Historians From England

"It was one of the self-delusions of the age that the Sixties were an era of heightened political consciousness. ‘Everyone’ (or at least everyone under twenty-five attending an educational establishment and drawn to radical ideas) was in the streets and mobilized for a cause. The deflation of the causes—and the demobilization of the coming decades—thus confers in retrospect an air of failure upon a decade of frenetic political activity. But in certain important respects the Sixties were actually a vital decade for the opposite reason: they were the moment when Europeans in both halves of the continent began their definitive turn away from ideological politics. Thus the slogans and projects of the Sixties’ generation, far from re-awakening a revolutionary tradition whose language and symbols they so energetically sought to reinvigorate, can be seen in hindsight to have served as its swansong. In Eastern Europe, the ‘revisionist’ interlude and its tragic dénouement saw off the last illusions of Marxism as a practice. In the West, Marxist and para-Marxist theories soared clear of any relationship to local reality, disqualifying themselves from any future role in serious public debate. In 1945 the radical Right had discredited itself as a legitimate vehicle for political expression. By 1970, the radical Left was set fair to emulate it. A 180-year cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close."

"Such knowledge [of contemporary physicists] is clearly not the same as that derived by abstraction from individual cases: abstraction can provide us with knowledge of accidents but not necessary attributes as such. If we find that the search for essences can in fact only take the form of abstraction from individual cases then Aristotle's account of what counts as an explanation in physics is an unrealisable ideal."

"If you don't think explicitly about big history, you are condemned to making all kinds of assumptions that may be unfruitful, counterproductive, or just plain ignorant. It is something that every historian has to think about at some stage, and it distinguishes history from antiquarianism."

"Gaukroger believes that contemporary physicists concern themselves with a kind of mathematical knowledge that“ is clearly not the same as that derived by abstraction from individual cases.” Indeed, he goes goes so far as to claim that true scientific knowledge, “cannot be attained, at least in Aristotelian physics and cosmology."

"Stoppard's Night and Day was dedicated to his friend Paul Johnson, the historian and polemicist. Of the many funerals I have attended in 2023, Paul's was the one I'd least expected to be at. For 25 years, from the late 1970s on, I mocked him in print whenever he wrote anything that seemed to merit it—which, given his prolific and often intemperate output, was very often. He in turn accused me of "playing Job Trotter to [Christopher] Hitchens's Alfred Jingle Esq", a taunt I still cherish. When he threatened to sue unless I stopped goading him, this merely encouraged me to give him another prod. About 20 years ago, however, the fun went out of this sport—perhaps because Paul was well into his seventies, or perhaps because I'd run out of epithets to hurl. Thanks to an intercession by his saintly wife, Marigold, he turned up at a book launch I was hosting, shook me firmly by the hand and agreed an immediate ceasefire. A few years later, he descended into the abyss of Alzheimer's. "The Gospel today had Jesus enjoining us to make peace with our enemies," one of Paul’s children later wrote to me, "and I am sure that you did the right thing by putting an end to your feud with my father while you could.""

"In a novel called Left of Centre which is now, to the relief of its publisher and author alike, safely out of print, Paul Johnson wrote what is generally agreed to be the most embarrassing spanking scene ever penned. The eclipse of this otherwise unreadable novel did nothing to dim the memory of the cringemaking episode, which was continually called to mind by Johnson's public and social behaviour. This often involved drunken and boorish conduct towards women, including his wife. On a famous occasion in a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street in 1973, he struck her across the face for disagreeing with him in public and, when rebuked for this by a colleague of mine, threatened to put him through a plate-glass window. At a lunch given for the Israeli ambassador to Britain in the boardroom of the old New Statesman, I watched Johnson bully and barrack Corinna Adam, then the foreign editor, as she attempted to engage Gideon Raphael in conversation. "Don't listen to her, she's a Communist", he kept bellowing, his face twisted and puce with drink. "Fascist bitch!", he finally managed, before retiring to a sofa on the other side of the room and farting his way through a fitful doze for the rest of the meal. ... Long before he made his much-advertised stagger from left to right, Johnson had come to display all the lineaments of the snob, the racist and the bigot."

"I must confess I have not as yet found a permanent replacement for Mr Johnson. His catty jokes about politicians take some matching. But I had had enough of spanking for Britain."

"Many of my contemporaries have vivid memories of visits to our home in Iver. There my father presided over idyllic Sunday lunches, improvising quizzes for us children and entertaining the Worsthornes, Frasers, Howards, Stoppards, Amises, Gales and countless others with conversation and jokes that flowed and gurgled like a bubbling stream. When the talk turned to politics, he could be combative. We children didn’t like that. Aged about six, I tackled him: "Daddy, why do you go on and on about Mr Wilson?" "Why do you go on about the Daleks?" he replied. "The Daleks are important," I said. After lunch there were walks in Langley Park, culminating in the hunt for sixpences, hidden in a giant hollow tree where (he claimed) the Great Train Robbers had stashed their loot. My recollection of him taking me to London on my seventh birthday is a joy: riding in a taxi, visiting the New Statesman office as the editor's son, and then to Bertorelli’s for lunch, where he introduced me to Vicky, the great cartoonist, who was not much taller than I was. He seemed to know everyone. When I was puzzled by my part in a school play by J.B. Priestley, he suddenly said: "Let’s ring old Jack up and ask him." Next minute, I heard an aged voice with a Yorkshire accent saying: "Oh yes, Time and the Conways. Damn good play, that. What’s the problem?""

"It was part of Rousseau's vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. 'I feel too superior to hate.' 'I love myself too much to hate anybody.' 'Never have I known the hateful passions, never did jealousy, wickedness, vengeance enter my heart … anger occasionally but I am never crafty and never bear a grudge.' In fact he frequently bore grudges and was crafty in pursuing them."

"This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched."

"Intellectuals is a caricature of the bad faith it itself denounces. Were we to judge it by Johnson's own standards, the result would be clear. We would not give a fig for Mr Johnson's private life. He might be an excellent husband, an admirable father, a good colleague, and even in his other work a decent historian. None of this would redeem the shallowness of his arguments."

"With Lenin he shared a quasi-religious approach to politics, though in sheer crankiness he had much more in common with Hitler (…) One of his favourite books was Constipation and Our Civilization, which he constantly reread. (…) His eccentricities appealed to a nation which venerates sacral oddity. But his teachings had no relevance to India’s problems. (…) His food policy would have led to mass starvation. In fact Gandhi’s own ashram (…) had to be heavily subsidized by three merchant princes. And Gandhi was expensive in human life as well as money. The events of 1920–21 indicated that though he could bring a mass-movement into existence, he could not control it. Yet he continued to play the sorcerer's apprentice, while the casualty bill mounted into hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and the risks of a gigantic sectarian and racial explosion accumulated. This blindness to the law of probability in a bitterly divided subcontinent made nonsense of Gandhi’s professions that he would not take life in any circumstances."

"Well then, who had he had time for, during his 24 years in the Party, if he didn't like collectivists and didn't like moderates? There was a pause. "Well, Benn. I have a high opinion of Wedgwood Benn. He is committed to a form of collectivism, but at least he is honest and original. I'd like to see him leading the Labour Party." You could have knocked me down with a feather. But, I said, would not Benn's leadership of the Labour Party make it still more likely that the country would go collectivist, with the inevitable erosion of our liberties as outlined by Johnson in his "Farewell"? Not necessarily, Johnson replied, because Benn was a genuine democrat, and might, when it came to the crunch between collectivism and liberty, choose liberty. But it would be too late by then! Well, said Johnson, it might be. But at least Benn leading Labour and Thatcher leading the Tories would present the country with "a proper chloice" between collectivism and individualism. This struck me as dotty."

"Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance."

"Mussolini was a reluctant fascist because, underneath, he remained a Marxist, albeit a heretical one."

"Before I am denounced as a reactionary fuddy-duddy, let us pause an instant and see exactly what we mean by this "youth". Both TV channels now run weekly programmes in which popular records are played to teenagers and judged. While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! The huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store makeup, the open, sagging mouths and glazed eyes, the broken stiletto heels: here is a generation enslaved by a commercial machine. ... Are teenagers different today? Of course not. Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures: their existence, in such large numbers, far from being a cause for ministerial congratulation, is a fearful indictment of our education system, which in 10 years of schooling can scarcely raise them to literacy."

"But violence is an evil continuum which begins with the inflammatory verbal pursuit of class war, continues with Grunwick and the lawless use of union power, progresses to knives, clubs and acid-bombs of Lewisham and Ladywood and then—as we may well fear—rapidly accelerates into full-blooded terrorism with firearms, explosives and an utter contempt for human life. This where the Labour Party is heading. It has already embraced corporatism, which ultimately must mean the end of parliamentary democracy. But corporatism plus violence is infinitely worse. It is fascism; Left-wing fascism maybe, marxist-fascism if you like, but still fascism all the same."

"The article by Roald Dahl in the August Issue of Literary Review is, in my view, the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publication for a very, long time. Indeed 1 cannot recall anything like it ... As a rule, in a civilised country like Britain, those who hate the Israelis, or the Jews in general, are careful to mask their views behind a screen of anti-Zionism, thus in theory giving their collective condemnation a political rather than a racial rationale. Dahl is a different case. He is too reckless, or too angry, or too confident in getting away with it, to take such precautions."

"I would therefore abolish the monarchy and House of Lords, dispossess ... the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge; end the regimental system in the army ... disestablish the Church; replace the Inns of Court ... abolish the Honours List. What is more, we should take the offensive on all these fronts simultaneously: for if the apostles of social change eschew violence, they must embrace speed. Our society is a many-headed hydra: it is no use chopping off the heads singly, for while you are dealing with the second or third, the first will grow again."

"It is the nature of the Hindu religion to be tolerant and, in its own curious way, permissive. Under the socialist regime of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family successors the state was intolerant, restrictive and grotesquely bureaucratic. That has largely changed (though much bureaucracy remains), and the natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set has replaced quasi-Marxist rigidity."

"I have just finished what is, without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read. It is a new novel entitled Dr. No and the author is Mr Ian Fleming. ... By the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away, and only continued reading because I realised that here was a social phenomenon of some importance. There are three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult. Mr Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten in a haphazard manner. But the three ingredients are manufactured and blended with deliberate, professional precision ... Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Fleming's poison. ..."

"This kind of racial abuse is, thank God, rare in British journalism nowadays. The present case is serious, however, because Dahl is a well-known and successful author who, among other things, writes books for children and whose work is frequently used on TV. I ant not suggesting he be hauled before the Race Relations Board, a body which, I suspect, provokes rather than reduces racial antagonism, or indeed the Press Council, a tribunal which is falling in- to contempt. The most effective action the civilised community can take is for reputable writers to refuse to be associated with a journal which publishes such filth."

"[I]t is about time we destroyed the British class system"

"A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason."

"Edwin Cannan significantly influenced Hayek and many other economists, although, as Hayek noted, the “part he played is little known beyond a rather narrow circle.” Hayek held that Cannan—together with Mises in Vienna and Frank Knight in Chicago—was responsible for the preservation and transmission of classical liberalism during the early decades of the twentieth century."

"As Hayek wrote, the role that Edwin Cannan has played in the transmission and development of liberalism is little known. The school of liberal thought he established at the London School of Economics has proven lasting and influential across disciplines. According to economic historian Henry Spiegel, Cannan was “the leading student of classical economics in the England of his time.” Murray Rothbard, who was an excellent historian of economic theory, had a very high opinion of Cannan’s work. Leading contemporary economic historian Denis O’Brien writes that “Cannan’s strong critical attitude and wide scholarship are of great value to economists.”"

"Perry Anderson is a towering figure in the annals of contemporary Marxism. As such, he deserves a special sort of intellectual history, one that engages and illuminates and challenges."

"The writing of western European history as the rise, fall, and succession of ancient, feudal, and bourgeois modes of production is a fascinating project. But the only person to try it seriously soon throws the Marxist apparatus over the side, where it splashes and sinks to the bottom of the sea. Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State are great and fascinating books, but they are not Marxist. They are Weberian. The key processes in Anderson's books concern not "modes of production" but rather "modes of domination." And when Marx and Engels's writings became sacred texts for the world religion called Communism, things passed beyond the absurd into tragedy and beyond tragedy into horror: the belief that the logic of development of the economy was the most important thing about society became entangled in the belief that Joe Stalin or Mao Zedong or Pol Pot or Kim Il Sung or Fidel Castro was our benevolent master and ever-wise guide."

"The range of emotions parents can arouse in their children – affection, rebellion, indifference, fear, adulation, their disturbing combinations – suggest a repertory of subjective universals, cutting in each individual case at random across cultures. What children know – as opposed to feel – about their parents, on the other hand, is likely to be a function of objective constraints that vary more systematically: tradition, place, life-span."

"A wonderful range of writing is offered in these and other forms. Stylistically, there are unspoken limits. The delphic or serpentine are not part of the repertoire. No fear could be more foreign to the journal than of ‘the mischief of premature clarification’, against which Fredric Jameson – whose arrival in its pages is a welcome departure from consistency – once warned. The too vehement is likewise at some discount, suspect of ‘rant’. Perhaps the best way of conveying the overall climate would be to say that the paper resists any trace of l’esprit du sérieux, in the Sartrean sense: that is, of the portentous, high-minded, hypocritical. Against all these, its playfulness finds expression on the largest as well as smallest of topics. Emblematic in this collection are the saturnine tones of Edward Luttwak, as a ‘heavy-weight’ contributor. 12 It is enough to think of the contributions of President Havel to the New York Review to understand their antithesis."

"Over this landscape, Göran Therborn's Between Sex and Power rises up like some majestic volcano. Throwing up a billowing column of ideas and arguments, while a lava of evidence flows down its slopes, this is a great work of historical intellect and imagination, the effect of a rare combination of gifts. Trained as a sociologist, Therborn is a highly conceptual thinker, allying the formal rigour of his discipline at its best, with command of a vast range of empirical data. The result is a powerful theoretical structure, supported by a fascinating body of evidence. But it is also a set of macro-narratives that compose perhaps the first true example of a work of global history we possess."

"Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgement. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of Marx is never mentioned but his spirit is omnipresent, transforms the landscape of the English Revolution. Merchants and Revolution is distinguished by three achievements, any one of which would be impressive enough. Together, their combination is an extraordinary feat."

"Great men have foibles for which they can be forgiven; including an occasional failure to see where their greatness lies, or what might diminish it."

"The Violencia that ravaged Colombia for the next decade, pitting Liberals against the ruling Conservatives, took 200,000 lives – a catastrophe worse than any endured in Peru. This was the historical background to Márquez’s early career as a journalist and writer. But he seems to have remained eerily untouched by it."

"Historically, even in the greatest minds of the Enlightenment, they could be at variance. Rousseau, the most advanced political thinker of his generation, was emotionally a pietist; Voltaire, politically at ease with a benevolent absolutism, scorned the consolations of Savoyard Christianity. For Timpanaro, Leopardi had represented the possibility of a synthesis beyond either: firm republicanism, unswerving atheism."

"At times, in the scales of misery, society seemed of small account to Leopardi – emperor and beggar alike pitched into the grave. So conceived, philosophical pessimism always risked becoming political defeatism. Timpanaro was not subject to this temptation. He was intensely – even on occasion, he admitted, too vehemently – political. But he was also quite free from the monomania of any ‘pan-politicism’, as he once called it."

"All hegemonies have their limits, and no policies ever achieve just what they intend. But the salient feature of the present is not that the world at large is out of control, but that it has never been subject to such an extent of control by one power, acting to diffuse and enforce one system, as we see today."

"The – now shop-worn – label of ‘magical realism’ is customarily applied to Márquez’s novels. It has never fitted Vargas Llosa, who disavows the adjective."

"Rawls resorted to Hegel in his internal reflections on a constitutional state. On the plane of inter-state relations, Kant remained his philosopher of reference, as the theorist of conditions for a perpetual peace. So too for Habermas. But since Kant failed to envisage the necessary legal framework for a cosmopolitan order, as it started to take shape through the permanent institutions of the United Nations, Habermas, when he came to review the progress made since 1945, also looked towards the philosopher of objective idealism. Measured against the sombre background of the disasters of the first half of the twentieth century, he decided, ‘the World Spirit, as Hegel would have put it, has lurched forward’. As we have seen, Bobbio was responsible for the most pointed appeal to Hegel of all. In one sense, he was more entitled to do so."

"Welcoming Hegel’s idea of reconciliation as akin to his own enterprise of public reason, Rawls drew the line at his vision of the international realm as a domain of violence and anarchy, in which contention between sovereign states was bound to be regulated by war. Habermas’s gesture enlisted Hegel, on the contrary, as a patron of cosmopolitan peace. The first could not square his Law of Peoples with the lawlessness of Hegel’s states, the second could only enrol Hegel for pacific progress by turning him philosophically inside out. Bobbio, by contrast, could take the measure of Hegel’s conception of world history, as a ruthless march of great powers in which successive might founds overarching right, and invoke it in all logic to justify his approval of American imperial violence. Law was born of force, and the maxim of the conqueror – prior in tempore, potior in jure– still held."

"The greater pleasures of reading the LRB are thus paid for in a more erratic and limited horizon."

"It will take time to get a more settled sense of Thompson’s distinction as a historian and a writer. His work spans too many forms for easy judgement, and its aura can be a temptation to short cuts. But a tension between what might be called his nineteenth and his eighteenth century sensibility was certainly at the creative centre of it."

"Bobbio’s theoretical defence of the distinction between Left and Right, for all its eloquence, may thus be more vulnerable than it appears. If we ask why this should be so, the answer surely lies in the difficulty of constructing an axiology of political values without coherent reference to the empirical social world. Bobbio often writes as if he could separate his ideal taxonomy from contemporary history, but of course he cannot. In practice he admits the political scenery of the present into his account selectively, for the purposes of his argument. But it is in that present that the deeper reasons and limits of his intervention lie."

"In certain temperaments, intellectual skills and political sympathies have little or no connection. Frege’s anti-Semitism or Wittgenstein’s philo-Stalinism lacked significant leads to their philosophy. Such cases are common enough. Timpanaro was not one of them."

"What the structure of Rawls’s argument indicates is a more fundamental feature of his thought. This is an amphibious world, which contains just enough land of real social reference to avoid the tricky deeps of first philosophy (the gesture is roughly: let’s start out from where we’re at – in other words, Bush–Clinton country), while floating carefully enough on the waters of abstraction to avoid contact with the ground of actual political change (for example: what has happened in the US since the 1970s). The result is a kind of political cabotage, a critique of existing society that clings nervously to its shores. Readers of Rawls might well ask: where is the actual justice in the United States that corresponds to the ideal construct he offers us, if it is based on ‘plain truths widely accepted by citizens’?"

"The first, and most obvious, feature that separates Habermas’s later treatment of law from his original study of the public sphere is its completely unhistorical method."

"The dichotomies which are the signature of their work – the esoteric and the exoteric, the civil and the managerial, the friend and the foe, the lawful and the legislative – are so many cordons. Their function is to hold popular sovereignty at bay. The different gifts displayed in this enterprise, whatever view is taken of it, were remarkable. For all his later tendency to textual dressage, Strauss's range and subtlety as a master of the canon of political philosophy had no equal in his generation. Schmitt's moral instability never impaired an extraordinary capacity to fuse conceptual insight and metaphoric imagination in lightning flashes of illumination around the state. Hayek could seem tactically ingenuous, but he fashioned a theoretical synthesis out of his epistemology and economics whose scope and strength has yet to be supplanted. Oakeshott was the literary artist in this gallery. His writing varies considerably in quality, and can be whimsically arch at one moment and curiously crude at another, disconcertingly close to Punch or Cross-Bencher. But at its best, when it moves into high register, it can rise to a lyrical beauty."

"The trope was eminently Oakeshottian. Politics was not a battle of interests, or a quest for truth, or a voyage of progress – it was an aesthetic performance, to captivate an audience. But it was not high theatre (Oakeshott had also insisted that politics was a second-rate activity). It was more like commercial theatre, the drama of the boulevards that plays to our emotions or embarrassments – Rattigan rather than Racine, he explained. On this stage, Mount has certainly given us a stylish production. We might call it the comedy of reform."

"Historically, Garton Ash belongs to the last levy of the Cold War, a cohort fired by an uncomplicated anti-Communism. His staunchness made him a natural candidate for recruitment to MI6, which propositioned him early on, as it had Ascherson in his time."

"Beyond the discrepant local sympathies of these careers – with their splay of temporary identities: Conservative, Zionist, Nazi, Old Whig – they reflected a common theoretical calling. […] In Schmitt’s own writing, the obscure figure assumes various – typically oblique – historical guises, as political or juridical restrainer in different epochs. But the Stygian cap fits the collective effort of this cluster of thinkers. For these were indeed constructions designed to hold something back. What they all in the end sought to restrain was the risks of democracy – seen and feared through the prisms of their theories of law, as the abyss of its absence: to misterion tes anomias, the mystery of lawlessness."