Peter Hart, Historian

I tend to think of my fellow historians as falling into one of two categories: living and dead. My own advisor is living, as are the sort of people I run into at conferences. There are other historians, such as the great golden calf smasher, A. J. P. Taylor, who are deceased and hopefully resting in peace. After a long and profitable career, a historian may gently slip from the former category to the latter. My current rabbi, M. R. D. Foot, was born in 1919 and has produced more books that I have time to read, much less could ever write. Some day he will pass from this life, and though his passing will be mourned, his rest will be well-deserved and unsurprising.

Today, however, I had the unfortunate experience to discover that a young historian, Peter Hart, passed away in July at the much too early age of 46. His work on the Irish Revolution has been of great help to me; just yesterday I was reading The IRA and Its Enemies. One can only hope that his forthcoming work, Guerrilla Days in the UK: Revolution in Ireland and Britain, will still be published.

History is a discipline which rewards longevity. It takes years simply to acquire a PhD, the union card to participate in the dialogue. Even then, archival research and sufficient background material for a major contribution can take decades to collect. Hart's career was already impressive and showed great promise for better still to come. His death is a profound loss for the field. May he rest in peace.

The Year of Revolutions

A. J. P. Taylor, my new rabbi in the field of history, wrote a number of essays about the year of revolutions, 1848, many of them for the hundredth anniversary. (If you have ever heard me say that I am suspicious of dances since 1848, that would be a comment upon the relative merits of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 – when the Viennese waltz was at the height of its craze – and the revolutions of 1848. But I digress.) Should I teach a European history course some day, a passage like the following would do much to clarify the significance of the year within a broader historical framework:

Eighteen forty-eight was the link between the centuries: it carried to the highest point the eighteenth-century belief in the perfectibility of man, yet, all unexpectedly, launched the social and national conflicts which ravaged Europe a century later. Socialism and nationalism, as mass forces, were both the product of 1848. The revolutions determined the character of every country in Europe (except Belgium) from the Pyrenees to the frontiers of the Russian and Turkish empires; and these countries have since shown common characteristics not shared by England, Russia, the Balkans, or Scandinavia. Politically speaking, a 'European' is an heir of 1848.

-Taylor, 'Year of Revolution', Manchester Guardian, 1 January 1948, in Napoleon to the Second International, 158.

As this passage suggests, however, the revolutions of 1848 did not affect Russia or the United States. Taylor explains:

The ideas of 1848 spread later to Russia; and the Russian revolutions of the twentieth century were in the true spirit of 1848. In fact, Russia, missing the disillusionment which followed the failure of 1848, alone retained faith in the revolutionary course. America was already democratic, and therefore for her, though there was no need for revolution, there was no need for disillusionment either. For a generation after 1848, and even longer, America offered to the peoples of Europe the economic and political prizes which failure had denied them in Europe. Still, 1848 left no tradition in either Russia or America.

-Taylor, introduction to The Opening of an Era: 1848, ed. Francois Fejto, in Napoleon to the Second International, 175.

Eighteen forty-eight created the modern obsession with economic equality, but this value surpassed political liberty for a strange reason:

'The right to work' was a protest as much against social inequality as against harsh living conditions. Nevertheless, by formulating this protest in economic terms, it launched the idea that liberty and political equality were negligible, or indeed valueless, in comparison with food and clothing. This idea was not intended by the social revolutionaries of 1848, who took up economic grievances principally in order to add greater force to their political demands. All the same, the damage had been done. Continental socialism, which had its origins in 1848, wrote off political democracy as bourgeois and accepted the doctrine that violence and intolerance were a small price to pay for social change. Class war took the place of the struggle for political liberty, and the Rights of Man were a casualty of 'the right to work'.

-Intro to The Opening of an Era, in Napoleon, 177.

Finally, Taylor, who saw himself as a man of the Left – though his greatest joy was smashing golden calves wherever he found them – provides this interesting insight into the limits of reason in the political sphere and the importance of tradition:

Peaceful agreement and government by consent are possible only on the basis of ideas common to all parties; and these ideas must spring from habit and from history. Once reason is introduced, every man, every class, every nation becomes a law unto itself; and the only right which reason understands is the right of the stronger. Reason formulates universal principles and is therefore intolerant: there can be only one rational society, one rational nation, ultimately one rational man. Decision between rival reasons can be made only by force. This lesson was drawn by the great political genius who observed the events of 1848: 'The great questions of our day will not be settled by resolutions and majority votes - that was the mistake of the men of 1848 and 1849 - but by blood and iron.' After 1848, the idea that disputes between classes could be settled by compromise or that discussion was an effective means of international relations was held only in England and America, the two countries which escaped the revolutions.

-Intro to The Opening of an Era, in Napoleon, 184.

Taylor believed in reason and therefore recognized what modern liberals do not: there can be only one truth. The zebra may be both black and white, but he cannot be both striped and not striped. Likewise, either all men are created equal and endowed with certain corresponding rights, or they are not. Holders of each position might both consider themselves rational, but they cannot agree and would be hard pressed to coexist except on the basis of some shared belief which could circumscribe their disagreement, a belief springing from habit or history.

Taylor on History

I have been reading the essays of A. J. P. Taylor, lately and I happened upon this passage and thought it quite instructive:

In most European languages 'story' and 'history' are the same word: histoire in French, Geschichte in German.... It would save much trouble if we had the same coincidence of words in English. Then perhaps we should not be ashamed to admit that history is at bottom simply a form of story-telling.

Historians nowadays have higher aims. They analyse past societies, generalized about human nature, or seek to draw morals about political or economic behavior that will provide lessons for the present. Some of them even claim to foretell the future. These are admirable ambitions which have produced work of high quality. But there is no escaping the fact that the original task of the historian is to answer the child's question: 'What happened next?'

-Taylor, 'History in Fiction,' Times Literary Supplement, 23 March 1973, in From Napoleon to the Second International, 36.

It is quite true. Historians who do “narrative history” are shunned; indeed the phrase has become a byword for writing which lacks footnotes and historical rigor. Not that there is any reason to assume that narrative structure means bad history. I have seen plenty of “history” organized in the most awful way, lacking substantial citation, written with meaningless social science terms and possessing the fluidity of an elementary school science paper. And this sort of thing is sometimes championed as great scholarship, while mere “storytellers” are seen as “populists,” whose crime, so far as I can tell, is writing books that people actually want to read.

This too struck me as a keen insight:

Our fiction [that of historians] comes in quite another way [from that of the historical novelist] and is all the more dangerous for being usually unconscious. We take the characters of the past too seriously. Most of our evidence until fairly recent times is about the thin top layer of society - kings, nobles, ministers and high clerics. They may be a poor lot but they are all we have, and we blot them up beyond their deserts. Experience teaches that hereditary succession is not a good way of producing ability. Yet we go on treating kings as though they possessed the sort of ability shown by men who had to fight their way to the top. Of course we acknowledge bad kings, according to the immortal phrase of Sellar and Yeatman, but we also find good kings and even great kings.

My late colleague Bruce McFarlane described Henry V as 'the greatest man that ever ruled England.' Great, say, compared with Churchill, let alone Cromwell? I do not believe it. I doubt whether he was much improvement on Ramsay MacDonald. Looking around the crowned heads who have bestrewn the European stage over the centuries, I cannot see any other than Frederick the Great as a man of more than common abilities, and even his abilities were on the thin side.

-Taylor, 'History in Fiction,' 41.

While I might disagree with Taylor's analysis of some of Europe's monarchs (though I suspect he knew so much more than I on the matter that a disagreement is not worth voicing), the insight is definitely a valuable one: to say that King Thus-and-Such invaded Whatsitcalled or built a bridge over the River Thingamadoo may say more about the instruments he inherited than the dexterity with which he wielded them.

A Few Interesting Passages

Three (completely unrelated) passages from things I have been reading lately:


In an interview with Psychology Today, Whit Stillman spoke of the effect on him of having spent his junior year abroad in Mexico: "It turned out to do the opposite of what it was suppose to do. It didn't make me a mushroom-dropping pothead; seeing another culture and the ways the less affluent in that culture coped with life actually made me much more conventional. It made me more respectful of conventional people in the United States." (Doomed Bourgeois in Love, 46)




I called myself a Marxist from the time I became a socialist. But, reading more history at Oxford, I began to feel that Marxism did not work. Consider the famous sentence in the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto recorded society is the history of class struggles." Very impressive but not true. Perhaps all history ought to have been the history of class struggles, but things did not work out that way. There have been long periods of class collaboration and many struggles that were not about class at all. I suppose my mind is too anarchic to be fitted into any system of thought. Like Johnson's friend Edwards, I, too, have tried to be a Marxist but common sense kept breaking in. (Accident Prone, or What Happened Next, republished in From Napoleon to the Second International, 5)


Calcutta is still my favorite city.... There was something... which if it did not transform the second city of Empire, lifted it at least a little from the depths. Everybody smiled. That may be at the root of Britain's three-century love affair with India. Nowadays it is taught (usually be people who never saw the Raj) that our passion for the sub-continent was mere pride of possession, arrogant satisfaction of conquest, and lust of exploitation, leavened only by a missionary zeal to improve. No doubt those feelings existed, among some, but they don't account for the undying affection that so many of the island race felt for that wonderful country and its people. Nor do all its great marvels: the beauty of the land and its buildings, the endless variety of its customs and cultures, the wonder of its art and philosophy and ancient civilizations, the glory of its matchless regiments. They may inspire awe, even reverence, but they don't quite explain why thousands of soldiers and merchants and administrators and traders left their hearts there, to say nothing of their mortal remains. One can babble about the magic of India, and convey nothing: I can only say that when I look back at it my lasting memory is of smiling faces, laughter in the bazaar, tiny naked children grinning as they clamoured for buckshee - and it wasn't an act, for they still laughed and joked and play-acted if they didn't get it. There was a life, a spirit about India that was irrepressible, and it outweighed all the faults and miseries and cruelties and corruptions. That, I think, is why the British loved it, and some of us will never get it out of our systems, even in an age when Indian and Pakistani immigration is about as welcome in Britain as the British were in India. (Quartered Safe Out Here, 179-80)