Fulminates against the American university’s abandonment of liberal arts education in favor of the postmodern left’s historicism and nihilism. The opening section blasts the contemporary student, circa 1985, and is forgettable. The meat of the book more usefully traces the passage from Weber and Nietzsche to Heidegger and thence, severely corrupted, to the postwar American faculty. The author contrasts classical understandings of the self, truth, and suchlike concepts with the studiously value-free conceptions of the moderns and postmoderns. The final section demonstrates how the Enlightenment university, established to safeguard academic freedom, has been transformed into a radically totalitarian institution. Erudite and interesting, if occasionally shrill.
Month: December 2022
15. [Mcintyre], Work of History (7 August 2022)
A festschrift narrating the career of Australian Marxisant Stuart Macintyre, evincing the effects of ‘commitment’ on professional study – however learned, surely limited and tendentious. An early historian of the British and Australian Communist parties, which pursuit was seen as groundbreaking because (modestly) critical, Macintyre moved on to Australian labor and government, and in as much as Marxist theories failed in history and they did in sociopolitics, then a Weberian sociology of the contemporary. He lamented the Hawke-Keating era didn’t go far enough in addressing utopian goals, criticizing ‘normative neoliberalism’, rejecting the search for ‘timelessness’. Effectively he and his student lodged the usual complaints of ‘winners and losers’, that unequal outcomes fall short of the general will. Macintyre was a ‘black armbander’ who controversially sought to put himself above the fray, a position which might have been more credible had he acknowledged the errors and outcomes of 20th-century communism.
22. Haskins, Rise of Universities (4 Dec 2015)
A collection of 3 lectures sketching the foundation of European universities in 12th-century Europe, reviewing the schools of Bologna and Paris, the professor, and the student. Asserts the Renaissance really began with this new institution (which lacked many modern trappings — buildings). Otherwise seems antiquarian.
23. Strauss, The City and Man (22 Dec 2015)
Modern political philosophy has become ideology, a phenomenon at the center of the crisis of the West, which is uncertain of its purpose. The modern treatment, which conceives of itself as political science, seeks to separate facts from values, and so cannot accommodate the pursuit of what ought to be, only what is. The classical treatment, best encapsulated in Aristotle’s
- Politics
because it originates the study of moral virtue, is the original and best approach to the ‘common sense’ understanding of political things. In three essays that chronologically work backward, from Aristotle to Plato’s
- Republic
to Thucydides, Strauss elucidates conceptions and problems of the best regime before turning to actual study of political history. In this way, Strauss makes the distinction between what is ‘first for us’ against what is ‘first in nature’, connecting history to philosophy without subsuming one inside the other. Philosophy is the ascendancy of events qua history. The search for the common-sense understanding of the city and man’s role as a good citizen and a good person leads the philosopher back to question: what is the nature of god? To be re-read.
24. Prest, William Blackstone (27 Dec 2015)
A narrative life of 18th-century jurist William Blackstone, renowned for distilling dense English common law into a more readily understood framework. The fatherless son of minor gentry, Blackstone rose through diligent classical studies to a place at Oxford’s All Souls, where postgraduate and administrative energies led to intra-university political activity. His initial foray as a London barrister was unsuccessful; his lectures on the common law made him a name; but his taking most of the income of newly endowed chair earned Blackstone a whiff of odium. Or was it more simply undignified ambition in Hanoverian and Georgian England? The future George III was a fan, Jeremy Bentham was not. The author’s counterbalances his own opinion. Later an MP, Blackstone was only modestly effective because of his back-bench independence and also a diffident speaking style: he failed notably during the rough-and-tumble of the Wilkes affair. But his practice grew, and some years after leaving Oxford for good, he won the judgeship he sought. Again opinions were divided, between churlish, high-church Tory and diligent national treasure. In fact he was something of a rationalist modernizer. Like Everitt’s
- Cicero
, the book could spend a bit more time elucidating the kernel of Blackstone’s thinking itself.
1. Bromwich, Intellectual Life of Burke (31 Jan 2016)
A patiently elaborated intellectual biography of Edmund Burke that falls short of its ulterior objective, to demonstrate the Anglo-Irishman is not a source of modern conservatism. A professor of English literature, Bromwich reads Burke’s published works and private correspondence alike as political action (i.e., thought leadership), concluding Burke treats politics as civic morality. So far so good. However, the author cannot reconcile Burke the reformer with Burke the defender of entailed inheritance qua tradition: he doesn’t or hasn’t understood that Burke ‘changed his stance but not his ground’ — a reasonable description of 20th-century neoconservatism, which is problematic for Bromwich. So he settles on a view of Burke solely as a reformer and seeks to read him out of the conservative canon. The ambition fails both by not considering Burke in contradistinction to, for example, the philosophes, as a historian would, and also in failing to show how the generations of conservatives who have drawn inspiration from Burke were somehow mistaken. Bromwich wrongly suggests that because Burke was not a contemporary Tory, he cannot be seen as the fount of the right. Prone to social psychology, but well written. A promised successor volume, which must cover the years following from the American Revolution, faces the bigger challenge of explaining away
- Reflections
.
2. Hamilton, Echo of Greece (7 Feb 2016)
Most of the leading thinkers of ancient Greece lived in the fourth century, after the democratic triumph of Pericles and the fall of Athens. Hamilton sketches the oeuvre of these men, particularly emphasizing the humanistic qualities and also contrasting Plato with Aristotle, the latter so long in the former’s shade. Ultimately, the Greeks sought to identify freedom, the Romans order. The conclusion is a departure: what would have become of the Christian church had it followed the Greeks?
3. Hazareesingh, How the French Think (27 Feb 2016)
Surveys elite and popular ideas in France since the revolution, in an effort to characterize predominant modes of Gallic thinking. The author begins with the rationalist, deductive thought of Rene Descartes, which spilled from science into the social sciences and the humanities: Cartesian thinking remains the feature of the French worldview. Other conceptual treatments include utopianism, left-right artefacts, and metropolitan-regional oppositions. The final third of the book focuses on postwar notables such as Camus and Sartre, the communist left, and the postmoderns — de Gaulle merits comparatively little notice. Surprisingly, the left-liberal author concludes postmodernism (and implicitly communism) has proven a dead end, and even blames the mindset for spurring contemporary pessimism. Well written and honest, if bien pensant.
5. Fenby, The General (13 Mar 2020)
A biography of a 20th century’s great, emphasizing his distinctive approach to military and political leadership. Charles de Gaulle was a ‘lifelong teacher’ of men, dating to his days as a World War I prisoner war. He saw military organization as the model for the mass-production economy and also government management of society. Great leaders surpass hierarchy to act independently, accordingly they must be distant, reserved. De Gaulle evinced autocracy but was to work through referenda; notwithstanding Roosevelt’s views he was a committed democrat, using established institutions. He held out French rationalism as the native counter to fascism.
de Gaulle had broken with Petain well before the treason of 1940, yet was strongly opposed by such London Frenchmen as Raymond Aron and Jean Monnet. His popular appeal via radio outlasted Hitler and Roosevelt. Free French (yet less than 20,000) had scored several tactical successes in Africa, thereby winning Churchill’s grudging support, and established its elan. By 1941, he had prevailed over admiral Emile Muselier and opposition leader Jean Moulin. He then relocated the Free French to Algiers to reestablish himself of on French soil, and in 1943 was recognized as supremo by Eisenhower.
In country from 1944, after the war he blocked the Communist from the ‘three great levers’: foreign affairs, military, interior (police) – each of which had been conceded in Eastern Europe. Though the logical executive, he disavowed a political party a la Bolingbroke, seeking to become a ‘national arbiter’ above the fray, and so left politics. His strategy for return was to take the electoral route while allowing the establishment to envision his leading a coup, thereby ‘frightening [the [populace] into acquiesce’. By the time of the Algerian crisis, he was seen as the only rampart between communism and fascism; in the 1958 elections 344 of 475 incumbent deputies lost their seats.
Under de Gaulle, centralized authority expanded: power lay not in the legislature but unelected civil servants or state-run corporations. He himself was Olympian in hauteur, ‘crab like’ in duplicity. France depended on his status, justified in settling the Algerian civil war and German rapprochement. But the OAS affair forced him to abandon the presidential for the partisan – the beginning of the end of the regime, evidenced by poor elections result of 1962. By 1965 he could no longer claim to represent the general will. He blundered in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; in 1968 he could still outwit politicians but not the new generation of students; only the disconnect between students and unions prevented a disgraceful exit.
De Gaulle poses a problem for historians who deny individual greatness – he twice saved France from cataclysm (surrender, civil war), twice showed himself a natural autocrat in service of popular nationhood and rule. Fenby suggests the authoritarian start of the Fifth Republic could not be sustained, yet the country’s movement toward parliamentarism is better observed in the European Union. Genuinely rooted in the country’s claims to greatness, Gaullism is merely a political behavior (not unlike Peronism). The author writes crisply yet fails to elaborate what is the France his subject saved.
21. Banner, Ever-changing Past (15 October 2022)
The discipline of history depends on evidence, which element is protean, and seeks for relevance, which changes with passing generations. Therefore conclusions are in the long run unstable. So runs the main tenet of Banner’s argument for historicism. ‘Only by writing for their own times and in response to questions of their day can historians make the past comprehensible to those who wish to learn of it. … What to one person and one age is orthodoxy to another is revision, and vice versa’ (p. 269). Banner commences with the contrast between Herodotus, who valued informal culture and mindsets, and Thucydides, who preferred tangible deeds and recorded public affairs. Put another way, whether the discipline’s purpose is to advance moral understanding or be objective (Ranke’s as it actually happened) is an important source of competing perspective. Revisions may also stem from method, which prompt different queries. After a tour of such revisionists – really pioneering practitioners – as the 4th-century theologian Eusebius and Marx, the author establishes himself as a postmodern fellow traveler. The premise of deconstruction is admitted; objectivity is ‘masculine’; historical propositions usually cannot be falsified; the would-be neutrality (positivism) of psychology is smuggled into historical practice to demonstrate the impossibility of conclusion. Yet Banner is pleased to defend the mandarinate’s expertise: ‘Whatever modern and postmodern doubts about the objectivity ideal have arisen since the nineteenth century, it is impossible to imagine that the inborn human thirst for dependable historical understanding will suffer significantly among professional historians and members of the general public because of these uncertainties’ (p. 262)! And: ‘Such prudent relativism in historical thought has never come close to being so unhinged and radical as to threaten historians’ commitment to truth and accuracy’ (p.265). The usual (circa 2021) progressive platitudes are frequently aired. Lacking any boundary between ‘revisionism’ and nihilism, Banner tacitly encourages postmodern attacks on the heritage of Western society. The matter of historicism is treated by recognizing it is not the answers but the great recurring questions that establish transcendence.