Putting Marx and Montesquieu along with the pH test into thebackground, we now bring to the fore the colleagues of E.V. Tarle,professional historians. We turn to examine how they wereadjusting their outlook on Western world order at the beginningof the twentieth century before the First World War, and thenconsider the impact made on the outlook of some historians andother representative writers by that great conflict. In particular,we shall note the full acceptance in the West, especially the nowso-called English-speaking West, of the idea of an Atlanticcommunity, including the USA, and the demise of a previouslywidely accepted cultural concept, that of a Teutonic’ group ofnations including the United Kingdom and the United States alongwith Germany.In his excited discussion of ‘The Next Task’, E.V.Tarle presentedan interesting view of the development of the writing of historyfrom the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century.There is at least one point, however, that he failed to makesufficiently clear: that the profession of historian emerged towardsthe end of the nineteenth century. This development had importantimplications: historians expected their profession, like any other,to be taken seriously; they communicated much more amongthemselves, for example by way of new journals, in efforts to realisethis expectation; equally, for the same purpose, they lookedincreasingly upon their discipline as a ‘science’ with its owndistinctive techniques In July 1900, an International Congress of Comparative Historymet within the framework of the Paris World Exhibition. Likeits predecessors from London in 1851 to Chicago in 1893, theParis Exhibition was a contrast of wide collaboration and narrowself-interest. Not surprisingly, therefore, the proceedings of thecongresses on a wide range of subjects both academic and non-academic tended to comprise a bland mixture of mutualcongratulation and nationalist assertiveness. And so historianswould not have been surprised to hear that their subject hadmade great strides throughout the nineteenth century,overcoming misleading theories (including revolutionarysocialism, no doubt) on the one hand and trivial compilationson the other to produce a large number of reliable facts revealingthe full truth; nor would they have been surprised to find thatthe more they learned about their country, the more they learnedto love it, and the more they loved it, the more they wanted tolearn about it.1However, both at the congress and even more outside it, therewas ample evidence in and around 1900 that neither fact-gathering nor flag-waving was enough. Among the historianswho had come to realise the shortcomings of empiricalpatriotism was Karl Lamprecht, who was to look beyond theconfines of his German history as he completed its twenty-fourvolumes between 1891 and 1913. Increasingly, he came to turnfrom specialisation towards universalism, from the‘individualist’ approach to the ‘collectivist’.Lamprecht’s views aroused enormous controversy andcarried his name across the Atlantic. Invited to visit the USA in1904, he set out his approach in a series of lectures published in1905 as What Is History?.2 Although this was the broadestexposition of his views, he still gave heavy emphasis to thedevelopment of Germany over the course of more than twomillennia. In a stirring passage, Lamprecht declared: ‘I canimagine my sixtieth ancestor marching out with a German spearand looking with defiant mien across the Rhine, and my fiftiethancestor putting behind him the great river and invading thecarefully guarded regions subject to the Roman Yoke.’ And nowtheir remote descendant—‘a brain-worker whose muscles havegrown flabby from lack of constant exercise’—had crossed the vast ocean to speak to a foreign yet kindred people about thelife 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 passedthrough several stages before reaching newer, deeper insights thanever before in the latter part of the eighteenth century and at thebeginning of the nineteenth century. Then, a period of economicand political evolution following 1848 and culminating in 1871was of great significance for intellectual growth. Released fromtheir great anxieties concerning national life and unity, men couldnow concentrate on the development of internal culture. A stirringin the arts and social sciences shook their common foundation—‘socio-psychological history’. To be sure, there was a period ofdisputation and pessimism, involving ‘brilliant failures’, amongwhom could be numbered the ‘tragic person of Nietzsche’. Butduring the past half decade or so, the concept of the Supermanhad given way to concepts of the individual, society and statewhich were simpler yet more in keeping with the dominant spiritof the new age.3For Lamprecht, the greatest problem facing the scientifichistory of mankind was the deduction of a universal law fromthe history of the most important communities. Along with theUSA and Japan these included European countries which hadundergone modernising experiences comparable to those inGermany. The study of some stages of development of ‘over-ripe’ or ‘decadent’ cultures such as the Indian and Chinese couldbe useful, but the centre of attention would have to be wheresignificant key political and economic evolution had recentlyoccurred. This, of course, was ‘the doctrine of Karl Marx, thetheory of the so-called, though most unhappily so-called,historical materialism’. But, in Lamprecht’s view, the doctrineof Marx and his school was ‘utterly inadequate’ even if therewas an attempt to measure the mental and moral progress of acommunity. Ethnology, archaeology and the history of art wouldall play important parts along with political and economichistory in the composition of a scientific Weltgeschichte, butamong all the vast and inexhaustible sources of world history,the centre was emphatically ‘psycho-historical’.4Lamprecht recognised that scientific history had advancedelsewhere, especially in France, both before and after 1871. But, ofcourse, the proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles on 18 January of that year was a great humiliation for France, and by theend of 1871 the Paris Commune had been formed and crushed,adding another important date to 1815, 1830 and 1848 in the periodfollowing the French Revolution. Nevertheless, both in spite andbecause of the revolutionary tradition, French intellectuals hadindeed managed to develop the study of history. Therefore, therewas much to draw on when a new French departure took thepursuit of the subject further at the time of the Paris WorldExhibition.In August 1900, the first number of Revue de Synthèse Historiquewas brought out by Henri Berr, and Lamprecht and other foreignerswere joined in debate by their French colleagues. In addition, Berrhimself published in 1911 a full exposition of his views, La Synthèseen histoire: son rapport avec la synthèse générale. In this book, heaccepted that, empirically, history was the study of the human factsof the past, and that every other definition was tendentious.However, to concentrate on the summary and classifi-cation of factswas not enough: there was a clear difference between an eruditeand a scientific synthesis of history, as well as a further gap betweenthe latter and the philosophy of history.5What was the scientific synthesis of history? Basically, thequestion revolved around another, that of causality, which in turnmight be said to consist of three types or orders: contingency,necessity and logic. Contingency involved not only chance but alsosix modes of individuality: personal; ‘collective’; geographical;through time; at any moment; and (here Berr could not avoid theGerman noun) —Völkerpsychologie (folk or national psychology),an area much vaster and more indetermin-ate than the term mightsuggest, with a deep source expressing itself most clearly in thevarious collective individualities. If contingency in Berr’s viewconsisted of the facts, necessity was a matter mostly of the social,and therefore of sociology. The third order of causality, logic, inhistory meant ideas, of psychology as well as sociology, whichbetween them helped to bring about the formation of consciousness(conscience).On the one hand, Berr held back from asserting too rigid asystem, a fault which he believed he could find in sociology.Others, he suggested, might find an organisation of the scientificsynthesis of history more adequate than his, which dependedon the interaction of the three types of cause. On the other hand,through the patient, methodical and experimental study of this reciprocal interaction, he believed that the study of causes inhuman affairs might open perspectives on causes in nature, onevolution as a whole. In such a manner, scientific synthesiswould establish not only man’s precise role in society, but alsohelp him to come to understand his role in the universe.6Devoting the rest of a long career to the pursuit of such broadaims, Berr was to narrow his focus in the shorter run. For him, asfor many others, the war of 1914–18 was both a point of arrivaland departure in the evolution of humanity. In particular, Berrwanted to oppose German attempts at Weltgeschichte with acomparable French exercise demonstrating the national vitality,both commemorating those who fell to save France and advancingscience in its broadest sense. At this point, apparently, allies wereto be neglected as well as enemies, but in any case Berr had beenon the whole accurate in his earlier observation that Britain inparticular was far from adopting the objective scientific method inhistorical study, but continued to look upon history as a branch ofgeneral literature, against a strong background of the empiricisttradition of the Anglo-Saxons which had recently found expressionin the defence of pragmatism on both sides of the Atlantic,especially in the USA.7The senior partner among the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nations, Britain,was on the point of decline from world hegemony at the turn ofthe century, while a junior, the USA, was rising fast towards it.Among the observers of this phenomenon was Lord Acton, asmuch at home in the scholarship of the continent as in that of theEnglish-speaking community—‘a miracle of learning’, accordingto his friend Lord Bryce, with ‘a passion of the intellect, a thirstlike the thirst for water in a parching desert’. Unfortunately,however, although Acton could on occasion speak ‘as if the wholelandscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst ofsunlight’, he wrote very little. Or, rather, in a sense, he wrote toomuch, filling hundreds of boxes with notes and extracts, distillingand bottling the essence of what he read, but never pouring itout fully in publication.To some extent, this was because Acton could not accept whatBryce wrote in an increasingly relevant observation: that it becomes‘daily more than ever true that the secret of historical compositionis to know what to neglect’.8 But a considerable part of his difficultyarose from the circumstances that he was a loyal Roman Catholicattempting to become a leading Liberal, and that, among mostly insular empiricists, he was attempting to become a cosmopolitanuniversalist: ‘There is no escape from the dogma that history is theconscience of mankind.’9While Acton’s professed outlook was all-embracing, it wasnot without its limitations and partialities. From its vantagepoint in Western Europe, it was directed across the Atlanticrather 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. Furtherafield, Acton confessed himself unable to judge what to thinkof ‘those who live pure and good lives but are without reach ofChristianity’, although he firmly believed in the one ‘greatoperation set at work by Christ—the Preparation of the Nations’.And to his Christianity there was added his Liberalism, ‘basedon the love of freedom for its own sake’, in the estimation ofLord Bryce, ‘joined to the conviction that freedom is the bestfoundation for the stability of a constitution and the happinessof a people’.10Expounding his overview, though never completing hishistory of liberty, Acton thought of the seventeenth century as‘the crisis in the history of conscience’, seeing 1642 as a startingpoint, and coming to share the opinion that Cromwell’s statueshould be at Washington, not Westminster, for the Roundheadshad 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 throughdevising a theory of conscience, rejecting the authority oftradition and introducing the normality of ‘abstract ideas’.However, the Commonwealth had been marred by excesses ofsimplicity and completeness, and the Glorious and BloodlessRevolution of 1688 had been necessary to construct a morebalanced legacy to the eighteenth century.The best was yet to come, for the outbreak of the AmericanRevolution in 1776 could be rightly compared with the nativityof Christ, with William Penn’s Quaker ‘Holy Experiment’ as aprefiguration. The Declaration of Independence had set up a newtheory of government—the absolute condemnation of Europeanpolitics—while the Founding Fathers not only continued thestruggle for the introduction of conscience into politics but also,with the federal structure of the constitution, introduced ‘thesupreme guarantee’ of freedom and democracy. Making acomparative point succinctly, Acton wrote ‘French Revolution—pathology, American—normal development of ideas’. For him,the USA had produced ‘a community more powerful, moreprosperous, more intelligent and more free than any other thatthe world has seen’.11American historians would presumably have experienced nodifficulty in accepting ideas such as these, or most of thesentiments put forward by Acton in his confidential report to theSyndics of the Cambridge University Press in 1896 concerningthe suggested project of ‘a history of the World’. Recommend-ing the avoidance of ‘the needless utterance of opinion, and theservice of a cause’, Acton went on to declare: ‘Contributors willunderstand that we are established, not under the meridian ofGreenwich, but in Longitude 30 West—that our Waterloo mustbe one that satisfies French and English, Germans and Dutch alikethat nobody can tell, without examining the list of authors...’Nobody should be able to detect who put the pen down and whotook it up, although The Cambridge Modern History should becomposed by pens ‘English, American and Colonial’ with ‘acapable foreigner rather than an inferior countryman’ to be takenonly ‘in an emergency’.Ultimate history they could not have in their generation, butthey could dispose of conventional history, now that all informationwas within reach, and every problem capable of solution. In astirring passage, Acton explained what he meant by ‘UniversalHistory’:that which is distinct from the combined history of allcountries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuousdevelopment, and is not a burden on the memory, but anillumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to whichthe nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not fortheir own sake, but in reference and subordination to ahigher series according to the time and the degree in whichthey contribute to the common fortunes of mankind.Secondary states appear, in perspective, when they carryflame or fuel, not when they are isolated, irrelevant, stag-nant, inarticulate, passive, when they lend nothing to theforward progress or the upward growth, and offer no aidin solving the perpetual problem of the future. Renaissanceand the Epoch of Discovery, Reformation and Wars of Religion, Turkish Crusade and Western Colonization,European Absolutism, Dutch, English, American, FrenchRevolution, and its derivatives, the constitutionaldemocratic, national, social, Liberal, Federal movement ofthe world that is the great argument of the Epic that weare to expose. These things are extraterritorial, having theirhome in the sky, and no more confined to race or frontierthan a rainbow or a storm.12As 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 ofcause, not that of fortuitous juxtaposition’. Hippolyte Taine hadbeen right when he had said that to explain events, it is enoughto put them in the proper order: to put them in their place is toexpress their cause. Thus, religion, philosophy, literature, scienceand art influenced the course of public events from time to time:‘but when they do not then we are not concerned with them, andhave not to describe their orbit when there is no conjunction.’ Insuch a manner, establishing the proportion between historicthought and historic fact, and adhering to the higher series, Actonhoped that The Cambridge Modern History would act as a chartand compass for the coming century, and also establish ‘in whatmeasure history might be able to afford the basis for a truephilosophy of Life’.Steering a course beyond longitude 30 to about 75 west,crossing the Atlantic Ocean rather than moving towards itsmiddle, 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 FrederickJackson Turner asserted its impact on the further frontiers, andCharles Beard was among those interested in a ‘New History’ ofbroader scope and greater utility than its old predecessor.Meanwhile, on the landward side of Europe, longitude 30 eastand more, the Russian peoples, previously ‘inert’ in Acton’s view,were soon to rise up in the Revolution of 1905 in the wake of theRusso-Japanese War. The historians among them were torecommend a variety of ways forward, from the Westernparliamentary to the Marxist Soviet, with the most outstanding,V.O.Kliuchevsky, preferring the first but not convinced that thepattern of his country’s past would allow it. Unfortunately, asyet, Kliuchevsky and his colleagues in Russia, even Adams,Bancroft, Turner and Beard in the USA, had still to make theirfull mark in Europe, while wider attention was not easily securedby scholars from the continent’s lesser powers. To be sure,Benedetto Croce was to achieve lasting influence with hisargument that all history is contemporary history, that descriptionof past events refers in reality to ‘present needs and presentsituations’. And Croce was not the only outsider to make animpression on the guild of historians in process of formation atthe turn of the century.13To capture the perceived circumstances of the end of thenineteenth century is not easy, but perhaps as good an approachas any is to quote a widely celebrated work of the French historianCharles Seignobos, translated into English in 1901 as A PoliticalHistory of Contemporary Europe:The war of 1870 ended the crisis of nationalist wars.Germany, supreme in Europe, has obliged the other statesto adopt her military system and has put a stop to war bymaking it horrible.... All warlike action has related to theOrient and has been practically outside of Europe.... Warhas ceased. The perfect police system and the vast militarypower of the governments have made revolutionsimpossible.To varying extents, Lamprecht, Berr and Acton might haveagreed. However, Seignobos went on to observe: ‘A naturaltendency to attribute great effects to great causes leads us to explainpolitical evolution, like geological evolution, by deep andcontinuous forces, more far-reaching than individual actions. Thehistory of the nineteenth century accords ill with this idea.’ For thethree major crises in Europe after Waterloo, in 1830, 1848 and 1870,were all accidents, ‘sudden crises caused by sudden events’: thework respectively of a group of obscure republicans, aided by theblunders of Charles X; of certain democratic and socialist agitators,aided by Louis Philippe’s sudden lack of nerve; and of Bismarckpersonally, prepared by Napoleon III’s personal policy. Seignobosconcluded: ‘For these three unforeseen facts no general cause canbe discerned in the intellectual, economic, or political condition ofthe continent of Europe. It was three accidents that determinedthe political evolution of modern Europe.’ The approach of Seignobos would continue through thetwentieth century, with a latter-day version put forward byH.A.L. Fisher in 1936: ‘I can see only one emergency followingupon another...the play of the contingent and unforeseen.’ Sucha view, of 1914, 1939 and other world crises, is still widelyaccepted today. On the other hand, in spite of many unresolvedproblems (for example, the definition of ‘science’ and‘conscience’) and vastly different circumstances, there are thosewho would want to persist with the aspirations of Lamprecht,Berr and Acton for a universal history, now that the debate isjoined on the kind of watershed we are facing at the fin demillénaire.
No comments:
Post a Comment