by David Gress

On the 1989 meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco.

Americans, we often hear, are uninterested in history. Certainly there has been nothing in this country to compare to the quite extraordinary revival of narrative historiography in the 1980s in virtually every European country. In the major countries—Britain, France, Germany, Italy—several multivolume works on national history compete for attention, each representing distinct methodological, cultural, and narrative traditions.

In France, for instance, Fayard’s six-volume Histoire de France bears the mark of the detailed, documentary scholarship of the École des Chartes, a scholarship focused firmly on politics and the state. This tradition has been unjustly overshadowed abroad by the reputation of the Annales school of social history, whose adherents emphasize “the structures of everyday life.”

On the other side, Hachette’s five lavishly illustrated quarto-format volumes by leading Annalistes like François Furet, Georges Duby, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladourie testify not only that Annalistes are capable of writing brilliantly for le grand public, but that they, too, have made the turn back to questions of politics and of the doctrines and beliefs governing political action. In the smaller countries, the size of the readership dictates that representatives of differing traditions contribute to a single grand enterprise; one example is the sixteen-volume History of Denmark, edited by Olaf Olsen, the Keeper of Antiquities at the National Museum in Copenhagen.

The Danish example is quite instructive for anyone who contemplates the state of the discipline in America. This was abundantly evident at the American Historical Association’s 104th annual meeting, held in the last days of 1989 in San Francisco, where close to two thousand historians congregated to discuss a broad range of historical subjects.¹

First, like Americans, Danes are supposed to be ahistorical and intellectually lazy. Second, Mr. Olsen, the Danish History’s general editor, was for many years fashionably interested in Marxism and Maoism, despite—or maybe because of—the fact that his field was Viking history. The son of a Communist historian who was notorious for his sarcastic harassment of students he considered “bourgeois,” Mr. Olsen followed the trajectory of the academy in the 1970s, but has now returned to a less ideological position, interested, once more, in what the past was and not in how it should be judged by contemporary preferences. Third, these volumes, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, are uniformly well written, disproving the claim that the results of serious, up-to-date scholarship cannot be rendered in commonly understood language, or that the issues of history cannot be made interesting to the ordinary citizen. And fourth, forty thousand subscriptions to the sixteen-volume set, at a price of about seven hundred fifty dollars, have been sold so far in a country of five million, where print runs of less than one thousand copies are standard for works of fiction, and where serious nonfiction often cannot be published without generous public support. This corresponds to sales of about two million copies in the United States. Can anyone imagine publishing a history of the United States—or any combination of histories—on that scale and at such a price, and managing to sell two million copies?

If the answer is no, it has a good deal to do with what many American historians think they ought to be doing and how they ought to do it. Unlike their leading European colleagues, they have not stopped fighting the ideological battles of the 1960s, even though the victors in those battles are now in control of the academy and its hiring process. These historians seem more interested in tormenting the records of the past to fit currently dominant intellectual predilections than in writing works of general interest or significance, works of broad narrative history that might bridge the gap between original research in specialized fields and the much-lamented historical ignorance of the American public. In fact, American historians sneer at those who do undertake that task, which was formerly considered an essential cultural activity. Simon Schama, the author of Citizens, the best-selling history of the French Revolution that appeared in 1989, has come in for particular denigration on this score.²

One important current preoccupation of the American historical profession is feminism—not, of course, as a subject of study, but as a political effort to import the agenda of upper-middle-class American feminism of the late 1980s into the study and interpretation of the past.

The theme of the meeting in San Francisco (although other topics were discussed as well) was the French Revolution, a subject one would have thought to be of some general interest. Nevertheless, the main local news story about the meeting, in The San Francisco Chronicle, announced “Feminism on Historians’ Agenda” and featured an interview with Ellen Friedman of Boston College. In the article, Professor Friedman announced gleefully that “women’s history is expanding its influence in the universities, which are becoming more receptive to a feminist view of the past.” Not a word about the main theme of the meeting or, indeed, about the important controversies concerning the French Revolution and the legacy of revolution in general, controversies that help explain the world-historical changes we are now witnessing in Eastern Europe. As far as Professor Friedman was concerned, the most important aspect of this annual meeting was that women were now found on all the panels: “there is representation and participation everywhere … I keep hearing we’re in the post-feminist age … but the academy tells a different story.”

Indeed it does. About a year and a half ago, when the program of this meeting was being put together, I suggested to one of my local colleagues that the meeting might include a panel on the expansion of state power in Western Europe in the early modern period (1500-1800). Not only was this subject of some general interest, including as it did the changing role of politics and religion in Western societies, the methods and institutions of power, and the role of war in promoting or hampering political change. It was also an area that in recent years had seen some of the most exciting scholarship in any area of European history.

The response I got was surprising: “Well, yes, why don’t you go ahead and propose a panel on that. By the way, you should know that the program committee will not consider a panel proposal that does not include at least one woman, so be sure you find one.” I already knew that the American academy was hopelessly ideologized, far more so than the European universities had been even in the worst days after 1968. But somehow it had not occurred even to me that people I still naively persisted in thinking of as serious historians would regard the sexual composition of a panel as more important than the substantive interest of the subject to be discussed.

In the event, I had too many other commitments at the time to propose a panel, but I did not forget the admonition. In San Francisco I verified that, of the one hundred forty-odd panels, none was without at least one female participant, and there was a solid core of all-female panels (all of them with feminist subjects).

Had I not had the earlier conversation, I would doubtless not have noticed this. With that conversation in mind, however, I naturally found myself wondering how many women panelists had been included for quota reasons, and how many because they happened to be among the best people for that particular subject. I also wondered to what extent panel subjects themselves were now subject to a sort of censorship: in other words, a decree that the annual meeting will only discuss subjects of interest to feminist historians.

Finally, I speculated (dangerous thought) to what extent subservience to this crude form of feminism was now a litmus test for appointment in the academy, a speculation I may at some point have cause to test. I don’t know if Professor Friedman cares about this, or cares that other women historians are being treated—and, evidently, choose to treat themselves—as components of a quota. Probably not. But the underlying assumption is quite troubling for anyone concerned with the future and the broader relevance of history as a cultural activity.

The very notion of history as a cultural activity had an alien ring at the meeting. I almost said an “archaic” ring, until I recalled the very different situation in Europe. There, as I have said, the profession has largely recovered from the illnesses that so viciously beset its American members. There are, certainly, many European historians who think that history should leave out politics and focus on daily life, social beliefs, and the supposedly ignored achievements of women and minorities. The undeniable fact, however, is that leading historians in every European country have dared, once again, to say that history should play a role in contemporary culture, and that it can only play such a role if it is about the important things—about the passions, conflicts, and beliefs of the past and about how those beliefs have produced the modern world. These historians have also understood that the only way to make good on these promises is to write, and to write well, in order to bring the drama of the past to life for modern audiences.

One who has done this magnificently is François Furet, who is probably today the world’s leading authority on the French Revolution. He was, naturally, present at the AHA meeting, though none of the local media found it worthwhile to interview the man who single-handedly overturned the Jacobin and Marxist orthodoxy that was dominant for almost a century in French revolutionary historiography.

Furet is in many ways an awkward figure for contemporary American historians. He began as a fully accredited Annaliste in the 1960s, emerging from the school of Fernand Braudel at the old Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. As early as 1965, he infuriated the guardians of Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy by producing a political history of the French Revolution that dared to point out its negative aspects, and to argue that the Terror of 1792-94 was not a justified necessity but a prefiguration of modern totalitarianism that grew naturally from the egalitarian extremism and moralism of the revolutionary leaders.

In his most recent work, Furet takes a more positive view of the Revolution as a whole, viewing it as the first consistent experiment in political democracy. He has also argued in France that the Revolution is, finally, “over,” and that the French should now learn to see its passions and divisions as part of their past and culture, but not as reasons for internecine hatred and conflict today. During the bicentennial celebrations of 1989, Furet appeared on innumerable talk shows and magazine covers, earning nationwide recognition and proving a popular interest in events of two hundred years past—an interest that sparked some contempt at the AHA meeting.

This was evident at a panel discussing “The Origins of the French Revolution.” Michel Vovelle, a French colleague of Furet’s who is still committed to an old-style Annaliste focus on attitudes and their social constraints as determinants of behavior, rather than on politics, could not attend the meeting but sent in a paper criticizing Furet for having changed his mind too often.

According to Vovelle, “Furet I” was crudely anti-Jacobin and anti-Communist (Vovelle is himself a Communist), “Furet II” believed that people might have political beliefs independent of their social origins or earlier world view, and, in 1989, “Furet III” simply popularized the conservative view that the Revolution was over and that a liberal democracy was the standard of the future. Very curiously for a Communist, Vovelle went on to argue that the Revolution was not over at all, as could easily be seen from Eastern Europe: there, as in France in 1789, the people were rebelling against arbitrary rule that had lost all legitimacy; there, as in France, a sophisticated public opinion and articulated political culture had developed too far to tolerate the limits imposed by an archaic despotism. Unfortunately, Furet was not at hand on this panel to make the obvious retort: that the East Europeans wanted freedom, not terror, and that the East European dictatorships were the true heirs of the revolutionaries who seized absolute power in the name of the people in order to institute brutal oppression.

In a panel devoted to his own work, Furet maintained that he had not contradicted himself, only deepened and broadened his views. In the 1960s and 1970s, he had to make the case that a non-Marxist and non-Jacobin interpretation of the Revolution was serious, not merely an expression of counterrevolutionary resentment. When it became clear, by the early 1980s, that the evidence did not support the Marxist view that the Revolution was a struggle between bourgeois and nobles and that it represented the victory of industrial capitalism in France, Furet could go on to a more general study of what the revolutionaries believed, and how much popular support they in fact had.

The result of this work appeared in Furet’s 1988 volume in Hachette’s Histoire de France, which I mentioned above. Setting the Revolution in the context and the continuity of French history from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, Furet saw it primarily as an explosion of genuine democratic ideology, growing out of the Enlightenment and the broad, sophisticated public opinion that existed in France by the 1780s. As the first experiment in true democracy in Europe, it was not a failure, though the Terror showed that it would be a long time before stable democracy would be possible in France.

If Furet is right that the Revolution was above all a political phenomenon, neither predetermined by class structure or beliefs, nor driven by deep social forces beyond individual control, he has undermined an important pillar of the leftist version of history. That this is clear to many of the Left emerged from an impassioned plea by a young American historian, Gary Kates, for historians not to “abandon the Revolution” to the conservatives.

In recent years, the Left has seen revolutionary societies around the world collapse in ignominy or sink into the kind of desperate poverty that they inevitably produce. In order to maintain the progressive, socialist world view in the classroom, leftist historians had two choices: either to jump aboard the bandwagon of feminist, social, and black history, with its wide spectrum of methods for attacking American democracy as flawed and useless, or to emphasize the French and Russian Revolutions of the past as great steps forward (whatever some of their consequences might have been). If serious scholars can now show that even the French Revolution was a failure as far as improving the life of the people was concerned, if they can show that it brought not freedom but violence, terror, war, and poverty, the very concept of revolution as a positive notion is in danger.

To counter this, Kates called on historians to prevent the revisionists (Furet, et al.) from imposing their emphasis on politics as the only way to study the French Revolution. If we look at the politics of the day as the main feature of the Revolution, Kates complained, we minimize its impact as a pedagogical tool today. What he meant was that if we study the Revolution honestly, we may not be able to use it to advocate radical change today. I could not help wondering precisely what it was in the old Marxist revolutionary legacy that Kates found so valuable: he is a man of my own generation, someone who has had to live through the distortions of scholarship and the social and economic difficulties of academics in the past decade or so, difficulties caused in large part by ideology taking the place of scholarship. Why would he possibly want to strengthen the ideology?

If I drew any one lesson from the meeting, it was that American historians, in too many cases, still have not faced the challenge that Gertrude Himmelfarb posed when she accused the so-called New History of “leaving the politics out,” that is, leaving out the one dimension worthy of general interest, the stage for those actions that affect us all. As I have mentioned, this New History is already old in Europe, where it coexists, often quite happily, with a revived and vigorous political history that explicitly addresses itself to an enlightened and curious public.

American historians often give the impression that they do not want to engage the grand issues, write the broad synthetic treatments, or offer the drama and conflict of the past for the edification of the present. In other words, they do not want to sustain our culture because, in many cases, they despise that culture and wish to undermine it. We do have, in America, important living political narrative historians, though many of them are actually of foreign—usually British—origin, like Simon Schama, Geoffrey Parker, and the splendidly promising recent arrival, David Cannadine. But they are a distinct minority.

One reason most American academic historians have abandoned the effort to contribute to a sympathetic understanding of our culture is older than current ideology: it has to do with the Teutonic traditions of the American doctoral dissertation, one of whose rules seems to have been: Write all you know as obscurely as possible. Hence the inveterately passive constructions, abstract nouns, and impersonal sentences so prevalent in most American historical writing.

But there are exceptions. The best American work of history of 1988 (and possibly of the decade) was Battle Cry of Freedom, an epochal history of the Civil War with all the politics left in, but also with a rich panorama of life in all its aspects: social, familial, spiritual, and economic. And it was written by an American, James McPherson. There was something symbolic in the fact that he was not at the AHA meeting, and that there was not one panel dealing with the political or military history of the Civil War—the most dramatic event in American history, and the one still most familiar to that culturally starved and deprived creature, the common citizen.

1.   The 104th meeting of the American Historical Association took place at the Hilton and St. Francis hotels in San Francisco from December 28 to December 30, 1989.
2.   Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama; Knopf, 948 pages, $29.95.

by David Gress

On social and philosophical complications.

The French political philosopher Raymond Aron, who died, at the age of seventy-eight, in October 1983, is perhaps best known to American readers as the author of a crushing indictment of Western Marxism and philo-Communism, The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), and of a skeptical, questioning, yet sympathetic view of America’s world role, The Imperial Republic (1973).¹ In fact, though Aron made many other significant contributions—in sociology, in strategy and international relations, in the history of ideas, in judgments on public policy, and in philosophy—to the culture and the spirit of democracy in the twentieth century, these two books well illustrate the range of his interests, sympathies, and learning.

Aron wrote The Opium of the Intellectuals from 1951 to 1954 as a refuge from personal tragedies, and in order to come to grips with and attack the belief, held by most French intellectuals of the time, that the Soviet Union, for all its possible faults, truly represented “the party of humanity,” that political consciousness had to be progressive, and that to be progressive was to support the Soviet Union and to criticize or oppose the United States. In writing it, he drew on his philosophical learning, his political knowledge, and his experiences as a journalist and commentator in postwar France.

He wrote the other work, The Imperial Republic, some twenty years later in an effort to explain the character and methods of American foreign policy and international behavior to an audience that, in France, was at best critical of, and at worst overtly hostile to, the United States. He began the book in response to Henry Kissinger’s proclamation of 1973 as the ‘Year of Europe” and ended it in the shadow of the Yom Kippur War, the OPEC oil embargo, the collapse of the dollar, Watergate, and American defeat in Vietnam. Conceived as a description of a certain state of affairs, a pattern of world politics dominated by America, it became in fact a history of a completed epoch, namely of the American hegemony that had both come and gone within Aron’s own lifetime. Where Opium drew on philosophy and journalism in about equal measure, The Imperial Republic drew on the significant skills that Aron cultivated in the second half of his public life as theorist of international relations, sociologist of power, political economist, and diplomatic historian.

What links the two books, and indeed all of Aron’s vast and varied oeuvre, is his passionate concern for the conditions and perils of freedom in the modern world, combined with a grasp of the profound movements, the secular shifts in world politics. Such a grasp can either beideological, with the purpose of domination and power, as in Marxism, or be philosophical, in which case its purpose is understanding. Aron’s grasp was of this latter kind. Like his great model, Alexis de Tocqueville, Raymond Aron sought to understand the world, not in order to change it—world-changers, he found, invariably caused more harm than good—but in order to determine the conditions under which civilized human life, and democratic politics, might be possible.

Aron, in other words, defended the idea of limited, contingent—but genuine—freedom in the real world, and did not demand the limitless, perfect freedom of Utopia as proclaimed by revolutionary Marxism. He did not have to wait for experience to know that the promise of limitless freedom must inevitably take the form of the most complete and thorough tyranny known to man. For him, this lesson did not grow out of political practice, but was a necessary consequence of human nature as manifested in history. Human nature is fallible and imperfect; we do not and cannot know what we would have to know in order to create the perfect society; therefore, the Marxist project of perfection must founder on the reefs of passion, recalcitrance, and the natural human interests that are simply unamenable to constant and total mobilization in the name of Utopia. For revolutionary Marxists, however, those interests are evil and irrational, and must be crushed, since nothing can be allowed to impede perfection. Hence the Gulag, the terror, the sixty million dead, and the hundreds of millions of crushed, exploited, and ruined lives that are Marxism-Leninism’s legacy to mankind.

The philosophy of history was the beginning and end of Axon’s reflective life, as he described it in his Memoirs, one of his two last major works.² At first glance, the book may appear rather dry and humorless, little more than a series of summaries of the author’s works, interspersed with accounts of his opinions and intellectual encounters. I recall discussing it with Alain Besançon, the Soviet scholar who inherited Aron’s column in L’Express, a few weeks after Axon’s death; I knew Besançon to be a fervent admirer of Aron, yet he dismissed the Memoirs as stilted and disappointing, offering little that is new, and certainly less rewarding than any of Axon’s other works. He contrasted the tedium of the book with the vitality and spirit of the man himself.

In his noteworthy tribute to his late teacher and friend, he wrote that “we all loved Aron physically, I can attest it, and found him very beautiful,” confessing also that “I am ill placed to judge Aron’s work, which I read to inform myself not so much about the world but rather about a personality that I loved, and in order to hear the distant echo of a voice that gave me pleasure.” Further on in the same piece, Besançon made the observation, surprising to many, that Aron, despite his conservative politics, his classical literary tastes, his impeccable appearance, and his perfect manners, was “at bottom a rebel, like so many young men of his generation, and remained so in the full sense, albeit discreetly. There was never a more rebellious generation than that of the 1930s . . . . All of them did not remain surrealists, all of them did not remain on the extreme Left or the extreme Right, but, as civilized rebels, they kept a space for practical jokes and mockery, obstinately rejecting excessive seriousness.”

Another unforgettable feature of the man himself was his eloquence. This, according to Besançon, “was of two kinds: ordinary and extraordinary. The ordinary kind was wholly admirable. The words flowed smoothly, vigorously, without hesitation. If they were recorded, one could print them as they were, with no change. But when circumstances required it, Aron’s eloquence took a leap into the realm of the absolute. . . . There was no pathos in this eloquence, but something dry, bare, profoundly personal, noble, elevated, chastely modest . . . related, in some ways, to the parliamentary eloquence of the English Revolution, of the former, that of the Puritans, and of the latter, that of the Whigs, by its restrained sarcasm, its bitter irony, its Tacitean concision, its overwhelming politeness.”³

Rereading the Memoirs after some years, I had to revise any earlier less-than-positive judgment. The formerly tedious accounts of Aron’s works became exciting itineraries. The meetings, discussions, encounters were anything but dry and bloodless; on the contrary, each of them yielded its part of the twentieth-century drama of will and aspiration, hope and defeat.

Nor is it true that the book is impersonal; Aron does not conceal the terrible tragedies of his life, the death of his second child or the mental handicap of the youngest, but mentions them precisely where they are necessary for the account to make sense, and with a habitual modesty that is all the more overwhelming in its effect.

More typical are the many places where Aron gives us his ruthlessly honest opinion of himself as a student, a journalist, or a candidate for professor at the Sorbonne in 1955. Perhaps most interesting of all are his reflections on his own lack of faith, his life as a secular Jew in modern France, and his own surprise at his strong emotional reaction to the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967 and to Charles de Gaulle’s indictment of Jews as “a self-confident and domineering people.”⁴ Indeed, this is no dusty account of lost debates and unimportant meetings, but a vibrant and indispensable chronicle of a vital part of our century.

In his other late important work, Les dernières années du siècle (1984), Aron undertook an assessment of world politics in the two decades since his masterpiece Peace and War (1962) and a preview of the “last years of the century,” an essay in applied philosophy of history that concluded by reiterating his famous statement of 1948 on superpower relations in the era of nuclear weapons and intercontinental rivalry: “Peace impossible; war unlikely.”⁵ On one level, Aron, in Les dernières années, offered brilliant strategic and diplomatic history as well as some remarkable predictions, for example of the economic crisis of the Soviet empire, the growing role of the Soviet military, and the rapid decline of American influence in Europe.⁶ On another level, he defined and illuminated the real choices facing democratic peoples by his skeptical philosophy that rejected both the pacifists’ intemperate fear of the future and the apocalyptic strategies of the nuclear warriors.

In rejecting both excessive moralism and false realism, Aron was applying the very philosophy of history that he had long ago distilled in his earliest work and was completing an arc of thought, a journey from theory to philosophical understanding of the political world, that he had begun in the 1930s. Back then, as a young normalien (graduate of the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure), Aron sought to establish historical reason and historical consciousness as a valid mode of knowledge “opposed both to scientistic rationalism and to positivism.”⁷

By scientistic rationalism, the young Aron meant above all the ambition of Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, to “found the morality of educators on the new science,” that is, the science of society. Durkheim, in other words, believed that one could derive the “ought” of morality from the “is” of society, that society itself, properly studied, would yield the moral rules that should guide educators, who in turn would guide society.

By positivism, Aron meant the illusion of historians, particularly of the Victorian and post-Victorian eras, that they could, by appropriate methods, discover “truth in the naive sense of reproducing the reality of the past wie es geschehen ist (as it has taken place), according to the celebrated expression of Leopold von Ranke.”

Against both these beliefs, Aron asserted the role of experience in changing the interpretation of the past and declared, in a phrase that more than any other summed up his deepest conviction: “Philosophy develops in the ever-renewed movement from life to consciousness, from consciousness to free thought and from thinking to willing.” This was not relativism, a philosophy of anything goes; it was rather a skeptical humanism, a hope of freedom limited by the awareness of danger and disaster, an awareness more than confirmed by the events of the 1930s.

Since both the scientism of Durkheim and the positivism of the Rankeans dominated French academic life at the time, it was no wonder that Aron’s conclusions made him an outsider. He himself ironically described his early works as “desperate or satanic,” desperate because they promised no certainty, satanic because they appeared to make a mockery of the firmly held faith of Durkheim’s moral educators, the academic intellectuals of the Third Republic.

Even more ironically, or perhaps inevitably, as he widened his interests after 1945 to include strategy, world politics, and political economy—and as he applied those interests in public debate as journalist and columnist from 1946 and as professor of sociology at the Sorbonne from 1955 to 1968 and from 1970 at the Collège de France—his skeptical humanism aroused the much more virulent ire of the Marxist academic and political intellectuals of the Fourth and Fifth Republics, who exercised in full and arrogant measure Durkheim’s mandate to be the educators of society in matters of political morality.

Not all of Aron’s enemies were on the Left. During the war years, which he spent in exile in England, Aron had frequent, if not close, contact with Charles de Gaulle’s Free French government. In 1945-46 he served briefly as chef de cabinet (principal private secretary) to de Gaulle’s minister of information, André Malraux—the only official position Aron ever held, unless one counts his academic appointments.

In 1946, de Gaulle’s first government fell. In 1947, Aron joined the Gaullist party, the RPF (Rassemblement du peuple français), because he considered the General the only credible alternative to the fragmentation of the Fourth Republic and its weakness vis-a-vis Soviet expansionism. In 1953, de Gaulle withdrew from politics, temporarily as it turned out, and the RPF effectively came to an end. Axon cut his ties to Gaullism, which he came to view as more of an obstacle to than an agent of Western unity. This earned him the anger and contempt of many on the Right, for whom parochial French interests often implied anti-Americanism. Aron could not, in the circumstances of European division and Soviet power, conceive of a French national interest that could possibly override loyalty to the Western alliance.

Still, Aron’s bitterest enemies were on the Left, the most famous undoubtedly being Jean-Paul Sartre. Even after Sartre lost his cultural hegemony in the 1970s, a common Parisian saying had it that, on the character and purposes of the Soviet Union, or on the question of political morality in general, it was “better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron” (mieux vaut avoir tort avec Sartre qu’avoir raison avec Aron). Sartre, according to the common legend, was the brilliant polemicist, the philosopher of the absurd and of human defiance of oppression, the prophet of liberation, in short, the defender of truth and freedom. Aron, by contrast, was the plodding academic, supinely accepting the world as it was, the apologist for capitalist exploitation and American imperialism, the enemy of global popular liberation, the man of war. This attitude died hard, even in its milder version.

In 1977, Aron published In Defense of Decadent Europe, his most Tocquevillian work, a searching and accurate diagnosis of the paradoxical weakness of Western democracies and their elites, fascinated and mystified by Marxism, ignorant of the true virtues of liberal democracy, forgetful of the meaning and the reasons of liberty.⁸ Presciently, in view of the events in Central Europe in 1989, Aron noted “in the face of ideocratic [Eastern] Europe, liberal Europe represents not merely liberty, but productive efficiency, and embodies less imperfectly than the other the values invoked by all Europeans, from the Atlantic to the Urals. That the Europeans of the West should be convinced of this, and that they should not seek salvation where they, in turn, will find only servitude, those are the two purposes of this essay in advocacy.”

Despite the relative neglect of this late work by many critics, it is perhaps Aron’s strongest political writing, displaying his absolute mastery of the political history of ideas (in this case, of Marxism as ideology and practice), his command of economic and political facts, and his rhetoric with its double effect that I have already noted in regard to his Memoirs—slow on the first reading, irresistibly powerful on the second.

The reviewer for Le Nouvel Observateur, at the time still very much the journal of record of the bien-pensant Left, looked in vain for the revolutionary prescription he apparently considered obligatory in any work of social analysis. Annoyed by its absence, he concluded his review with the petulant statement that “Aron evidently accepts the world as it is.” In other words, the problem with Aron was that he was a good sociologist who did not prostitute his scholarship to ideology. The reviewer entirely missed one of Aron’s fundamental points, which was that the doctrine of revolutionary liberation had been responsible for vastly greater evils than any Western democracy.

Aron, Sartre, and Paul-Yves Nizan (who later became perhaps the most gifted writer ever to surrender his spirit to Communism) were classmates at the École Normale Supérieure. Aron graduated in 1928, Sartre a year later because, the first time round, he had shown his contempt for the system by not preparing himself for the examinations. “Aside from his ease in writing, the richness of his imagination and capacity for construction in the world of ideas dazzled me (and dazzles me still),” Aron wrote after Sartre’s death, commenting also that Sartre, who never was a member of the Communist Party, had fewer doubts about himself and his righteousness than Nizan, the committed militant. “What attracted us about Paul-Yves was the mystery of his personality. He had been tempted by the Action française, by Georges Valois’ blueshirts, before finding his anchorage in Communism.”

Sartre and Aron remained in touch, even on terms of friendship, until 1948. Given Sartre’s monstrous personality, this span of time betokens a forbearance on Aron’s part that must seem extraordinary until one realizes how typical it was of the man. He firmly believed that Sartre was a more brilliant writer, a more skillful polemicist, a more imaginative and original thinker than himself. Therefore, he owed it to the very principles of reason and intelligence to seek out Sartre from time to time and to pay respects to his brilliance until doing so became incompatible with his sense of dignity.

The break came after a radio broadcast in which Sartre and a friend had, in considerable (and even physical) detail, compared de Gaulle to Hitler. The Gaullists organized a counterbroadcast, to which they invited Aron, and in which they attacked and insulted Sartre, who was also present. “I remained silent, since I could neither agree with Sartre nor join the imprecations against him. I learned some weeks later that Sartre could not forgive my ‘silence,’ while he was alone, surrounded by enemies.” The fact was that Sartre, ever ready to dish out insults by the hundreds among friends, to an isolated microphone, or in writing, was afraid of personal confrontations, of having to own up to his invective in the presence of those affected. Even knowing this, Aron could not omit the second reflection that was so characteristic of him: “Of course, I might have found a way to act otherwise, to make clear my friendship for him without agreeing with his broadcast.” Or the third: “But Sartre was right. The friendship was dying by itself.”

Following this episode, Sartre began to attack Aron publicly, calling him a “cynic without even the virtue of intelligence” and accusing him of “fatalistically accepting” the prospect of a third world war. In fact, earlier that same year, in 1948, Aron had published Le Grand Schisme, his first major exercise in grand strategy and world political analysis, and in that book he had declared precisely the opposite of what Sartre claimed, since he found “peace impossible” but “war unlikely.” Sartre, however, could never be bothered to read, much less try to understand, the writings of people he considered inferior, a category that included, by definition, all those who disagreed with him.

Aron provided an important key to both their personalities when, in 1980, he reported a conversation he had had with Sartre sometime around 1929. Sartre said to him, “Why are you interested in politics if you don’t believe in revolution, if you consent to this society even while admitting its evils (turpitudes)?” Recalling these words, Aron commented: “I was probably influenced by an image often invoked by [the philosopher] Alain: civilization is a thin membrane which a shock can easily tear open, and barbarism will surge through the rift. Revolution, like war, risks tearing open the membrane of civilization, which has slowly grown over the centuries.”

In 1976, when Aron’s skeptical humanism and sober liberalism were just beginning to achieve the recognition they deserved, the budding “new philosopher” Bernard-Henri Lévy interviewed Aron on the subject of Sartre. “Which of you will have put a greater mark on his time?” asked Lévy. Aron found the question (and the questioner) foolish, but replied civilly that there was no contest: Sartre was the richer intellect even in his excesses. Aron himself, he asserted, was “too tied to reality” to produce works that would outlast the generations.

“I present myself as an analyst or a critic. Writers of this type may exercise considerable influence on their contemporaries, but since their work is tied to an ephemeral situation, it will sink into oblivion faster than that of those creators who, at the risk of error, build cathedrals out of concepts with the courage of imagination.” For Sartre, of course, the very notion of “error” was a hopelessly bourgeois category. What mattered was to be for freedom, no matter how many real corpses and how much actual unfreedom it entailed.

Aron went on: “What I think is catastrophic, what he will one day be blamed for, is to have used his dialectical virtuosity and his generous impulses to justify the unjustifiable. To have, if you will, deployed his treasure of genius to try to show that one could not be against Stalin and that it was necessary at least to be close to him. Whereas, on the contrary, one will perhaps be able to say, if there is any future interest in him or me, that I have never justified the unjustifiable for any dialectical reason.”

Aron saw Sartre once again, in 1979, when André Glucksmann, a follower of Sartre who had become a leading spokesman for the so-called “new philosophy,” contrived a meeting between the two at a rally to raise money for the Vietnamese boat people. Aron, recovered from a serious heart attack of two years earlier and dapper as always in his neat gray suit, rose to greet the doddering Sartre, who was clearly quite ill and possibly no longer fully aware of his surroundings. He used the old normalien greeting, “little comrade” (petit camarade), and was later at pains to explain that it contained no ideological subtext and was no more and no less than it seemed. By that time, Aron’s final vindication was well under way.

In 1989, a State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, published an article entitled “The End of History” in The National Interest, which earned considerable notoriety for its author. The theme of the article was that Western liberal democracy and its associated ideas and practices had won the decisive battle. No radically different political ideology or system of thought was likely to arise to challenge liberal democracy in the way that revolutionary Marxism had challenged it in the century after 1880. The world would still witness conflicts, perhaps even major ones, but the ideological and institutional issue was fundamentally settled, and mankind could look forward to an endless era of technocratic management.

Had Fukuyama not said so himself (with little fear of being checked out), it is likely that very few of his readers would have known where he lifted the notion of an “end of history.” In fact it came from Alexandre Kojève, a White Russian émigré who, in the 1930s, developed the thesis of an end of history in a series of famous lectures on Hegel (attended by Sartre and Jacques Lacan, among others) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

Aron considered Kojève one of the three greatest intellects he had personally known, the two others being Sartre and the philosopher Eric Weil. These three were “superior spirits whom I admired and against whom I would not dare to measure myself.” Kojève’s notion was that history potentially came to an end as soon as the possibility of a universal, homogeneous, world-encompassing political order emerged, which is to say in the epoch of Hegel and Napoleon.

“History stops when man no longer acts in the strong sense of the word, that is to say, when he no longer negates, no longer transforms what is given by nature and society by means of a bloody struggle and a creative effort.” The need for such struggle and effort disappeared as soon as Hegel explained everything; the form of the universal empire to come, however, would be that of Stalin’s Soviet Union, or so Kojève maintained in public. No matter that “red Russia was governed by brutes, its language even vulgarized, its culture degraded.” These were mere details, evident to any imbecile, and of no significance whatever in determining the shape or the timing of the end of history.

Aron wondered whether he was entirely serious: after World War II, Kojève, the prophet of global Stalinism, became a loyal civil servant in the ministry of economics and a strong defender of French national interests in the Common Market. “I wanted to see how history played out,” he explained to Aron, who, astoundingly, considered him “even more intelligent than Sartre . . . . Believing that he had assimilated all of philosophy and history as embraced by Hegel’s system, he followed the ideas and events of our time with the detachment of the sage and the also with the close attention of the great civil servant.”

Undoubtedly there was some playfulness in the idea of the end of history. In the revised edition of his lectures on Hegel, Kojève added a footnote saying that, upon reflection, he might admit that Japanese culture and economics could provide a new form of life, of “human struggle with nature and society,” that might indeed postpone the end of history and succeed universal Stalinism. Aron noted that the real reason for this sudden interest in Japan was a journey and a love affair. Mr. Fukuyama, of course, is of Japanese descent.

I have mentioned that, toward the end of his life, Aron finally achieved a measure of recognition by the very groups and interests that had rejected him so furiously in the past: the academic, political, and media intellectuals, the moralists of postmodern society. As might be expected, he had little sympathy for most of the radical agenda of 1968, for the vulgar Marxism, the hysterical denunciations of liberal democracy, the boundless faith in Utopian solutions and in the benevolence of Third World tyrants. All of these traits merely recapitulated, in cruder and louder form, the political moralism that Aron had always rejected.

Common to them was what Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut called “anti-humanism,” the belief that there were no humane values in politics or morality, that humanism was a sham and had never been anything more than a cover for exploitation and imperialism. By the later 1970s, this ideology was cracking open along the seams of its own contradictions. Into the resulting vacuum came a new, anti-Communist humanism, inspired at first by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose Gulag Archipelago was translated into French in 1971-74.

Why, however, did anti-Communism spread beyond the Right in the 1970s when it had notoriously failed to do so in the 1930s or 1950s? One reason was that a number of Soviet and East European dissidents had settled in Paris and were slowly gaining sympathizers among the intellectuals. These people, who patently were not American stooges or capitalist oppressors, restored an older language of political morality that Aron had never forgotten, but which was unknown to most of his contemporaries. Another reason was that political passions in general declined after the departure of de Gaulle and the advent of a new generation of more pragmatic, centrist politicians. The socialist party under François Mitterrand, in particular, stopped appearing ridiculous, stopped acting defensively, as if socialists had to apologize for not being totalitarian. And finally, there was Aron himself, whose decades of teaching, writing, and journalism were finally having an effect.

Those decades, from his return from exile in 1944 to his final years at the College de France, were busy. From 1947 to 1977, he wrote a weekly column for Le Figaro. When Robert Hersant, the publishing magnate, took over the paper, Aron switched to L’Express, which remained his journalistic outlet for the rest of his life. Peace and War, which first appeared in 1962, was Aron’s summa on international relations, a theoretical, sociological, and historical analysis of the phenomenon of war, of the ideological, economic, and political divisions of the post-1945 world, and of the morale and strategy necessary to the West for survival short of war.

As always, Aron presented no firm conclusions, believing any such to be inherently contradicted by the variety of events and perspectives. Instead, he posed questions: Would mankind remain divided, between East and West, rich and poor, or would it become one? If it became one, would it be in the manner prescribed by Immanuel Kant, in a global society of peaceful republics, or in the manner of Kojève, in some universal empire? Neither paralyzing fear of the future nor Utopian aspirations were attitudes worthy of man, Aron observed, clearly echoing Tocqueville: “Let us instead try not to fall short of either the one or the other of the obligations imposed on every one of us: neither trying to escape from our warlike history, nor betraying the ideal; let us think and act with the firm purpose that the absence of war shall continue to the day that peace becomes possible—if indeed it ever does.”

In the spring of 1977, Aron suffered a severe heart attack, and ever after regarded his recovery as a reprieve and his remaining years as an unexpected gift. Had he died in 1977, he would not have written his Memoirs, but above all he would not have experienced “the years of public recognition, when France finally consented to recognize the immense benefits she owed to him,” as Alain Besançon wrote.

The breakthrough came in 1981, when two journalists, Dominique Wolton and Jean-Louis Missika (both, as Aron genially noted, Trotskyite revolutionaries), asked permission to spend two weeks taping conversations with Aron for television, conversations which were subsequently published as The Committed Observer.⁹ Aron took evident pleasure in the talks, which led to a genuine friendship across generations and ideologies, “in a style forgotten for half a century.”

His interviewers began by asking him about his political positions and philosophy, clearly puzzled and amazed by a man who had never felt the need nor the urge to “give in to any of the intellectual fashions of Paris.” The broadcasts and the book were acclaimed by all apart from the straight Communist Party press. Even Michel Contat, ally of Sartre and editor of his collected works, proclaimed that “the leftist intelligentsia, whose counterpart and despised adversary he has been for so long, discovers now that it is Aronian, or almost.”

Still, Contat had to try to find some way to explain the phenomenon: “The Left remains his family, because it is with the Left that he argues, in an attempt to open its eyes.” Nor could Contat. avoid a few unfair jabs, feeble compared to those of Sartre in his heyday: “How can his geopolitical vision of what is to be preferred or despised justify Aron’s apparent blindness . . . on North-South issues, on the Holocaust of hunger?” Aron’s comment on this piece of idiocy was to the point: “Would I have helped the starving in Bangladesh or the Sahel in any way if, in the manner of Contat’s master, I had blamed it all on rich Americans?”

As one might expect, Aron’s popularity did not in the least turn him into a monstre sacré like Sartre. He continued his skeptical itinerary to the end, on the one hand doubting the ability of men in general and Europeans in particular to take proper thought for their own political survival, and on the other hand refusing to succumb to apocalyptic fears, which he regarded as mere metaphysical luxury.

While the outside world was slowly preparing to recognize him, he completed, in the 1970s, his last great philosophical work, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, in which he addressed, once more, the fundamental themes of his strategic and philosophical reflection: the nature of war, limited or absolute; the notion of war as the continuation of policy by other means; the idea of national mobilization and “people’s war” in modern European history; and, finally, the uses and interpretations of Clausewitz in the twentieth century.¹⁰

Clausewitz is perhaps the least appreciated of Aron’s major works, though it is his greatest and most perfect attempt at a political history of ideas, a genre hardly cultivated in American historiography but one that, in my opinion, offers the single greatest promise of intellectual renewal in the humanities. Aron himself regarded the labor as somewhat quixotic, since it was directed primarily at a German, rather than a French, audience, and a rather specialized one at that, particularly in the atmosphere of East-West detente of the mid-1970s.

Yet the question, for example, of total mobilization versus limited war is one of vital importance for the future of democratic nations, whose leaders must be able to answer the question, How do we defend ourselves and deter violence in a world in which the absolute threat, of nuclear attack, will probably never be executed, while bandits and terrorists seize and kill our citizens with impunity? Terrorists, moreover, whose national leaders themselves draw on another legacy of Clausewitz, the moralistic legacy of war as “people’s war” or “war of liberation,” of which he was the first and most profound analyst.

Raymond Aron died suddenly, with no preceding illness, in the afternoon of October 17, 1983. He had just come from the law courts in the Palais de Justice, where he had testified on behalf of his friend, the sociologist Bertrand de Jouvenel (known for his writings on power). An Israeli historian had written a book in which he accused Jouvenel of sympathy for the Vichy regime and even for National Socialism. Jouvenel brought suit for libel and asked Aron, among others, to testify to his behavior during World War II. Having given his deposition, Aron was leaving the building when he collapsed, unconscious, in the street and died on the way to the hospital.

Had he not been so inveterately critical of himself, he would have been able to acknowledge more fully the scope and magnitude of his own achievement.

In the postscript to his Memoirs, he stated that of all his books, Opium, Peace and War, and Clausewitz are those in which he found the fewest faults. The majority of thinkers listed in our histories of political thought would have been proud to have written any one of those three works. In these works, Aron explained and refuted not merely the philo-Sovietism of French intellectuals in the 1950s, but any liberalism that does not take itself seriously, that has not the courage of its convictions.

What could be more relevant in the 1990s, when an American president proclaims kindness and gentleness as national purpose and flounders helplessly in the face of what might otherwise seem the greatest opportunity for American action in the name of liberal democracy since 1945, namely the collapse of Communist power in Central Europe? Together they constitute a complete philosophy of the modern age, providing anyone who reads them properly with a suit of intellectual armor complete and sufficient to repel and rise above the meaningless chatter of the day.

Some might say that, were Aron alive today, he would, at last, shed his pessimism about the capacity of liberal democracies to take thought for their own future. This is doubtful. He was a man of passion and, when appropriate, of emotion, and would have rejoiced at the revival of Central Europe, yet he also knew, as Kojève or at least his epigones apparently do not, that history has no end, and that permanent stability or success are the lot only of those gods he did not believe in, and not of mortal men. Moreover, the Central Europeans owe little to the Western liberal democracies, whose leaders and spokesmen too often in the past belittled their aspirations and consorted with their oppressors. In the face of such blemished history, let Aron’s final verdict stand:

“Precisely because their historic mission seems completed, the Europeans have doubts about their fate and wonder which way to turn . . . . The more the means of production and destruction multiply, the more the means of communication, calculation and intelligence at the disposal of humanity surpass all fictions . . . . From all sides, prophets beset us . . . those who are obsessed by nuclear arms, those terrified by pollution, or those whose are kept awake by the population explosion, all prophesy the apocalypse . . . . I need neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger to know that the development of humanity does not obey reason . . .

Does the fate of Western Europe depend more on the disappearance of the gods or on the decline of the birthrate? I still have enough taste for philosophical speculation not to give a categorical answer to these questions.

On the other hand, if we are talking about possible apocalypses, the threats hanging over mankind, I know where to look for faith and hope. Against the evils of industrial civilization, nuclear weapons, pollution, hunger, or overpopulation, I have no secret miraculous remedies. But I know that millenarian beliefs or theoretical ratiocinations will serve no purpose; I prefer experience, knowledge, and modesty.

If civilizations, all ambitious and all precarious, are to realize in a distant future the dreams of the prophets, what universal vocation could unite them other thanReason?

by David Gress

On Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.

Allan Bloom is a political philosopher, a friend and disciple of the late Leo Strauss. He teaches at the University of Chicago, which appears more and more to be one of the only institutions of higher learning in this country where it is still possible to pursue knowledge and wisdom for their own sakes, where the administration does not believe that the purpose of the university is to “reflect the surrounding society.”

At Chicago, as he did earlier at Cornell, Professor Bloom has devoted himself to educating a few discerning students in the great tradition of Western thought, a tradition that once concerned itself above all with the most important things—namely, the question of the true and the good and the question of God. According to the Greeks and to virtually all Western thinkers up to Hegel, these questions were political questions, since no regime could endure unless its relation to the true, to the good, and to God was clarified. Politics was the arena where the most important things were debated, and a society that ignored that debate, or refused to engage in it, was no longer truly political, although it might continue for a while as a despotism, as Aristotle recognized.

Professor Bloom has now gathered his reflections in a book which is an extraordinarily accurate diagnosis of the current state of American civilization.¹ Some of the advance praise for the book has given the mistaken impression that it is wholly, or even chiefly, taken up with the conditions in American universities.

In fact, the reader who wishes, or fears, an extended diatribe against the lowering of standards and against misguided attempts by administrations and faculty to conform to the prevailing left-liberal culture will be disappointed. Bloom does offer much criticism on these matters, but he embeds it in a wider “meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education.”

The burden of that meditation is that American civilization is in great danger from those who do not understand that the purpose of education is to give students the power to form ideas of their own. Instead of being havens of independent thought, universities have become channels of indoctrination, inculcating attitudes regarded as respectable by the majority of American intellectuals and confirming the prejudices of those who control the agenda of public discourse. As Bloom shows, this problem, though much exacerbated by the cultural revolution of the Sixties, is in fact rooted in the Enlightenment belief that there is no conflict of purpose between the university and society. According to this belief, what the leaders of society and social opinion at any given time hold to be true should be taught as truth to the young.

Most students will be content with what our present considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous. It is for these last, especially, that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for what they are than for what they do. Without their presence (and, one should add, without their being respectable), no society—no matter how rich or comfortable, no matter how technically adept or full of tender sentiments—can be called cultivated.

What the present considers “relevant” in education is above all the idea that truth is relative. In his introduction, entitled “Our Virtue,” Bloom shows how relativism, far from producing openness, has in fact produced the “closing of the American mind.” This closing is expressed in the indifference of students to the particular virtues of Western culture and in the insistence on the part of their teachers that other cultures are equal or superior to the culture of the West. Thus, teachers set standards of relevance and judgment whose effects ripple through society at large, until the closing itself is felt as natural.

Even before coming to the university, students assume that “[t]he purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue—openness.” This education of openness “pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime,” Bloom writes, “which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive.” Where earlier teaching inculcated the republican principles on which the United States was founded, current teaching debunks those principles while vaguely assuming that they will endure this constant pounding.

Bloom cites an example from his own student days. A history professor once explained that George Washington was really motivated not by love of freedom but by the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy. Bloom asked whether this picture “did not have the effect of making us despise our regime.” The professor indignantly explained that the regime “doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” When Bloom repeated that this was precisely the point—how can we believe in democratic values if those values are only the camouflage of class interests?—the professor got angry.

The teaching that truth is relative also implies that our own culture and regime are not worthy of particular respect simply because they are our own. Universities enforce this doctrine when they reject courses in Western civilization in favor of “non-biased” courses that treat the histories of non-Western cultures with special favor. The central achievements of Western culture are no longer thought to be of any interest in themselves, because it is assumed they will offend members of other cultures or minority groups, all of whom are entitled to esteem. As the philosopher John Rawls taught in A Theory of Justice, esteem is a basic need; thus, we are not allowed to discriminate or even, in Bloom’s words, “to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education.”

The belief in relativism and the debunking of Western culture are the result of a Kulturkampf, a struggle to control culture that is manifested in a broad campaign to control people’s feelings and form their attitudes. In this Kulturkampf Bloom’s history professor, who reduced George Washington’s professed beliefs to an expression of class interests, was only an advance guard. Today, we see the effects of this struggle in the inevitable tittering with which student audiences respond to invocations of patriotism, or in the reflex tendency to look for flaws and failures in American heroes or achievements.

We can feel the effects in ourselves in the considerable effort we must make to overcome an almost instinctive suspicion that, for example, a laudatory history of the United States and of American ideals, such as George Tindall’s America: A Narrative History (1984), is somehow not an example of serious scholarship.

Above all, the Kulturkampf is visible in the agenda of universities and of society, especially in the terms in which that agenda is formulated and in the presumptions it makes. A good way of measuring how the battle is going is to observe which positions seem perfectly natural, not requiring argument, and which are held to be indefensible. Among those taken for granted are the validity of relativism, the right of women and minorities to preferential treatment (in both the workplace and the college curriculum), and the presumption of American guilt in international affairs. In such a climate of received opinion, the ideas advanced by Bloom are anathema. That is why, although he praises the idea of the university as a place where the important questions are asked, he acknowledges that few, if any, American universities today are up to the task. The bulk of Bloom’s book is an attempt to explain how the idea of the university and of liberal education got lost, and what the effects of that loss are.

Bloom starts, as it were, at the end of the process, with the effects. In the first of the three sections of his book, entitled “Students” (the other two are “Nihilism, American Style” and “The University”), he describes the characters of his students today, and what he describes is exactly, frighteningly reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s brilliant essay of 1941, “The Abolition of Man,” in which Lewis describes the victims of modern pedagogy as “men without chests.” To be without a chest, in Lewis’s terms, is not only to be unheroic, it is to lack even the idea that heroism, virtue, or the hope of great achievements are admirable traits, worthy of praise or emulation. That lack can express itself in, say, the automatic ridicule of patriotism. But Bloom’s students of the late 1980s are not, so far as one can judge, politically radical; their “chestlessness” denies them even the hope of revolution that possessed their precursors in the late 1960s.

Until the Sixties, when “the culture leeches, professional and amateur, began their great spiritual bleeding,” American students were, in Bloom’s view, the best in the world. They knew less when they came to university than European students, who had read great novels in school and were familiar with European intellectual and political history, but this lack of knowledge was richly compensated by a “natural savagery,” manifested as a naïve eagerness to learn and a belief that knowing the great tradition of the West was important and rewarding.

Ideas mattered, and the students were well served by their teachers. In 1955, Bloom contends, “no universities were better than the best American universities in the things that have to do with a liberal education and arousing in students the awareness of their intellectual needs.” One reason for this high quality of American education at this time was that many exiles from Nazi Germany—the survivors of the destruction of the German universities who carried with them the great tradition—found new homes in the best American universities. Unfortunately, beginning in the mid-Sixties, the universities gave in to a violent minority of students until “the whole experiment in excellence was washed away, leaving not a trace. The various liberations wasted that marvelous energy and tension, leaving the students’ souls exhausted and flaccid, capable of calculating, but not of passionate insight.”

Bloom forcefully illustrates this debacle by example and commentary, and gives free rein to his considerable talent for dramatic irony. At Cornell University in 1969, to cite one instance, the faculty and administration surrendered completely to the demands of radical black students. The provost, who later became university president, refused to censure a black faculty member who had threatened the life of a black student for refusing to participate in a demonstration. Taxed by Bloom with this outrageous shirking of responsibility, the provost said only that he “hoped there would soon be better communication with the radical black students.” Bloom adds laconically: “This was a few weeks before the guns emerged and permitted much clearer communication.” The provost, Bloom notes, had demonstrated “a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time.” As for the president, he was “interested only in protecting himself…. He was of the moral stamp of those who were angry with Poland for resisting Hitler because this precipitated the war.”

Appeasement seems too mild a term to describe the moral state of the majority of American professors in the face of the student revolt in the Sixties. Not only did they seem to have backbones made of limp spaghetti, they seemed to regard this trait as a sign of virtue. The teachers gave way to radical student movements, Bloom believes, “because they thought those movements possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide.” This moral truth included the idea, for example, “that old ladies who work as secretaries for draft boards are the equivalent of the Beast of Belsen and deserve no more respectful treatment than she did.” The old liberalism, which championed freedom of thought and expression, was redefined as an ideology of reaction. Professors who were happy in the Fifties to rely on academic freedom as protection from Joseph McCarthy rejected the notion of academic freedom for their opponents when their own opinions gained the favor of radical students.

In Bloom’s view, the professors surrendered in the Sixties ultimately because none of them, or very few, had any coherent notion of the idea or purpose of a university or of higher education in general. They did not understand that, apart from all the other bad results, their appeasement only served to integrate the universities more completely into the “system of democratic public opinion, and the condition of cavelike darkness amidst prosperity feared by Tocqueville.” Liberal social scientists like David Easton had already promised that “the great achievements of social science would be put in the service of the right values.” But despite their vaunted critical faculties, these social scientists were incapable of finding values anywhere but in the left-liberal moralism of the surrounding culture.

Of course, the professors and the students justified their moralism by claiming that it was a necessary purification that would lead to a new, great era of moral and cultural vitality. Instead, they killed all vitality, producing the “homogenized persons” of today. “At worst,” Bloom writes, “I fear that spiritual entropy or an evaporation of the soul’s boiling blood is taking place, a fear that Nietzsche thought justified … Today’s select students know so much less, are so much more cut off from the tradition, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their predecessors look like prodigies of culture.”

This slackness is due in part to the effects of the Kulturkampf in the family, according to Bloom. Parents “no longer have the legal or moral authority they had in the Old World. They lack self-confidence as educators of their children,” and yet they believe that they are somehow better and more enlightened than their ancestors. The combination of weak authority and a rejection of ritual, tradition, and the wisdom of old books produces children who “arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.” Older generations had fewer sources of inspiration, but better ones: the Bible and Shakespeare instead of Time. They knew little about the ephemera of world politics or about the latest attitudes toward sex and the family—matters that dominate the talk of supposedly educated people today; but they were “linked … to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material.” Without great revelations, epics, and philosophies “as part of our natural vision,” Bloom writes, “there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside.” The loss of this “longing for the beyond” produces, in Lewis’s phrase, “men without chests,” whose souls “are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around.”

In Bloom’s view, the loss of vision—of the very idea of vision—has devastated the intellectual capacity of today’s students. Largely bookless, students lack the system of references and allusions that used to be the essential property of the educated Western man. How can the great books have any meaning to students who cannot even begin to grasp the point of Anna Karenina? For today’s students, Bloom argues, Anna’s problem is not tragic love but a “failed marriage,” and they have all learned from their parents what to do about that, namely, get a divorce. Moreover, they see Anna Karenina, like all the novels, stories, and epics of Western literature, as “sexist.” Such labels, Bloom concludes, not only discourage understanding but suppress the very notion that education can help “to free oneself from public guidance and find resources for guidance within oneself.”

So what do students have today if they do not have books? For one thing, they have rock music, a form of entertainment which requires no intellectual effort and which appeals to the least noble aspect of our natures:

“Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”

The glorification of sex in rock music, Bloom notes, is in reality a glorification of narcissism without a trace of the erotic; and its social philosophy is a cheapened version of what was already cheap, namely the moralistic egalitarianism and anti-patriotism of the Sixties. Bloom might have added that rock music—especially in its music-video form—is the very antithesis of the linear culture of reading. Psychologists have pointed out that a culture based on reading demands the exercise—and hence the refinement—of more complex, higher-order brain functions than are needed to absorb the messages of purely visual images or of sound. Thus, the flattening of character among post-literate Western students is supported by physiology.

As observed by Bloom, students today are “nice,” not because they possess any nobility of character, indeed they frankly reject it as a desirable possibility, but because times are good. They have little sense of wonder, a lack that Bloom sees as closely related to their understanding of sex and sexual relationships. “The eroticism of our students is lame. It is not the divine madness Socrates praised; or the enticing awareness of incompleteness and the quest to overcome it; or nature’s grace, which permits a partial being to recover his wholeness in the embrace of another, or a temporal being to long for eternity in the perpetuity of his seed; or the hope that all men will remember his deeds; or his contemplation of perfection.” Rather, for today’s students sex is mechanical and narcissistic and soul-deadening, because it has come too early in their lives.

“We properly sense that there is a long road to adulthood, the condition in which they are able to govern themselves and be true mothers and fathers . … I believe that the most interesting students are those who have not yet settled the sexual problem, who are still young, even look young for their age, who think there is much to look forward to and much they must yet grow up to, fresh and naive, excited by the mysteries into which they have not yet been fully initiated. There are some who are men and women at the age of sixteen, who have nothing more to learn about the erotic. They are adult in the sense that they will no longer change very much. They may become competent specialists, but they are flat-souled. The world is for them what it presents itself to the senses to be; it is unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals. This flat soul is what the sexual wisdom of our time conspires to make universal.”

This is a vitally important comment, even though I must register a rare disagreement with Bloom’s choice of words. If his argument is correct, it is precisely not the case that sexually active students have “nothing more to learn about the erotic.” In fact, they have everything to learn, but their behavior creates habits that make it unlikely they ever will.

In his section on social relationships, Bloom broadens his discussion to encompass the mores of society, thus demonstrating again that his book is not only about students or the university, but about American civilization as a whole. “Are the relations between men and women and parents and children determined by natural impulse or are they the product of choice and consent?” he asks. Clearly his own answer is the former, whereas the answer of modern culture is the latter.

To act as though some sort of consent based on “democratic values” determines relationships which are actually determined by nature is, in Bloom’s view, to close minds and invite disaster. He describes how “women’s liberation” has liberated men from the obligation to care for their families and helped to create a vicious circle of shifting roles: as women demand the right to autonomous careers and an equal share of the responsibilities, they take away one important source of male pride and identity; the resulting male irresponsibility in turn appears to justify further the need for women to pursue careers. That economic conditions usually require two earners to produce a middle-class standard of living only increases the circle’s speed.

The ideology of feminism, in Bloom’s view, emancipated sex by taking away romance and by denouncing as sexist the traditional pursuit of women by men. “What sensitive male can avoid realizing how dangerous his sexual passion is? Is there perhaps really original sin? Men had failed to read the fine print in the Emancipation Proclamation. The new interference with sexual desire is more comprehensive, more intense, more difficult to escape than the older conventions … The new reign of virtue, accompanied by relentless propaganda on radio and television and in the press, has its own catechism, including an examination of the conscience and the inmost sentiments for traces of possessiveness, jealousy, protectiveness—all those things men used to feel for women.” This particular version of Kulturkampf, it should be noted, is peculiarly American; it is not found, at least to the same degree, elsewhere in the West.

In the university, the reign of virtue has taken many forms. Bloom singles out one of these—affirmative action—for special attention. He notes that the young share with their teachers a belief that everyone should be treated equally; but the prevailing ideology easily allows them to accommodate the hypocrisy of affirmative action. Bloom remembers when radical black students at Cornell in 1969 “demanded the dismissal of the tough-minded, old-style integrationist black woman who was assistant dean of students. In short order the administration complied with this demand.” The end result of this type of behavior was “a debilitated normalcy.” A kind of “black domain … was created: permanent quotas in admission, preference in financial assistance, racially motivated hiring of faculty, difficulty in giving blacks failing marks, and an organized system of grievance and feeling aggrieved.”

The state of affairs Bloom describes is immediately familiar to anyone who spends much time at a university. It is profoundly demoralizing and creates a sort of virus of victimization that spreads far beyond the original “preferred groups.” If the hiring or promotion of any black, or now of any woman, is suspect, then conversely the non-hiring or non-promotion of any white male is suspect as well. The truth of this was demonstrated recently when a Stanford history professor, who in general holds liberal views, was denied tenure and immediately entered a grievance claim, openly surmising in the campus newspaper that the decision had to do with his being a white male. Apparently even the academic supporters of affirmative action—most of whom, unlike this man, are at no risk, since they already have tenure—suffer from its effects. Things have gone very far indeed, although one is not tempted to feel much sympathy. After all, the ideology they subscribe to has created a moral, political, and economic morass with which we all have to contend.

If all these are the effects of the current Kulturkampf, what are its causes? To ask that question is to ask for an account of the entire course of modern politics and ideology. Bloom does not shrink from the task. Temporarily setting aside the closed minds and flat souls of today’s best and brightest, he draws back to survey the ideas that underlie modern politics and social beliefs, ideas concerning human rights, nature, the self, creativity, and culture. The drama of American civilization, in Bloom’s view, is the drama of how one version of those ideas, the version propagated by John Locke, has been undermined and partly superseded by the rival and contradictory vision of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

“Our nation, which seems to be a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke’s views of the state of nature and Rousseau’s criticism of them … The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion … This is the direct result of the two state-of-nature teachings. Locke’s is responsible for our institutions, justifies our absorption with private property and the free market, and gives us our sense of right. Rousseau’s lies behind the most prevalent views of what life is about and how to seek healing for our wounds.”

Rousseau pointed out that Locke’s natural man, concerned with self-preservation and property and hence with the rule of law, was not really very natural at all. He had neither higher aspirations nor dark, subterranean compulsions. According to Rousseau, Bloom explains, “Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract … The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look into his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off. Rousseau explodes the simplistic harmoniousness between nature and society that seems to be the American premise.”

The closing of the American mind, in the grand perspective of the ideological history of the past three centuries, is, then, the result of three converging factors: first, Locke’s definition of human purpose as security and prosperity, a definition whose degenerate form is the flat-souled hedonism of today’s young; second, Rousseau’s justified criticism that such a definition ignores the human need for collective faith, a faith that would act as the glue of the social contract (from this criticism grows the constant insistence in American political life on goals higher than mere safety, a degenerate form of which was the moralism of the Sixties); third, the wholesale adoption of nihilism disguised as value relativism. “There is now an entirely new language of good and evil,” Bloom writes, “originating in an attempt to get ‘beyond good and evil’ and preventing us from talking with any conviction about good and evil anymore … The new language is that of value relativism, and it constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.”

The man who coined the phrase “beyond good and evil” was, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche, and it is Nietzsche who is Bloom’s real interlocutor throughout the second half of his book. Fittingly, Nietzsche plays an ambiguous role. Bloom blames him for fatally undermining the West’s belief that its hopes and highest aspirations were in accord with the true and the good, but also praises him for diagnosing a disease that was already incurable. The disease itself had already progressed through two stages: the Enlightenment had taught Europe that perfect concord between scientific progress, rational politics, and human betterment was possible; the French Revolution and the ideologies of nationalism and socialism had disproved and corrupted the Enlightenment’s promise.

Nietzsche was thus the prophet who called for heroic endurance and achievement —not in order to overcome despair, but to live despite it. In America, however, Nietzsche was taken to prove that you can live with nihilism, and live successfully, without the need for heroism; America offered the possibility of “nihilism with a happy ending.” The American temperament will not accept that there may be problems without solutions; it insists, rather, that reason and optimism can overcome all obstacles, that men are basically good, and that any flaws in society or individuals can be cured by reason or psychiatry. This elision of the tragic foundation of modern life has led, in Bloom’s view, to the falsity and thinness of modern American culture, turning it into what Bloom calls, in one of his more memorable formulations, “a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.”

As Bloom points out, Sigmund Freud and Max Weber both followed Nietzsche in denying that reason could really govern human affairs. Nietzsche had said that the appeal to reason was really an expression of the will to power by people using reason as ideological camouflage. Freud demonstrated that what most of us consider good reasons for our behavior are in fact anything but that. “Weber,” Bloom says, “found it impossible to prefer rational politics to the politics of irrational commitment.” He argued that “reason in politics leads to the inhumanity of bureaucracy” and “believed that reason and science themselves were value commitments like any other commitments, incapable of asserting their own goodness … Politics required dangerous and uncontrollable semireligious value positing.”

This was the point at which German nihilism diverged from the American version and accelerated rapidly toward disaster. One cause of that divergence was the somber, merciless consistency of the German thinkers. They methodically followed through the consequences of Nietzsche’s announcement that God was dead and that good and evil were defunct categories of meaning, and they stated the results of their thinking with uncompromising clarity. Those who read Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber “constituted that ambiguous Weimar atmosphere in which liberals looked like simpletons and anything was possible for people who sang of the joy of the knife in cabarets.”

By contrast, Americans found in Freud and Weber a wholly different message: namely, that the use of reason could defeat and bind the irrational compulsions that control behavior and could solve the problems of the death of God and the advent of mass democracy. Walter Kaufmann, not a critic with whom Bloom otherwise has much in common, once pointed out that the Freud Americans read is a curiously optimistic Freud, a Freud without his sting, a Freud who teaches that psychoanalysis really will cure the self and, by extension, society. The Freud read in Germany was a revealer of the dark basement below bourgeois society, one who promised at best a temporary palliative in individual cases, but whose fundamental message, in such late works as Civilization and its Discontents or Moses and Monotheism, was that social and individual progress is fragile and dubious at best, and at worst outweighed by its cost. This reading seemed only confirmed by the rise of Hitler and National Socialism, and by the philosophical justification of Nazism offered by another great disciple of Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger.

As president of the University of Heidelberg in 1933-34, Heidegger gave his notorious Rektoratsrede, or president’s speech, in which he said that Nazism was the unity of politics and philosophy and that it deserved the “affirmative support” of all thinking people. This speech appears as a focal point in the last section of Bloom’s book, entitled “The University.” For Bloom, it represents the extreme attained by those who took seriously the Enlightenment promise that human reason and politics ought to be allied.

From the time of Socrates to the Enlightenment, Bloom points out, philosophers had believed that there was no natural alliance of political authority and philosophy, that the two were in fact naturally in conflict, that politics was a threat to philosophy. It was assumed that the search for the true and the good and the discussion of the most important things, which are the tasks of philosophy, would always be despised both by the rulers of the city—the political community—and by its citizens. If a philosopher wished to speak to the city, like Machiavelli, he could only do so by concealing his true message and pretending to speak the same language as the rulers.

Not long after Machiavelli’s time, however, the natural opposition between philosophy and politics started to crumble under pressure of a new idea, that knowledge is power. If knowledge is indeed power, then the task of philosophy, namely to pursue knowledge, is a political task. Knowledge as power in turn became allied with another notion, that the purpose of power is human betterment and social progress. These two notions in combination created the constellation of the Enlightenment and its misplaced faith in the political use of reason.

Bloom refers to Weber’s notion of the “last man,” the character-type produced by—and in turn producing—the perfectly rational, bureaucratic society. The “last man,” whom we could also call, following Lewis, the “chestless man,” has solved the relation between reason and the human good and has achieved a kind of happiness at the price of forgetting what the real search for happiness was once about. The flatness of the last man’s soul is the result of a philosophical, not a political, disaster. This is what differentiates the crisis of the West from the decline of Greek civilization or the end of the Roman Empire.

With the “last man”—who is happy because his purpose in life is to find values to believe in rather than to discover the good— we have come full circle. We are back with the students Bloom described at the beginning of his book. They think they are finding their own values, but they really have only two choices: they can follow nihilism to its conclusion and simply decide what to do as an act of will, indulging in irrational commitment for the mere sake of action; or they can reflect, in the mirrors of their souls, what is around them. In fact, the two choices are only one, as the Heidelberg students of 1933 and the Columbia students of 1968 demonstrated. Irrational commitment turned out in practice to be nothing other than the reflection of what was around.

The difference between finding values and discovering the good is, Bloom says, the same as the difference between the language of tradition (known to the grandparents of today’s students) and the language of relativism, which does not allow the discussion of good and evil except as matters of opinion. The difference between these two languages is the real subject of Bloom’s book, and the closing of the American mind in the name of openness is a measure of the victory of the language of relativism over the language of truth and error.

There is a fatal flaw in the language of relativism, however: it depends for its own validity on a rationalism that it implicitly denies. In a sense, relativism suffers from the liar’s paradox: “Everything I say is a lie, including this sentence.” One way out of the impasse is for the relativist to say that, whereas there is no such thing as discovering the good, there are areas of life, such as “the sacred,” that have meaning for certain groups and individuals, and as such have a curious sort of provisional validity. Bloom easily disposes of this intellectual sleight-of-hand, concluding that “these sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.”

Having described the grand history of nihilism in the Western mind, Bloom has one task left, and that is to relate that grand history to the smaller history of the university itself. Here the poignancy of his early chapters returns. The reader is made painfully aware that Bloom understands, perhaps better than anyone alive in America today, what the idea of the university is, and how little our universities live up to that idea.

Like Leo Strauss, Bloom chooses his language and his forms of expression very carefully, and the reader must be attentive not just to the message but to the precise way in which each argument is made. Bloom’s language in speaking of the university is especially important, because in saying what the university is he is describing not the contemporary world but the ideal world. He is offering, I believe, a form of ironic incantation in the hope that a few of us might listen and try to bring about the reality he invokes.

The university, according to Bloom, is the place where society permits philosophers “an eternal childhood … whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.” But society must have no expectations from the university other than that philosophers there will talk with one another about the most important things.

Bloom has not yet told us why he follows Plato in believing that true philosophers are at odds with the rest of society. In a chapter entitled “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede” he takes up the question in a brief, almost parenthetical passage:

“The essential difference between the philosopher and all other men is his facing of death or his relation to eternity … The question is how one lives, and only the philosopher does not need opinions that falsify the significance of things in order to endure them. He alone mixes the reality of death—its inevitability and our dependence on fortune for what little life we have—into every thought and deed and is thus able to live while honestly seeking perfect clarity. He is, therefore, necessarily in the most fundamental tension with everyone except his own kind. He relates to all the others ironically, i.e., with sympathy and a playful distance … he has no expectation of essential progress. Toleration, not right, is the best he can hope for.”

Clearly for Bloom the Enlightenment alliance of knowledge and politics, of philosophy and society, was based on a misguided belief in a common purpose, and what is more, on a surrender of philosophy to the belief in progress which the philosophers from Plato through Machiavelli to Hobbes had denied. When philosophers started to believe in progress, politicians started to believe in the political utility of philosophy, and both sides began the slide down the slippery slope that ended in Germany in Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede. In America today, university administrators argue less dangerously than Heidegger, but in furtherance of the same belief, that the university must be ministerial to society, that it should absorb socially respectable views and ideologies and communicate them to its students, thereby providing effective, useful citizens and effective, useful discoveries for society’s leaders to use in their mastery of nature and man.

Bloom concludes his account of the career of knowledge by writing that “Heidegger’s teachings are the most powerful intellectual force in our times.” He then proceeds, in his penultimate chapter, “The Sixties,” to prove this by example. In that unhappy decade, the Kulturkampf broke upon campuses that held more promise than ever before in American history. The result was the destruction of that promise and the final “snapping of the threads” that bound the noble American “savages” to the great tradition. The thread-snappers, students and faculty alike, “could waste the capital because they did not know they were living off of it. They returned to the university, declared it bankrupt and thereby bankrupted it. They abandoned the grand American liberal traditions of learning.” As a consequence, not only are today’s “nice” students “men without chests,” but

“the university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person … there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is. The question has disappeared, for to pose it would be a threat to the peace … Out of chaos emerges dispiritedness, because it is impossible to make a reasonable choice. Better to give up on liberal education and get on with a specialty in which there is at least a prescribed curriculum and a prospective career … The student gets no intimation that great mysteries might be revealed to him, that new and higher motives of action might be discovered within him, that a different and more human way of life can be harmoniously constructed by what he is going to learn.”

What the students want, apparently, is the pale, disinfected security of non-racist, non-sexist, non-biased undergraduate courses, followed by professional school and a good job. What they need—and what they will not get unless they are lucky enough to be taught by Allan Bloom—is the discovery of the great tradition and, we must now add, of the history of how that tradition has been obscured and ridiculed.

The Closing of the American Mind finishes on what I think, given Bloom’s argument, is an essential ambiguity. The promise of the modern university that science and society could be reconciled for the common good has failed. Yet if the promise is entirely dead, why bother to write the book other than as an obituary which no one could understand anyway? Bloom’s somber conclusion is that, “just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before.” An observer stationed at a leading university, as I am, would have to conclude that those who represent knowledge appear utterly oblivious to the responsibility Bloom recognizes. Nevertheless, as the German poet Hölderlin wrote, “Where there is danger/There also grows that which will save us.”

Crisis, October 1987

by David Gress

“Born in Judea, raised in Rome, coming of age in the USA,” proclaimed a headline in the National Catholic Reporter, the mouthpiece of the left-liberal establishment of the American Church. There followed excerpts from a discussion by six sociologists (correctly divided fifty-fifty by sex) as well as the publisher and editor of NCR (not correctly divided) on the state of American Catholicism and the beliefs of American Catholics as they prepared to welcome the Pope.

The exuberant headline and the discussion that followed praised three features of the American church that are incompatible with any historically or theologically founded definition of Catholicism. The first is secular determinism, the assumption that the political and moral standards of left-liberal Americans of the 1980s are and should be normative for the Church. The second is parochialism in time, expressed in the simplistic notion of perpetual secular progress and in the view that we who happen to live today are in all ways superior to our ancestors. The third, which is both a cause and a consequence of the others, is the naive cultural arrogance that implies that the American Church really is the vanguard of the universal Church. Where lay American Catholics are today, there the Pope should be tomorrow, or the worse for him.

The occasion for the discussion was an NCR/Gallup survey of Catholic attitudes on what it means to be a “good Catholic,” how the Church should be administered, and who should have moral authority. Pluralities or majorities believed that good Catholics need not fulfill their Sunday obligation or go to confession at least once a year, that they may be divorced and remarried, that individuals should have more say than the hierarchy in judging contraception, abortion, pre- or extramarital sex, or divorce, and that laymen should be able to give sermons, teach in seminaries, select priests, spend parish income, and decide canonical and doctrinal issues such as divorce or the ordination of women. In general, the younger and the better educated were more likely to believe or agree with these points.

These opinions, many have said, signify a cultural revolution among American Catholics. Once content to obey, American Catholics now question; once trusting, they are now suspicious. They claim the right to decide what to believe for themselves, but also insist that they can do this and remain “good Catholics.”

Two fundamental beliefs recur in this and other more impressionistic surveys of Catholic opinion in the U.S. One is that distinctions should be eliminated: American Catholics want to give the laity as much influence, control, and pastoral authority as the hierarchy; in other words, a Church that would be indistinguishable from liberal Protestant denominations. The other is doctrinal individualism: the belief that individual conscience is supreme, that the individual’s own sincerity and preferences should determine belief. Gone, or at least very well hidden, is any sense that a Catholic’s conscience is not wholly his own nor an infallible guide to moral judgment; that it must be directed and taught by authority; and that if his conscience disagrees with Church teaching, it is his conscience, and not the teaching, that must yield.

During his visit, the Pope singled out both these demands — that distinctions be eliminated, and that individual conscience be respected as the ultimate moral guide — for specific rebuke. He clearly regards them as the essence of what we might call “the American problem.” It is the prevalence of these demands, and of the emotions and attitudes associated with them, that make it hard to agree with those who see Americans as particularly religious, or who point to the levels of religious affiliation and stated commitment as evidence that, in the United States at least, modernity has not led to a decline of faith. The main theme of the debates and arguments preceding the Pope’s visit was that American Catholics want the Church to be like the political society in which they live — not different, not special, not set apart. Surely this is not evidence of an enduring religious commitment in the midst of modern society, a commitment that disproves the theory of inevitable secularization. Rather it is evidence that secularization can operate just as well by taking over religion as by overtly discarding it.

As the Pope’s arrival became imminent, the major national media began picking up stories about the inevitable clash between the Pope and the American Church. On September 10, the day the Holy Father landed in Miami, the New York Times published the response of 605 Catholics to the question “Is the Church in touch or out of touch with the needs of Catholics today?” Forty-eight percent said “out of touch” and 43 percent said “in touch.” The significant of this result lies only partly in the figures and in the curiously provincial assumption that “the needs of Catholics” and “the felt needs of American Catholics” coincide. It lies, rather, in the perverse view that the most important question to ask about this, or any Pope, is whether he is “in touch” with the desires or needs of some part of his flock, and not whether that part of his flock is “in touch” with him. Throughout the visit, the constant refrain of commentators in the mass media was that there is something wrong with a Pope who does not instantly and obediently adopt the agenda of the liberal establishment of the American Church — the agenda I summarized above as “elimination of distinctions” and “doctrinal individualism.” To listen to this unremitting chorus, one might be led to suppose that the most important question for an American Catholic was no longer “Am I in accord with Peter?” but “Is Peter in accord with me?”

That same evening, the major networks presented special broadcasts on the state of American Catholicism. These broadcasts were the opening barrage in the television coverage of the visit, which at times resembled more a campaign to give publicity to the arguments for dissent. This was markedly more true of the national networks than of the local affiliates. If San Francisco coverage is any guide, these did a fairly good job, although their idea of a discussion of the Pope’s encounters and speeches generally was to have two liberal priests or theologians agreeing with one another, rather than to present genuinely differing views. Still, even the locals were not completely honest. On September 10, Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco celebrated a mass at St. Mary’s cathedral in honor of the Pope’s arrival in the U. S. All three local affiliates of the national networks were there, cameras rolling. In his sermon, the archbishop criticized the media for giving disproportionate attention to dissent and insisted that most American faithful were neither dissenters nor angry. That is undoubtedly true, since even the pluralities in the NCR survey who held clearly unorthodox positions refused to describe themselves as dissenters and insisted that they liked the Pope while rejecting his teaching. However, all that is not the point here. Rather, the point is that in the news clip as broadcast the statement had been cut so that the archbishop seemed to be saying that there was a great deal of dissent and anguish. That was just about the opposite of what he in fact said.

The network specials were entirely predictable. The Pope, according to Peter Jennings of ABC, was a strange “paradox,” a man who called for helping the poor while insisting that Catholics obey Church teaching. This amazing character was a “problem” for enlightened American Catholics who (here came the refrain) demanded to participate in decisions and to make up their own minds. On CBS, Dan Rather intoned solemnly that “Catholics are looking inside themselves for the answers.” ABC illustrated what some of those answers might be by looking at a “typical modern parish” in Moraga, California. The interviewer talked to the youth director, a rather hard-faced young lady who referred to God as “She” and declared Rome and the Holy Father to be of small importance in her life or that of her parish. If her level of theological grounding was typical, as it probably was, we have even more interesting things in store when her generation “looks inside itself for the answers.”

ABC flashed a series of unspecified poll data on the screen to prove that most American Catholics want married priests, women priests, and no Church constraints on sexual behavior. The most interesting but also doubtful item was that 40 percent of American Catholics would rather split from Rome and form an American Church than give up their personal convictions when these differed from the Magisterium. This item completely contradicted the evidence from the NCR poll and elsewhere that Americans want doctrinal individualism, but most emphatically do not want to secede. In fact, the very same ABC program offered evidence that 75 percent — three quarters — of those polled think you can dissent and still be a Catholic. This, and not any honest desire for schism, is the essence of “the American problem.”

The media barrage was aimed at the American people, and God only knows what they made of it. As for the Pope, he was exposed to “the American problem” in a less direct and somewhat less crass form. He encountered it in the three speeches given to him on the state of the American Church. There were, of course, other speeches and other encounters, notably the sermon on immigrants in San Antonio which was perhaps the pastoral high point of the Holy Father’s journey, and the address to the film industry in Hollywood. These three, however, concern us here because they so well expressed the gulf separating John Paul II from at least a significant fraction of the powers- that – be in the American Church. They were the address by Father Frank McNulty in Miami for the priests, the remarks by Archbishops Quinn, Bernardin, and Weakland in Los Angeles for the bishops, and the harangue by Mrs. Donna Hanson in San Francisco for the laity. Each address was less eloquent, less filial, and more importunate than the one before.

Father McNulty, a leader of the left-liberal establishment, emphasized, as might be expected, “the celibacy question.” While not openly demanding that the requirement of celibacy be lifted, he urged to Pope to “continue along paths of support and exploration.” Father McNulty, whose remarks had been submitted to the Vatican months before for approval, as had all other speeches given to the Pope, was no doubt comforted to learn, as the New York Times reported on September 11, that 55 percent of priests want to marry. He also went on to say, in that particularly insistent and concerned manner which priests adopt who, one suspects, feel guilty that women cannot be ordained, that “there is need for study, reflection and, above all, more dialogue with women.” In the Times poll, an equal number of priests (43 percent) supported and opposed the ordination of women.

Father McNulty was careful to note that, as a priest, he could not speak for “women in ministry.” Strictly speaking, that phrase can refer only to those extraordinary women ministers of the Eucharist who, in violation of canonical norms, are so common these days in American parishes and not, for example, to religious or teachers in parochial schools. Indeed, the problem of education was notable for its absence in any of the reported discussions. Spokesmen for the American Church during the visit occasionally made reference, as did the NCR panelists as well as the network specials, to the high level of “our Catholic education” today. Yet these highly educated Catholics are also those who demand the abolition of distinctions and doctrinal individualism. Such demands show, if anything, that those who make them have absorbed the ideology of the culture, not a Catholic education in any recognizable sense.

The problem of Catholic education, to digress for a moment, seems to be a special case of that afflicting all education in this country, namely, the loss of the appropriate “cultural code.” For Catholics, this code should consist of the elements of doctrine, knowledge of the sacraments, how they are to be received and their effects, some knowledge of liturgy and liturgical development, and an outline of Church history including the Church’s social teaching. The main point is that the cultural code, whether of the Church or of American society in general, is not something found by looking at the world around us or simply copying its values and standards, but by learning a certain, irreducible minimum of facts and ideas. In the public schools, the teachers became fearful of imposing any values at all that might offend anyone’s sensibilities or which might imply that there was such a thing as a cultural code of things “literate Americans should know,” in the words of E. J. Hirsch.

This ought not to be a problem in Catholic schools which have, in theory at least, an explicit mission to teach a specific body of knowledge and truth. Yet it has been. Relativism and the various other spinoffs from the broad ideological arsenal of post-1960s American liberalism appear well entrenched in the Catholic school system. That is where young Catholics should be learning about distinctions and doctrines, and where instead too many of them graduate with the idea that to be educated and mature is to argue and make demands. The arrogant importunities of those who insist on doctrinal individualism and the right to selective obedience derive at least partly from a defective education. The most important task of Catholic education may be to transcend, not to copy, the less admirable features of contemporary American political and social life, and to teach the difference between those — political, social, cultural — areas where argument and disagreement are signs of maturity, and the area of faith and doctrine, where maturity is signified by a more complete understanding.

In Los Angeles, where the Pope met 320 U. S. bishops, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, the head of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), told the pope: “We live in an open society where everyone prizes the freedom to speak his or her mind,” and that Americans “instinctively react negatively when they told that they must do something, even though in their hearts they may know they should do it.” That remark got a lot of play in the media, though it is objectively a grave insult. It implies that American Catholics are immature and, above all, uneducated children who have not been taught the distinction between legitimate authority and arbitrary demands.

Weakland and Quinn spoke after Bernardin. Each of the three raised one of the banner issues of the liberal Church establishment — collegiality, the role of women, and the inadequacy of traditional doctrine. Bernardin spoke expansively of collegiality and the new role of bishops. The Pope replied with what seemed like dry humor that “the vertical dimension of collegiality has been less deeply experienced by many who on the other hand have a vivid sense of its horizontal dimension.” He added that the Catholic Church is not a “federation of particular churches.” If the American Church wants that kind of autonomy, it had better face the consequences honestly.

Last year, Archbishop Weakland demonstrated that of the leading U. S. bishops he is closest to open opposition to Rome. That was when the NCCB, under strong Vatican urging, temporarily disciplined Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle for, among other things, allowing general absolution without individual confession and pro-homosexual masses. Weakland sometimes gives the impression that he regards the left of the American Church as the true Church and Rome as being in schism. In Los Angeles he extolled “Catholic education” as better than ever, and as evidence adduced the fact that Catholics now “are more inclined to look at the intrinsic worth of an argument.” That is not quite correct: what Weakland should have said was that many Catholics do not question left-liberal arguments, such as those of the economic pastoral, which bears Weakland’s imprint, and prefer to criticize caricatures of moderate or conservative arguments. Whether American Catholics as a whole have been well served, and their critical faculties more finely honed, by this excellent education of today is, on the evidence, very much open to question.

Weakland then made a pitch for “women who seek to be equal partners” and who “feel they are second-class citizens in a church they love.” He insisted that this was not a plea for women’s ordination, though it was hard to see what else it might be, given that the Pope reiterated several times on his trip that women have “equal dignity” and that we must not forget that the most perfect exemplar of simple humanity was a woman, namely the Mother of God.

Finally, Archbishop Quinn spoke of the difficulty of teaching the Church’s message amidst the social convulsions of the age. It was in response to this that the Pope insisted most firmly on orthodoxy: “It is sometimes claimed that dissent from the Magisterium is totally compatible with being a ‘good Catholic’ and poses no obstacles to the reception of the sacraments. This is a grave error that challenges the teaching office of the bishops of the United States and elsewhere.” Later, in San Francisco, the Pope repeated his warning with specific reference to divorced and remarried persons. While such persons are certain of the Church’s love, he said, they cannot receive the sacraments.

Now everyone knows, including the Holy Father, that many American priests defy this canonical rule, giving the sacraments (mainly the Eucharist) not only to remarried persons but to dissenters of every stripe, so long as it is a liberal or a radical stripe. Since a condition for valid reception of the Eucharist is full auricular confession including an act of contrition and firm promise of amendment, and since many of these dissenters by their behavior demonstrate that, confession or no, they have no intention of changing their ways, it seems morally certain that these people are receiving the Eucharist invalidly and thus putting their immortal souls in jeopardy.

The bishops who tolerate this clearly do not see it as “a grave error” that challenges their “teaching office.” Why then did the Pope bother to make the pretense that they do, or that these practices should and will stop? I suspect the main reason was to go on record for the doctrinal and canonical truth. It was a warning, just as in the old days the Church authorities warned the heretic three times before severing the Church from his harmful influence. In those times, each exhortation had to include a plea for repentance, a demand for firm amendment, and an assumption of good faith, that is, an assumption that the heretic was not wilfully in error, but merely misinformed. Thus, the burden of separation would rest, and would be seen to rest, on the heretic. The Church does not and cannot thrust anyone away, but likewise will not force anyone to stay. It is my feeling that the Pope, in Los Angeles, issued the first exhortation. We will now see whether it is heeded.

To avoid distortion of judgment I had deliberately refrained from following the Pope’s visit on television after the opening shots in the form of the network specials on September 10. On September 18, however, the Pope was in San Francisco, and with some trepidation I checked in with the local affiliates to see how they were covering it. Sensibly, I found, but the main value of autopsy was that I got to see the spectacle of the lay leaders’ talks in St. Mary’s cathedral live. That was important, for the appearance, gestures, and actions of these leaders were at least as interesting, and as revealing of the neuroses and compulsions of liberal establishment Catholicism, as what they actually said.

In Los Angeles, the Pope told the bishops, in effect, that he expected them, if not to teach the truth, at least to prevent scandal by withholding the sacraments from notorious dissenters. More broadly he was also telling lay people that doctrinal individualism was not an option. Now, in San Francisco, he told us that the elimination of distinctions is a folly and an evil. Two such distinctions are, seemingly, of particular offense to the liberal Catholic mentality: the distinction between lay and ordained, and that between men and women. Concerning the first, the Pope said specifically in St. Mary’s that the lay and the ordained state are equal, but separate, and that we should beware of “clericalizing the laity and laicizing the clergy.” Sensible, wonderful, and refreshing words to those who cannot understand why the Vatican Council’s elevation of lay dignity and lay vocations has resulted, in the American Church, in an ugly clericalism, so that people think that lay participation is only respectable if it takes semi-clerical forms. Concerning the second, the Holy Father said that “all the special gifts of women are needed in an ever-increasing measure in [the Church’s] life.”

The problem that many liberal Catholics apparently have with these distinctions was illustrated with unconscious irony by the very people whom the archdiocese had chosen to represent lay leaders. There were four: a couple to introduce the speakers and the two speakers, Donna Hanson, President of the Lay Advisory Council of the NCCB, and Patrick Hughes, director of lay ministries for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Both the lady introducer and Mrs. Hanson wore nearly identical man-tailored suits of the kind that has become so depressingly familiar in the workplace. Mrs. Hanson even sported a tie. These probably unconscious gestures were, if these ladies had only reflected upon it, amusing tributes to the enduring power of male archetypes in the liberal mind. Such a mind can only conceive of equality as identity, not as difference. To be equal with men therefore means to wear men’s clothes.

The speakers had the same problem with the distinction between lay and ordained. Here, too, they conceived of equality as identity. Both Mrs. Hanson and Mr. Hughes spoke at great length of the importance of lay ministries and asked that “authorities involve me in a process of understanding,” a clumsy phrase that, apparently, concealed a demand for lay influence on the formulation of doctrine. The real give-away in this regard, however, was the introduction of Mr. Hughes as a man whose “career in the Church” began in 1963. This slip was highly suggestive of a certain mindset, namely a mindset that sees the Church as a “career organization.”

This is as far as possible from the Council’s idea that the laity are called to sanctify their work and the world, not to invade the Church organization, just as the clergy are not called to invade the world with pronouncements on all manner of non-doctrinal issues like nuclear weapons or economic policy. Mr. Hughes’ “career” in the Church, like that of every Catholic, began on the day of his baptism and will, we pray, continue through this life in the Church Militant and beyond in the Church Suffering and the Church Triumphant.

Needless to say, neither Mrs. Hanson nor Mr. Hughes nor, for that matter, a great part of the throng at St. Mary’s found it appropriate to kiss the Pope’s ring as a sign of filial devotion. Instead, they offered the egalitarian American handshake and, in Mrs. Hanson’s case, a peck on the Holy Father’s cheek. How grown-up and mature we all are, to be sure.

The liberal compulsion to eliminate distinctions and to favor doctrinal individualism seems an in-eradicable part of our culture. One way of under-standing that compulsion is to see it as an example of what Thomas Sowell, the economist and social critic, calls the “unconstrained vision” of human nature. As he explains in his recent book, A Conflict of Visions, the unconstrained vision is fundamentally historical and superficially rationalistic. Its adherents have little regard for tradition and inherited wisdom; for them, sincerity is more important than fidelity. They see inequalities and differences where, according to them, there should be equality. If they cannot justify a rule rationally to their own satisfaction, they reject it; there is, for them, no such thing as doctrinal authority. They want justice they can understand, and now, whereas adherents of the constrained vision accept tradition because they assume that they do not and cannot know everything.

Sowell’s argument concerns social and economic thinkers, but it has an uncanny relevance for today’s debate in the Church. It seems — and this I offer hesitantly, off-the-cuff — that most Catholics’ classical understanding of the Church, in America as elsewhere, was related to the constrained vision as regards human nature and capabilities. We are fallen, limited creatures who cannot know all and therefore have no right to assert that our individual preferences are just or better than those of other times or places. That does not mean that anything goes, or that Western culture or the Catholic Church are no better than any other culture or religion. Rather, it means that tradition is important, because tradition is one way of drawing on the wisdom of many people none of whom, individually, had the full answer to anything.

Today, if one is to believe the NCR survey and much of the argument over the Pope’s visit, the unconstrained vision has the hegemony. If something does not make sense, reject it. If some rule is a “hard doctrine,” don’t obey it. As long as your personal conscience is clear, you are doing no wrong. Sincerity is more important than fidelity. The submission of conscience and will, the mortification of spirit, the sacrificium intellectus? Ancient hocus-pocus unworthy of us enlightened moderns, probably developed by a gang of male chauvinists for their nefarious purposes. The problem with all this rationalism and the unconstrained vision from which it springs is that not only is that vision, as I believe, false and pernicious, it is also quite simply incompatible with any recognizably Catholic ecclesiology.

The Church, with her Magisterium and deposit of faith, is not only the keeper of truth by divine promise, but also, as a cultural institution, a great repository of the wisdom of many generations. The ancient criterion of Catholic orthodoxy was quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est (that which has been believed always, everywhere, and by all). This is the very opposite of the primitive notion that what a plurality of American Catholics believes today is somehow the true sensus fidelium, as one of the NCR panelists absurdly argued.

The Pope came to see us, to learn from us, and to pray more fully for us “that our faith may not fail.” How well he succeeded, God only knows. The one thing that we can know is that the arguments within the American Church will continue. Those of us who are outside the liberal mainstream have the greater obligation to add our mite to those arguments.

by David Gress

On July 14, France will celebrate, with considerable pomp and circumstance, the bicentennial of the French Revolution, or, more precisely, of that revolution’s central symbolic event, the capture of the Bastille fortress and prison by a mob of hungry Parisians looking for bread and guns.

The Bastille represented the authority and repressive power of the government; the victorious mob represented the will and needs of a people determined henceforth to take the fate of the nation into its own hands. Viewed thus, the symbolism is simple and perfect, and that is undoubtedly how it will seem to those participants on the day itself who bother to reflect on what it is they are commemorating. For most, July 14 in Paris, and throughout France, will be a “prodigious feast of national unity and even of chauvinism,” as the historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd told me when I called to ask about preparations for the great day. “The Republic is quite simply extremely popular,” he added. “The Revolution is part of national tradition, and that is what we will be celebrating.”

To illustrate his point, Todd described how the streetcorner boulangers, the little bakers who traditionally support the extreme right wing of French politics, including Robert Le Pen’s xenophobic Front National, have without exception garlanded their shops in tricolors and are offering red, white, and blue gateaux révolutionnaires for sale. “If there were any constituency in this country truly hostile to the revolutionary tradition, that’s where you would expect to find it. The fact is, it isn’t there. Everybody, including the extreme nationalists, loves the Revolution, because it’s become part of the very national tradition that they, in particular, are so obsessed with defending. We’re all going to have a great time on July 14, no matter what the historians say.”

No matter what the historians say: for so far as the historians are concerned, the last twenty years have indeed witnessed a radical revision of the formerly dominant views of the Revolution on which the celebrations on July 14 will still be based.

Thus, with the exception of a small remnant of diehard Marxists, associated, more or less intimately, with the French Communist party, the historians now see the Revolution as a “tragedy,” “overwhelmingly destructive,” the product of “harmful political passions.” Far from representing any sort of an advance in freedom and material life, the Revolution is depicted as having polarized politics, delayed popular sovereignty, and interrupted the course of economic and population growth that France had followed during most of the 18th century. The result, it is said, was a stagnant, class-ridden, divided society, ill-equipped materially and morally to meet the challenges of our own century, specifically the ideological challenge of Marxism-Leninism and the military challenge of Germany.

There is a paradox here, with several aspects. From a historiographical viewpoint the most striking is that the revisionist consensus, which is the result of decades of immense labor by dozens of historians in many countries, appears to confirm in all important respects the verdicts of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)—less than a year after the fall of the Bastille, and well before the Terror—and of Alexis de Tocqueville in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856). Add to this the very relevant fact that, with the notable exception of Francois Furet, the pioneers of revisionism have not been French but British and American, since most French historians have until recently been obliged by their political ideology to interpret the Revolution as a triumph of justice and human aspiration.

But (just to complete the paradox) it is precisely that ideology which, as Todd’s remark about the boulangers shows, has now extended to political and social groups in France that once would have openly denounced it. What has happened in French politics in the 1970’s and 1980’s is that the very polarization engendered by the Revolution has itself vanished. Instead of a strictly Stalinist Communist party contesting for power with a Gaullist majority, the 1980’s have seen the collapse of Communism as a political and intellectual factor and the emergence of an unprecedented consensus spanning socialists, liberals, and neo-Gaullists. This consensus needs an unproblematic revolution, which it will duly celebrate starting July 14.

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The French Revolution, however one looks at it, remains the seminal event of modern European history, the cataclysm from which all else flows. Consequently, whatever today’s popular mood may be, the radical revision in historiography represents an intellectual and, I would argue, a political fact of no small moment in contemporary European and, indeed, world affairs. How did this dramatic reappraisal come about? What, precisely, was the earlier orthodoxy, and how was it overturned?

To answer those questions the best place to begin is with the events themselves. With the publication of Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution,¹ we have available the most devastating, most informative, and most entertaining account, and the most penetrating critique, of the Revolution itself since Tocqueville’s book of more than a century ago. Citizens will surely become the history of the French Revolution for our generation. Not only that: I warrant that Schama’s book will enter the canon of permanent classics, along with the works of Burke, Michelet, Tocqueville, Lefebvre, Cobban, and Furet. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only what happened during the Revolution but what those events can tell us about the force of material need, the role of human will, and the power of political passions.

Schama, born in England but now a professor of history at Harvard, has accomplished the near-impossible: he has written a work based on serious, comprehensive scholarship which is yet accessible to the nonspecialist. What is even more extraordinary, he has combined a humane and thorough record of events, both known and hitherto unknown, of public and private lives, of emotions, passions, and judgments, with a profound message of his own about the Revolution; that message reflects and encapsulates the revisionist work of the past few decades without distorting the narrative or prescribing the reader’s evaluation.

Schama starts by telling us that he intends to develop three themes in his book. The first is “the problematic relationship between patriotism and liberty, which, in the Revolution, turns into a brutal competition between the power of the state and the effervescence of politics.” The second is the revolutionary leaders’ conception of the nation as an idealized family, which induced them to view disagreement with particular policies as tantamount to a child’s betrayal of his parents and therefore particularly immoral. The third is “the painful problem of revolutionary violence,” concerning which “historians have erred on the side of squeamishness.” All three themes belong to the realm of ideology, passion, and will: in short, to individual human choice and action—factors largely ignored or denied by the old orthodoxy.

That old orthodoxy consisted of two somewhat incompatible doctrinal ingredients: revolutionary nationalism and Marxist determinism. The former was nothing other than the fundamental belief of the Revolution itself in the nation as the sole political and moral reality, which must be freed of all divisions and hindrances in order to carry out its mission: the political redemption of mankind. This belief justified the Terror of 1792-94, which was held to be necessary to sweep away the debris of the old regime.

The father of modern revolutionary nationalism was Jules Michelet, who wrote his history of the Revolution in 1846-53 to glorify the short-lived Second Republic of 1848-51 and to keep alive revolutionary pride and memories in a time of reaction. No later French historian, not even Furet, has been able or willing wholly to shake off the domination of Michelet, for whom the revolutionaries were always right, whatever their actions, because they were defending the cause of universal freedom and justice, which only evil or ill-informed people could oppose.

Revolutionary nationalism is the basis of the universal popular appeal of the Revolution in France today. As I indicated, this has recently spread further than ever before. Twenty years ago, one could still find a small but sturdy constituency of monarchists in France, some of whom even argued for an alliance of king and wage-earners against bureaucrats and big business, denounced as “new feudalists.” Today, there are few monarchists in France. In Emmanuel Todd’s words: “Of course we had to guillotine the king. It’s quite clear that if you say all men are equal you can’t have an inherited monarchy. The king was an alien element. Everybody agrees on that; it’s part of the republican tradition.”

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The socialist leader Jean Jaurés introduced Marxist determinism to revolutionary studies in the 1900’s, when he published a seven-volume history of the Revolution—an extraordinary achievement which, despite its ideological parti pris, reminds one of the level of culture that earlier generations could expect from their political leaders. For Marxists, history necessarily moves in one direction, from primitive Communism through the slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production. At the end of this final phase, society will be universally divided into a tiny class of capitalists, who own all, and a vast majority of workers, who own nothing but their labor. This polarization then sets the stage for “the expropriation of the expropriators” and the arrival of true Communism, where each will work according to his ability and receive according to his needs.

For the Marxist historians who followed Jaures, all this was not a metaphysical belief but a scientific analysis of history. In their view, the Revolution was essentially a transition from the second, the feudal, to the third, capitalist, mode of production. Norman Hampson, a liberal British historian, has paraphrased the Marxist orthodoxy in these words:

A rising industrial and commercial middle class refused any longer to accept its subordinate status within a society and state whose values and policies reflected the obsolete demands of a decayed “feudal” order. When the French nobility took advantage of the impending bankruptcy of the crown [in 1787-88] to provoke a political crisis, in the hope of winning a conservative constitution like that of Great Britain, the middle class took charge of the movement and converted it into a social revolution. The resistance of the old order, however, was so tenacious that the “revolutionary bourgeoisie” could never have established a society based on legal equality, the sanctity of private property, and the freedom of the market if it had not enlisted [in 1791-92] the support of the sansculottes, whose own objective was social democracy rather than liberalism. The alliance between these two divergent forces could never have been more than temporary. When it broke down, France became ungovernable by processes involving mutual consent, and Napoleon eventually restored the authority of the state, at the price of endorsing the social change brought about by the Revolution.

By the 1920’s, this was the mainstream view of the French historical profession and formed the basic set of ideas underlying all empirical research. In no other democratic nation has a Marxist interpretation of the central event of the national history had such power and influence. The reason was that Marxism appeared to confirm that the Revolution, with all its drama and violence, accorded with the laws of historical development.

The “scientific” justification of revolutionary nationalism was elaborated in a series of seminal works of the 20’s and 30’s by Albert Mathiez and Georges Lefebvre, both of whom (like all architects of the old orthodoxy from Michelet on) worshipped Robespierre, the uncrowned king of the Jacobins and virtual dictator of France in 1793-94.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, three younger historians, George Rudé, Albert Soboul, and Michel Vovelle took over and modernized the interpretative scheme established by Mathiez and Lefebvre. All three were or are Communist-party members and identify closely with the cause of Marxist-Leninist revolution throughout the world. Of the three, Rude, who recently published what will probably be the last full statement of the old orthodoxy, is the odd man out.² Despite his name, he is not French but British, and was therefore faced early in his career with an academic environment where the standard view of the Revolution was diametrically opposed to the one dominant in France, and where his Communist-party membership reportedly caused him some trouble in getting a university appointment (he eventually went to work in Canada). Soboul and Vovelle, for their part, introduced into the old scheme the postwar disciplines of social history and history of mentalités (culture and popular attitudes), which enabled them to step away from the revolutionary events themselves to explore popular attitudes and the psychology of social groups. This turn away from politics gave the old orthodoxy a new lease on life, even as historians elsewhere were showing it to be untenable.

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It is a lamentable illustration of the parochialism of historians that the attack on the Marxist interpretation, which was largely the work of Alfred Cobban and other British (and American) historians of the 1960’s, did not penetrate to France until the mid-1980’s. For twenty years from the mid-1960’s on, virtually the sole authoritative French voice critical of the Lefebvre-Soboul orthodoxy was that of Francois Furet. This isolation has had the paradoxical result of leaving Furet today as France’s undisputed leader among historians of the Revolution, since he is the only figure of stature with a consistent record in support of the revisionist interpretation that is now victorious.

Furet began his career in the Annales school with its antipolitical focus on the secular trends of large-scale economic movements, popular attitudes, and permanent or very slow-changing geographic and climatic factors. But in 1965 he published, with Denis Richet, a history of the Revolution that enraged the Marxist-Leninists, and in 1978 he committed further sacrilege in a series of essays denouncing the orthodoxy as both oppressive and misleading. Furet found the keys to a proper understanding in two thinkers whom the orthodoxy had totally spurned: Tocqueville, who saw the Revolution as a violent continuation of the centralization of power that was already occurring under the old regime, and Augustin Cochin (1876-1917), who located the causes of the Jacobin mentality in the pre-revolutionary literary and political debating clubs known as sociétés de pensée.

By the late 1980’s, Furet had emerged as the champion of what he called the conceptual, as opposed to the “commemorative,” interpretation of the Revolution, which he described most recently in a lavishly illustrated history of France from 1770 to 1880.³ In this summary of his work and reflections to date, Furet, in an elegant balancing act, manages at one and the same time to justify and preserve revolutionary nationalism as a source of pride while not in any way concealing his judgment that the Revolution of 1788-99 itself was a destructive, violent, and largely harmful episode that did little to further French democracy in the long run. Like Schama’s new book, Furet’s work will stand as a monument to the political interpretation of the Revolution as the result of men’s will and actions, not of metaphysical forces beyond their control.

With the exception of Rude, few Anglo-Saxon historians of the Revolution ever fully endorsed the Marxist orthodoxy. Some, like Hampson or, in an older generation, the American Robert Palmer, have accepted the basic tenet of revolutionary nationalism, namely, that radical change was both necessary and beneficial in 1789-91. Typical is Hampson’s conclusion to his latest book, a study of “the Constituent Assembly and the failure of consensus” in 1789-91.⁴ He points to “the almost incredible achievements of that Assembly which transformed virtually all of France’s institutions and created, not merely a new society, but new ways of looking at man as a social animal and new ideas about the scope of political action. . . . France was transformed, in a way that many, probably most, of its educated citizens passionately believed to be for the better.” Nor, in Hampson’s view, was the Terror inevitable; rather, it was caused by the emergency resulting from the foreign invasion of 1792 which to those in power made extreme measures seem acceptable and even proper.

The key to Hampson’s outlook is his conclusion that “it was the height of their aspirations that led men to perceive their opponents as the incarnation of evil and thereby gave the Revolution its tragic dimension. If the Assembly failed its impossible task of effecting national regeneration by consent, this was due to what was best, much more than to what was worst in it.” Schama, as we shall see, shows that this benign view of the early stages of the Revolution cannot be justified. As Cochin long ago suggested, violence and terror were inseparable from the entire project of universal national regeneration according to an ideological scheme.

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The actual work of undermining the Marxist orthodoxy was the achievement of Alfred Cobban. In typical British style, he demolished the premises underlying half a century of French scholarship, represented in thousands of dense pages, in a brief lecture series in 1962, later published as The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution.⁵ Cobban was able to show that the notion of a bourgeois class overthrowing a feudal class in order to promote capitalism found no support in the sources. The revolutionaries of 1789 were not capitalists, but mainly lawyers and officeholders anxious about their status in a period of economic crisis and recession. These activists, who formed the bulk of the Constituent Assembly, were “forced to destroy what was called feudalism against their will, under peasant pressure. The Revolution was also a clash of country against town, and poor against rich, and in the end proved economically retarding and a triumph for the conservative, landowning classes.”

Cobban’s analysis raised some very intriguing questions. Unfortunately he himself did not go beyond social and economic questions, and hence produced what Hampson has called an anti-Marxist but still essentially economic and deterministic interpretation. Neither Cobban nor the Marxists had much use for a true political or ideological interpretation, one that would emphasize the role of the Enlightenment and of the faith in rational social organization, and which would see the Revolution as primarily a political event.

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This brings us back, at last, to Schama. For him the Revolution was not predestined, either in Marxist or in any other terms. Each of its stages issued, rather, from the deliberate actions and plans of leading individuals of the time. Politics and ideology, not social or economic structures, are the decisive features. Schama justifies this argument in part by his method. He begins every chapter with some characteristic anecdote, some event in an individual life, that illustrates the developing dialectic of liberty and coercion, from the institutional reforms of 1789 to the Terror of 1793-94.

What did the revolutionary leaders want? Schama argues that nationalism, more than anything else, was the ideological binding glue that held together progressive aristocrats, radical priests, and lawyers and journalists, the group that Cobban marked as the pivot of revolutionary activism. What, then, was nationalism in France of the 1780’s? According to Schama, literate Frenchmen of all orders and social groups had suffered profoundly from the British victory in the Seven Years’ War (known to Americans as the French and Indian War). The French defeat came as a shock to people who believed that France, by far the largest and richest country in Europe, could not possibly be number two in any international contest. The flip side of anti-British resentment was a growing demand that France, as it were, pull itself together, rise as a united nation, and take revenge for past insults and defeats. This burgeoning nationalism spurred the French intervention in the American Revolution; but that was not enough.

Perhaps the most original contribution of Schama’s book to revolutionary studies has to do with the extent of nationalist feeling that he finds years, even decades, before 1789. As far back as the 1730’s, the Marquis d’Argenson wrote a treatise on how France should be governed which accurately anticipated many of the ideas of 1789—above all, the two ideas that national glory requires unity and an end to the administrative chaos of the old regime as well as some form of national, popular representation. In the late 1750’s, the Abbé Mably denounced the existing structures of government and administration as archaic and inappropriate, and recommended a system of popular representation to sweep away the irrational debris of centuries and to establish true national government. With uncanny foresight, he predicted that such a radical transformation of government could only occur after a period of “spiritual ferment” that might well result in violence and civil war.

One aspect that Schama does not emphasize enough, in my opinion, is the role of religion in the rise of French nationalism. French Catholicism had always had a strongly separatist tinge. In the Middle Ages, French kings repeatedly refused to bow to the Pope’s jurisdiction in ecclesiastical affairs. During one of these controversies, Philip the Fair in 1303 even went so far as to have Pope Boniface VIII arrested, in a curious anticipation of what the revolutionary government did to Pius VI in 1797. In later centuries, this belief in a special status for the French Church became known as “Gallicanism,” which the Popes resented without being able to do much about it.

In the 17th century, Gallicanism received a powerful boost from Jansenism, the puritan movement which condemned the morals and the intellectual repression of the institutional Church. By the mid-18th century Jansenism had become part of the belief of many French Catholics that they were somehow special, and superior to the general run of their co-religionists. This emerging religious nationalism fed into and strengthened the political nationalism that Schama detects after 1763.

In the 1780’s, the nationalists found a further cause of urgency in the lamentable economic situation of the government. By late 1786, the French state was bankrupt. The nationalist or, to use the contemporary phrase, the patriotic solution to the problem was to establish a national representative body that would reform the administration and replace royal absolutism with popular sovereignty. By late 1788, the king, Louis XVI, had been persuaded to summon the only representative bodies known in French tradition, namely, the Estates General, which had last met in 1614.

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No sooner had the Estates been convened in early 1789 than the Third Estate, representing the commoners, declared itself the embodiment of the national will and changed its name to the National Assembly. The Assembly invited progressive nobles and clergymen to join it, and proceeded, in a series of measures in 1789- 90, to abolish all inherited social and economic rights and privileges, to disestablish the Church, and to introduce civil and political rights for all citizens.

So far, so good. Schama points out, however, that the prestige and power of the Assembly depended not merely on rational consent but on a fateful change in the patriotic ideology that inspired its leaders, a change that he argues was inherent in its universalist logic. The patriots wanted total change and they wanted it immediately. As Edmund Burke clearly saw in 1790, this was a grotesque, even inhuman, demand, since it implied the wholesale destruction of all traditions, whether good or bad. Moreover, the patriot lawmakers were a small minority of intellectual activists in an overwhelmingly agrarian country, most of whose inhabitants wanted simply a solution to the serious economic crisis. The harvest of 1788 had failed, the price of bread skyrocketed; hunger and misery were widespread in the spring of 1789. This was the immediate cause of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, which dramatically illustrated what could be done with half-armed Parisian mobs, a lesson not lost on the more radical activists.

Schama argues that even as early as 1788 it was clear that the patriot program was going to lead to bloodshed, violence, and civil war. The reason was that the very absolutism of the ideologues of national regeneration necessarily led them to regard any and all opponents as unpatriotic and therefore as “enemies of the people”:

Once aristocrat became synonymous with anti-national, it meant that anyone who wished to preserve distinctions of rank in the political bodies of the new order identified himself as incapable of citizenship. Such people were, in effect, outside the Nation, foreigners even before they had emigrated.

According to Schama, the “sentimental panaceas” of patriotic rhetoric led to violent conflict because they created entirely unrealistic expectations while at the same time labeling all opponents as vicious, immoral enemies who, for narrow, egotistical reasons, were preventing universal happiness. The ideologues told the nation that the Assembly would, by some magical process, solve all problems and grievances. When this did not happen, the activists found enough support in marginal groups threatened by economic disaster to provide the physical means of civil war—a moralistic civil war, to be sure, fought on behalf of the People against its enemies.

The phrase “sentimental panaceas” raises the question of the revolutionary temperament, the outlook of those who could believe that destroying all existing institutions to create a perfect new political society was either possible or desirable. Schama is not alone in pointing to Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the ancestor of this particular form of sentimental terrorism. Certainly, as Schama is careful to note, Rousseau himself warned that instituting a republic of “virtue”—a key revolutionary term—in a great, existing state was to invite disaster. In 1789, however, Rousseau had been dead for eleven years and the point was not what he had actually said but his prestige among radical intellectuals. Their rhetoric, as Schama notes, was “Rousseau with a hoarse voice and sharpened with bloody-minded impatience.” From this crude version of Rousseau the intellectuals devised the notion that virtue (vertu) could and must be institutionalized, and that doing so would bring about national regeneration.

Schama shows that the “direct relationship between blood and freedom” (in the ideologues’ sense) was clear, not, as Hampson would have it, in 1793, but already in 1789. “From the first year it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side-effect from which enlightened Patriots could selectively avert their eyes; it was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.”

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It would be hard to imagine a more direct challenge either to the Marxist orthodoxy of collective factors operating beyond human will or to Hampson’s benevolent liberalism. Yet Schama carries it off, above all by his extensive and cogent quotations from major or minor actors of the drama. His thousand pages are not a political tract or an argument with rival interpretations; he has no time for that, so concerned is he to report what people actually did and said. Nevertheless the fundamental message is clear. The Revolution, so far from producing liberty and democracy, was fated by its fundamental ideology to produce confrontation and civil war. Since, given human nature, the project of total renewal could not be carried out, it led necessarily to intolerance and repression of a particularly vicious kind, in which opponents were not merely adversaries to be convinced or restrained, but evil forces to be eradicated.

In a critique of Schama’s book, Hampson has argued that Schama ignores the ideology of the revolutionaries. This is hardly the case, as I have indicated; Schama makes that ideology clear in ways that few, except for Tocqueville, have done. But two other critical points are more relevant. One is that Schama spends so much time describing and analyzing the pre-revolution of 1774-89 that, despite his thousand pages, he has too little space for the period from the end of the Constituent Assembly in late 1791 to the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Jacobin Terror in 1794. A second is that Schama offers so much that an unprepared reader may indeed miss the forest for the trees. What we need to complement Schama is a bare-bones history of the revolutionary events combined with a philosophical interpretation, something like a French equivalent of Martin Malia’s extraordinary little volume on the Russian Revolution.⁶ In barely 100 pages, Malia shows what made the Russian Revolution inevitable, what happened during it, and why its results were as they are.

Applying Malia’s method to France, one can immediately see certain striking analogies to the Russian case as well as equally important differences. The biggest difference is that, however bloody the Jacobin Terror, it came nowhere near destroying French civil society as the Bolsheviks, aided by the famine they caused, destroyed Russian civil society in 1918-21. France survived, recovered, and eventually found its way to a democratic system that honors the revolutionary tradition while in fact having very little in common with the revolutionary ideology.

The analogies may be more important. Both revolutions had absolute goals, which naturally entailed the absolute eradication of the enemies, real or imagined, of these goals. Both saw in national uniformity the key to power and survival. For both, foreign war and expansion were a necessary complement to national, domestic revolution. Both, in accordance with this doctrine, brought untold and entirely unnecessary misery to millions of Europeans, as well as inflicting terrible damage on their homelands. Both, finally, were, as Schama notes in the French case, “anti-modernizing”; they retarded rather than accelerated the movement of their respective political cultures toward democratic pluralism, tolerance, and government by genuine popular sovereignty.

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The Marxists, of course, long ago decided on the answer to the question of whether the Revolution was modernizing, and how. Cobban proved them wrong but had no positive scheme of his own to put in the Marxist place, since he still believed in a social, not a political, explanation. A few years after Cobban wrote his debunking book, an American historian, Edward Whiting Fox, came up with a general interpretation of French history that, combined with Cobban, may offer some interesting pointers to what happened during the Revolution.⁷ Curiously, Schama neglects this work, though it provides useful support for his thesis that the Revolution was “anti-modernizing.”

Fox believes that French history can be interpreted as a secular struggle between what he calls “areal” and “linear” forms of organization. The areal is the organization of the territorial state, based on control, direct or indirect, of land. Linear organization is the network of commercial and financial interest which, in 18th-century France, spanned the Atlantic seaboard from Bordeaux in the south to Calais in the north, and the Rhine and Rhone valleys. The champions of areal organization and of the territorial state were by definition conservative, seeking to include and control the commercial cities in order to tax and exploit them. The merchants and financiers of the linear system, on the other hand, were by definition liberal, interested in withdrawing as much as possible from areal control and in resisting the encroachments of the state.

Ironically, a Marxist would find it very easy to apply Fox’s scheme to the Revolution. What happened, he would say, was that the linear people rose against the encrusted stagnation of the areal system, thus producing 19th-century French capitalism. The only problem with this neat solution is that we know, thanks to Cobban, that it is the exact reverse of the truth: the Revolution was in fact a tremendous victory for the arealists and a complete defeat for the linear, commercial culture. Cobban, and after him many others, have noted that French commerce was ruined by the Revolution and the wars that followed. French foreign trade in 1815 was a fraction of what it had been in 1789; Bordeaux, Brest, Le Havre, Calais, Strasbourg, and the other trading cities were shells of their former selves. The question one must ask is: was this ruination deliberate, and if so, why was it done?

Schama and Cobban together can provide the answer. As I indicated above, Cobban points out that the revolutionary leaders were radical lawyers and officeholders fearful of losing status. So they climbed on board a rising wave of nationalist ideology which they then used to launch an unprecedented centralization of authority and coercive force. What do the radical measures of 1789—the abolition of the orders, of feudal privileges, of the established Church, of inherited distinctions—all mean? If we peel away the patriotic varnish that Hampson and other liberals are so concerned to refresh, what they mean is a demolition of all traditional, local political cultures, and of all other institutional and psychological obstacles to uniform national power, centrally located in the Assembly and, later, the Convention.

This is what Tocqueville clearly saw in the 1850’s. He did not see what more recent histories can tell us, namely, that this centralization was not only brutal and violent, but viciously regressive from the viewpoint of economic and political modernization. Thanks exclusively to the activity of the patriots—or should we call them arealists?—Frenchmen in general were vastly poorer and arguably less free in 1793 than they had been in 1788.

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This Cobban-Fox-Schama interpretation carries some powerful lessons for today. One is that it is naive to think that commercial capitalism, just because it produces economic growth, is politically destined to defeat areal power on a national or global scale. Many people today believe, not only that the cold war between Western democracy and Communist totalitarianism is over, but that Western-style liberal capitalism is necessarily the coming thing. Certainly it would be pleasant if that were the case, but the French Revolution shows that determined arealists are closer to the levers of power, and that they will not hesitate to use them.

This consideration seems to me to have no small relevance for how we evaluate the modern fate of the Russian Revolution as symbolized in the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev to reform the Soviet Union. The Russian revolutionaries were, in Fox’s term, arealists. In their ideology there was no place for capitalist development, which they accordingly proceeded to crush so effectively in Russia that many parts of that vast country are materially worse off today than they were in 1913. Now Gorbachev’s strategy appears to be one of reinforcing areal control of the Soviet Union. In carrying out that strategy, he will not be impressed by arguments that linear capitalism is the wave of the future. Real history has no place for such a determinism, which is merely the mirror image of Marxism. Linear-style capitalist organization can win if it is backed by more resolution and a stronger will than its enemies. If not, it loses. So it was in 1789, and so it is in 1989.

One riddle perhaps remains. How could the Enlightenment ideals of liberal progress, toleration, and individual rights become the justification of mass murder and repression in the name of the People and vertu? After reading Schama, one realizes that this is not a riddle at all. Nothing is easier than perverting an ideal into the tool of repressive power while retaining the original slogans. Surely the history of Soviet Communism has taught us that. If we need examples closer to home, we need look merely at the striking transformation in the meaning of liberalism in the United States over the past two-and-a-half decades. At the time of the original Civil Rights Act of 1964, equal rights meant equal rights, not equality of result. Nevertheless, today’s administrators, lawyers, and bureaucrats have no trouble interpreting earlier doctrines according to an entirely different agenda, one of increasing regulation and control in the name of group rights.

These lawyers and bureaucrats, members of what some sociologists have called the “New Class,” are the social and intellectual analogues of the French activists of 1789. This is not, of course, to say that they have hidden plans for a Jacobin Terror to eradicate capitalism and political liberty in America. It is, however, to say that in this country we have a conflict of political cultures wherein the forces of regulation have managed to seize the moral and ideological high ground in ways not wholly dissimilar to the methods of the patriotes vis-à-vis well-meaning liberals in 1789-91. The leaders of these forces in America are using our contemporary sansculottes—the radicalized leadership of the urban minorities—as battering rams in their strategy of control, offering them power and jobs in return for loyalty and support. The results of this strategy are already evident in our stagnating economic productivity, the catastrophic condition of our schools, the lack of standards and professionalism in higher education, and in the growing calls for government policies in a variety of areas formerly considered to lie within the domain of individual responsibility.

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If schama’s magnificent book teaches us anything, it is that people suffer when individuals with power and responsibility let their political fantasies get the better of their understanding of reality. Robespierre was a liberal in 1789 and a terrorist for vertu in 1794. But Schama may also inspire us to hope that such a process is not inevitable. The experience of mankind since 1789 directs us to value democratic institutions where they exist, and to fear those who would have us reject or undermine them in the name of a more “just” or “equitable” distribution of resources or of power.

by David Gress

Why is the West not like the rest? That is the old question raised by Adam Smith, Max Weber, and other titans of modern social thought. Now the Harvard historian David S. Landes has tackled it anew in a work of deep historical scholarship and charmingly lucid prose.

The very terms of Landes’s inquiry represent a departure from much historical writing today. For over two decades, the postmodernists, relativists, and multiculturalists who dominate the history departments have denigrated the big, interesting, and important questions about human social evolution. Either these questions are said to be unanswerable, or they are deemed irrelevant to such “vital” contemporary concerns as gender and identity. Thankfully, at the same time the horizons of many academic historians have narrowed, a few unconventional scholars, Landes among them, have resolutely begun to widen theirs. What they have found is both more significant and more impressive than anything uncovered by world historians of an earlier era like Arnold Toynbee.

The astonishing fact about world history today is that the big questions—how societies came to be as they are, what causes them to change—can actually be answered on a far more solid basis of evidence than ever before. Although, as Landes writes, “no one has a simple answer” to the question of why some nations are rich and some poor, some democratic and others not, we do know that sustained development had a beginning in a particular time and place: namely, Europe, or to be more precise, England, in the 18th century. Without assuming that because the West became both rich and free it was fated to become so, or that the path to wealth and liberty is an easy one to follow, Landes enables us to separate out the elements that make for success.

He does so by setting the career of the West in a fruitful comparative context. By exploring the paths taken by China, India, Islamic societies, Africa, and Latin America—paths that led to poverty and stagnation—he highlights and isolates the peculiar symbiosis of elements that characterizes the rise and fall of nations. He also puts to rest—once and for all, one hopes—the notion that Western modernization was achieved at the expense of the East and South.

To this notion—that European prosperity was built on the backs of Chinese inventors, black African slaves, or Asian traders—Landes makes the obvious reply: if, as some historians assert, the Asians were civilizationally far ahead before being despoiled by rapacious Europeans, why was it the latter who showed up in the Indian Ocean to trade and conquer, and not the former in the North Sea? As for the inventions—gunpowder, paper, and printing—often touted by those who assert Chinese primacy in particular, these, Landes demonstrates, existed for centuries in China without spurring economic progress. By contrast, no sooner had they arrived in Europe than they were deployed to multiply power, skills, and mobility and to spark a wave of innovation that in next to no time surpassed anything to be found in Asia.

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What, then, did enable Europe to take off as it did? Fundamental to its breakout, in Landes’s view, was its favorable geography: a temperate climate of mild winters and wet summers that permitted hard work and, crucially, farming without the necessity of large-scale irrigation. In stressing this last point, Landes rehabilitates the work of Karl Wittfogel, who, in Oriental Despotism (1957), held that societies like China with a resource base of large rivers and irrigated fields could only survive on the basis of forced labor and the expropriation of power and energy by a ruthless central authority.

As Wittfogel also pointed out, the Soviet Union under Communism resurrected this crippling and tyrannical system of government. But Landes is no geographical determinist. Fair weather and the like are not enough; it takes people and incentives to bring about change. To geography, therefore, one must add politics, culture, and values. The politics, in Europe’s case, were those of a fragmented continent where rulers had to temper power with justice; if they did not, their most productive subjects would find a way to emigrate. This again provides a contrast to the equally skilled but less fortunate Chinese, who, no matter what kind of regime was imposed on them, had nowhere to turn.

As for culture and values, the Europeans were a people who married late, spaced the births of their children, and maintained just enough population pressure to encourage efficient use of resources without swamping fragile economies. Of course, before economic growth took off in the 18th century, these habits and values were not always decisive: famines and plagues culled the European population as they culled others. The point is that Europe’s cultural attributes were already in place, and had been in place from deep within the medieval past.

In arguing for the role of culture, Landes in effect carries out another rehabilitation—in this instance of Max Weber, whose notion that Calvinist Protestantism peculiarly promoted habits of investment and innovation has not been popular with historians in recent years. But why not? Weber, writes Landes, was clearly right, both theoretically and empirically: “The heart of the matter lay indeed in the making of a new kind of man,” at once “rational, ordered, diligent, productive,” and aware of time. Concerning this last capacity, Landes, building here on his previous book, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (1983), shows just how significant to economic development have been the desire and the ability to measure time independently of sun, weather, and stars.

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Landes’s wide-ranging excursion makes it clear, then, that Europe achieved its position of predominance by an ever-shifting mix of geopolitics, culture, values, and opportunities seized. Unfortunately, when it comes to declaring which among these elements was decisive, or even preeminent, he draws back and turns frustratingly coy. Thrusting before us a whole variety of determinants, and rightfully scorning single-cause theories, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations ends up explaining too much and, therefore, too little.

Still, there are hints, and the hints point to the absolutely indispensable role of cultural attitudes. In the final analysis, what seems to count most in Landes’s view are “work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity.” And therein lies a moral. As The Wealth and Poverty of Nations indisputably demonstrates, there are no free lunches in the continuing global competition, and front-line societies, like those of the West, can fall behind. For this sobering and necessary reminder, too, we are in David Landes’s debt.