility 41 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de: on democracy 146–7; influence 144–5, 148; on position of Russia 138; and promotion of public institutions 37; self-image 52; and social science 16; supports constitutionalism 66, 145; world view 11, 26; writings 14; The Spirit of the Laws: (and American Revolution) 22–5, 43; (Beard on) 118; (Catherine II takes as model) 8, 15–16, 27–9, 43; (on constitutional order) 41; (and Descartes) 11; (on effects of climate) 18, 20, 23, 36; (on European supremacy) 15, 17– 21; (and French Revolution) 42; (influence) 8, 16, 22–3, 29, 41, 43; (invoked) 101; (on monarchy) 31; (publication) 14;

(on Russia) 26–7; (structure) 17, 145 Morley, John, Viscount 90–1, 93; Recollections 101 Napoleon I (Bonaparte), Emperor of the French 66, 165 Napoleon III, Emperor of the French 50, 86 Nashe otechestvo (‘Our Fatherland’) 158 nation states 141; see also state, the National Assembly (France) 30 National Convention (France) 34 nationalism 103, 108–9, 111 natural law 28 natural selection 100–1 Nauchnyi istoricheskii zhurnal 100 Nazism 111 New Deal (USA) 117 New Economic Policy (USSR) 63, 156 New World (Americas) 15, 19 Newton, Sir Isaac 12, 131–2 Nicholas II, Tsar 156 Nietzsche, Friedrich 80 nobility: Charter (Russia, 1785) 3; formation of 92; freedom decree (Russia, 1762) 2; and monarchy 41 obshchina (communal land ownership) 56 October Revolution (Russia 1917)see Bolshevik Revolution Oman, (Sir) Charles William: ‘A Defence of Military History’ (paper) 94 otechestvo (fatherland) 157 Pacific Ocean: in geopolitics 153 Paris Commune (1871) 81 Paris World Exhibition (1900) 79, 81, 96 Pasteur, Louis 108 patriotism: and history 79 Paul I, Tsar 40 peasants: in 1917 Russian Revolution 6; and

194

INDEX

collectivisation 65; and common land ownership 56; and emancipation of serfs 51; Lenin’s policy on 63; in Marxist theory 50, 150; move to towns 92; and proletarian leadership 64; and Pugachev rising and freedom decree 2–4 Penn, William 19, 83 permanent revolution 64–5 Perry, John: The State of Russia under the Present Czar 26 Peter I (the Great), Tsar: Acton on 85, 161; assessed 165; Montesquieu on 27; and political ideals 2, 156, 186n30 (4) Peter III, Tsar 2–3 pH test 43, 44, 76, 78, 106, 136–7, 144 physics 128 Physiocrats 74 Pipes, Richard 2 Pirenne, Henri: at 1913 Historical Congress 10; history of Belgium 110; and universal history 125, 136, 162, 163; ‘Les Etapes sociales de revolution du capitalisme du XIIe au XIXe siècle’ (paper) 92; ‘On the Comparative Method in History’ (address) 108–10, 115, 161 Platonism 132 Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich: The Role of the Individual in History 132 Polynesia 60 Portugal 60 positivism 52 post-modernism 143, 165, 184n6 proletariat: dictatorship of 64–5, 148; Lenin on importance of 59; in Marx’s theories 49–50, 149; and Russian peasants 64 property 2–3, 6; see also land ownership pseudo-history 72 Pufendorf, Samuel 15, 22

Pugachev, Emelian Ivanovich 2–4, 6, 38, 63, 172n2 Pusey, Edward Bouverie 168 racial theory 108–9 Ranke, Leopold von 72, 119 Raphael Sanzio: St Cecilia (painting) 16 Reid, Sir George 94 relativity theory 128 Renaissance 129–30 republicanism 40, 145–6 ‘Revisioning History: Imperial Russia’ (conference, 1991) 166– 7 revolutions of 1848 50–1, 62 Revue historique 97 Revue de synthèse historique 81 Rhodes, Cecil 60 Robertson, General Sir William Robert 94 Robespierre, Maximilien de: on constitutional government and revolution 7–8, 15, 42–3, 62; historical view of 72; Marx on 48; and Russian Revolution 66 Robinson, James Harvey 116; ‘The Newer Ways’ 121 Roland, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon 33 Romania 170 Romanov, Michael see Michael Romanov, Tsar romanticism 109 Rome (ancient) 20–1, 129 Romein, Jan: career and ideas 123– 6, 162–3; influence 10; Aera van Europa 125; ‘Change and Continuity in History: the problem of “Transformation”’ 125, 131–2, 163; ‘The Common Human Pattern’ 128–9, 162; De Eeuw van Azie (The Asian Century) 125; ‘The Origins, Development and Future of Dutch History’ 124; ‘Theoretical History’ 125–7, 162; The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900 125, 131 Romein-Verschoor, Annie 127

195

INDEX

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 117 Royal United Services Institution 94 Russia (Imperial): Acton on 85, 98; Burke on 38, 40; Catherine’s reforms in 21, 27–9, 156; compared with USA 25–6; and cost of First World War 112; economic-political development 57–8; historical study and interpretation of 157–61, 165–7, 171; imperialism 60; influence of French Revolution on 29–30, 165–6; Karl Marx on 49–51, 55–6; March revolution (1917) 69; on margins of Europe 138; Montesquieu refers to 26–7; representation at 1913 Historical Congress 98–9; 1905 Revolution 59, 85, 156, 166; suppresses 1848 revolutions 51; see also Bolshevik Revolution; Russian Federation; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Russian Federation (post-1991) 152–6; see also August Revolution (Russia, 1991) Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic 62 Russia’s Choice (political bloc) 2, 6, 154 Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) 85 Ryazanov, D.B. 50 Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Leon de Richebourg de 48 St Louis: Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) 179n2 St Petersburg: chosen as venue for 1918 Historical Congress 99, 108 Schliemann, Heinrich 92 science: definition unresolved 87; Engels on terminology of 149; and erudition 74; history as 5, 108–10, 150, 163; Marx and 52; theories and truth in 128–9

Scottish Enlightenment 23, 28, 149, 168, 187n35 Second World War see World War II (1939–45) Seignobos, Charles: A Political History of Contemporary Europe 86, 159 serfs, serfdom: emancipation 51, 156, 166; Marx’s silence on 56; revolts 26 slaves, slavery 26, 166 Sloane, W.M.: ‘History and Democracy’ 102 Small, William 22 Smith, Adam: The Wealth of Nations 149, 168 social contract 15, 154 socialism: and imperialism 61; Kautsky on 67; Lenin and 63; and permanent revolution 64 ‘Socialism in one country’ (doctrine) 10 Socialist Revolutionaries (political group) 68 Soloviev, S.M. 76, 158, 159; History of Russia from the Earliest Times 70 Soviets: as institutions 64 Spanish-American War (1898) 60 Stalin, Josef V.: death 158; embraces constitutionalism 76; and Marxist doctrine 44; on need for modernisation 65; power and position 65, 156; and revolutionary order 8, 138; ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ 65 Stalingrad 114 Stamp Act (USA, 1765) 25 state, the 40, 100; see also nation states Strachey, John St Loe: ‘EnglishSpeaking Peoples, Relations of 104–5 surplus value, law of (Marx) 45, 53, 67 Sweden: Russia defeats (1709) 65 synchronic history 6 Széchenyi, Count István 95–6

196

INDEX

Tacitus 169 Tamerlane (Timur) 18 Tarle, E.V.: career and ideas 111– 15, 116, 125, 136, 138, 155, 162, 164; on 1913 Historical Congress 100; on history and pseudo-history 72–7; and revolutionary order 9–10; Europe in the Age of Imperialism, 1871–1919 111; ‘The Next Task’ 44, 70, 75–6, 78, 155–7 ‘Teutonic’ idea 78, 96–7, 100, 161 theoretical history 125–9, 162 Third World 141 Thirty Years War 165 Time of Troubles (Russia, c.1605– 1613) 156–7 Times, The (newspaper): on 1913 Historical Congress 87–8, 90, 94, 100 Tolstoy, Count Leo: ‘Three Deaths’ 131 Toynbee, Arnold 136; A Study of History 127 Trafalgar, Battle of (1805) 95 transformation 131–5 Trevor-Roper, Hugh (later Baron Dacre) 167 Trotsky, Leon: on Lenin’s aims 63, 76; and Marxist doctrine 44; and revolutionary order 8, 138; History of the Russian Revolution 63–4 Truman Doctrine 114, 117 Turgenev, Ivan S. 71 Turner, Frederick Jackson 85, 102 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR): axis with China 115, 141; Bolshevik regime 62; civil war in (1918– 20) 62; collapse of communism in 136, 154; economic development 63–4; and end of Cold War 151; Germans invade (1941) 65; isolation from Europe 110; Marxism in 44, 76; military successes 65–6; nationalism in 111; rise to

world power 114; in World War II113–15, 123; see also Bolshevik Revolution; Russia (Imperial); Russian Federation United States of America: Burke on 40–1; and concept of contemporarisation 144; constitution 16, 19, 22–4, 29, 36–7, 43; and cost of World War I 112; emancipation of slaves 166; and end of Cold War 151; and English-speaking peoples 104–6, 161; Europeanism 90; Genet in 33–5; geographical isolation 24–5; and 1913 Historical Congress 97–8; imperialism 60; industrial development 55–6; influence of French Revolution on 34–8; Marxism fails to influence 76; place in Western world 77; post-World War I independence from Europe 102–3, 110; power of Congress 34–5; relations with Russia 152; rise to dominance 82, 136, 153; in World War I 61 Vagts, Alfred: ‘Currents of Thought in Historiography’ (with Beard) 117–21 value-form 52, 55–6; see also surplus value Vietnam War 136 Vinogradoff, Paul: at 1913 Historical Congress 98–9, 161; Lenin ridicules 59; liberal views 68; and Soviet Russia 69– 70, 76; and updating of Montesquieu’s system 101 virtue: Montesquieu on 14; Robespierre on 42 Vogt, William: Road to Survival 135 Völkerpsychologie 81 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de 72 Wallerstein, Immanuel: ‘1968,

197

INDEX

Revolution in the World System’ 134–5 war guilt 110 Warburton, William, Bishop of Gloucester 167 Ward, (Sir) Adolphus William 94, 98 Washington Conference (on disarmament, 1921) 152 Washington, George: accused of power abuse 35; and constitutional order 8, 36; deletes references to liberty in Jefferson letter 34; Farewell Address (1796) 36–8, 154; Montesquieu and 15 Weber, Max 4, 6, 129 Wells, H.G.: Outline of History 72–3 Wilde, Oscar 132 Wilson, Woodrow 9, 76–7, 103; The State 57

women: Montesquieu on 147; votes for 87 Woodward, C.Vann 1 World War I (1914–18): compared with World War H 107; impact of 100–4, 106, 110, 161; Lenin describes as imperialist 61; mortality figures 112; Tarle on 112 World War H (1939–45) 107, 113– 14, 162 Wright, Benjamin Fletcher 22 Yeltsin, Boris 2, 186n30(4) Yergin, Daniel and Gustafson, Thane: Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World 1 zakonomernost (regularity of law) 157–9, 171 Zamaleev, A.F. 159 Zasulich, Vera 177n16 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir 1, 4, 6, 171

198

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