Month: June 2022

On Stalin’s evil genius

by kurto

Sean McMeekin’s

    Stalin’s War

asserts the Soviet leader manipulated interwar Europe in his interests, in ways that have been obscured by the West’s focus on Hitler’s Germany. ‘At its core is the claim that Stalin saw an advantage in the renewal of global hostilities, so he helped facilitate them’, writes Yale’s Ian Johnson.

Stalin had his war — and won it…. A looming question throughout the book is the counterfactual. Was there an alternative to partnering with Stalin against Hitler? That question has rarely been raised in serious scholarship but merits the consideration McMeekin gives it. The historical evidence in Stalin’s War shows how badly senior statesmen, particularly in the U.S., misunderstood Stalin, the Soviet system, and the price of their alliance with the USSR.

In the contemporary era, there are three implications. First, the extent to which ‘reductio ab Hitlerum’ has ruled scholarship and indeed social understanding. Nazi Germany was not sui generis but a form of tyranny matched by Soviet Russia. Second, FDR’s foreign policy was equally as inept as economic policy (e.g., 1937’s double-dip recession). Third, progressives seem little better judges of telos than of merit. It is little wonder the academy is sinking.

4. Kramnick (ed.), Edmund Burke (17 Mar 2016)

by kurto

Presents leading segments of Burke’s most notable works in conjunction with contemporary critiques, and reprints three essays seeking to characterize the whole of his thinking. Kramnick succeeds in simultaneously portraying the genius of Burke’s rhetoric (if not the volume of his erudition) and its more heated qualities, which sometimes took him beyond the pale. The triumvirate of essays – 1 right, 1 Marxist, and 1 centrist — demonstrate Burke’s empirical skepticism toward rationalism.

5. Stanlis, Edmund Burke (10 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Burke’s understanding of natural law — the spirit of equity — as reflected in English common law is the cornerstone of his largely uncodified body of thought: so Stanlis has contended since his groundbreaking Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. In this monograph, he reiterates and elaborates the basis of those views, while demonstrating he was not a utilitarian. Subsequently he shows Burke’s opposition to the rationalist views of the Enlightenment, particularly the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose conception of ‘sensibility’, or abstract moral empathy, which paves the wave for theoretical innovation; Burke preferred an empirical approach to limited reform, in order to preserve the best elements of society. This contrast between revolution and reform is demonstrated in Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a revolution ‘not made but prevented’.

6. Knightley, Australia (20 Apr 2016)

by kurto

A long cultural essay of 20th-century Australian society, helpful for understanding changing attitudes but lacking the dispassion of the historian. The author recurs to descriptions of the government and the working class, changing views of Aboriginals, and the cultural relationship with England. Knightley seems a reliable weather vale for left-liberal politics: he doesn’t acknowledge predecessors thought they were doing the right thing.

7. Kelly and Bramston, The Dismissal (24 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam violated multiple standards of propriety, including Kerr’s obligation to inform Whitlam of the seriousness of the budget crisis (i.e., blockage of supply), Kerr’s keeping counsel with High Court judges, his discussions with the opposition, and the use of ‘reserve powers’. The authors generally located the shortcomings in the personalities of the vainglorious yet timid Kerr and to a lesser degree the ambitious Malcom Fraser and the bombastic Whitlam. Constructed as a journalist’s tick-tock account with the newest information presented first, the book seems unlikely to be the last word because of its focus on personalities to the near-exclusion of contemporary society, economy, and politics; it reads like a polemic, defending contemporaneous conclusions, although this could be a byproduct of Aussie vernacular.

8. Morgan, Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (27 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Surveys the Revolutionary War era, demonstrating America’s founding is a product of shared search for principles of civic equality and justice. As with Burkean or Whig historians, Morgan argues for a revolution not made but preserved; this effort covers the details of articulating protest, organizing around the colonies’ common political views, and ultimately framing the American Constitution. The work’s eloquence lies in persuasively tying emergent principles to facts on the ground. A 21st-century analysis would hit harder at the moral failure to dispose of slavery — but then most latter-day treatments pettifog in ways which Morgan surmounts. Interestingly, the author contends the Articles of Confederation were not quite as dire as commonly held, and ties the Bill of Rights to the Constitution’s adoption by the states as a quid pro quo.

9. Paulsen and Paulsen, The Constitution (18 May 2016)

by kurto

Illustrates vital political concepts and shortcomings in the American constitution, before going on to narrate five distinct periods of jurisprudence: to 1860, postbellum, to World War II, to 1960, and the current activist era. The Constitution does not establish judicial supremacy but the document’s supremacy: it is intended to surmount the clash of opinions. The authors view the document as broadly successful, save for the stunning failure of allowing slavery, because it has tended to move toward justice rather political fashion. But the justices themselves have often stood in the way of progress for long periods of time, and continue to legislate from the bench. The heroes in fact are Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, and others who have fought for the Constitution’s preservation and the revision of its application.

10. Hibbert, House of Medici (4 June 2022)

by kurto

Portrays the dominion of the Florentine Medici over the 15th to early 18th centuries, emphasizing the family’s contribution to the arts and latterly its dissolute lifestyle. Rising to power under the republican constitution as wool traders and then bankers with the papal accounts, the foremost Medici figures were Cosimo and Lorenzo; a subsequent Cosimo was Florence’s first duke. Hibbert seems most interested in the provenance of culture and architecture. Though he sketches civic matters, one cannot tell whether the decline of agriculture and trade results from poor leadership, the changing economics of (for example) Atlantic trade, or the Italian city-states’ inferiority to emerging nation-states north of the Alps. Undoubtedly learned but not particularly helpful for understanding society and statesmanship.

10. Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (2 Jun 2016)

by kurto

The fox knows many things but cannot produce a unified theory of being; the hedgehog searches for a core certainty that explains all. Isaiah Berlin’s essay studies the extraordinary instance of Leo Tolstoy, who brilliantly portrayed quotidian life but sought for a holistic view. In this history of ideas, the author contends the Russian drew heavily on the French conservative Joseph de Maistre.

11. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (3 Jul 2016)

by kurto

Narrates the central event in 17th-century German lands, masterfully weaving military and political events; religious, regional, and class attitudes; and individual leadership and failure. The political dysfunction of German lands, including but not limited to the supra-‘national’ role of Hapsburg Austria, was the cause not the consequence of the internecine fighting. Sweden and France merely took advantage, and sectarian conflict was simply an activating force. German leaders (princes) several times missed their chance to coalesce, to set aside religion and dynastic interests. Broad in its sweep yet finely detailed. Perhaps the professional historians will have revised some of Wedgwood’s findings, both with the passage of time and because she was not a member of the guild, yet this is how history should be done.