Month: May 2024

16. Mahoney, Statesman as Thinker (13 August 2022)

by kurto

Holds up Cicero, Burke, Lincoln, Tocqueville, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel as exemplary statesmen, demonstrating excellence of vision and execution through contemporary turbulence. Courage, moderation (temperance and prudence), and magnamity (greatness of soul, according to classic or Christian ideals) in pursuit of justice are the essential attributes of those who would command practical reason in service of ordered liberty. Aristotle’s is the classic statement of a gentlemen-statesman, the opposite of Weber’s charismatic leader. Modern political thought and social science cannot discern the requisite qualities, believing in a false realism: in ascribing every action to naked power, the ability to assess motivation is forfeit and consequently to distinguish the statesman from the tyrant. The study of humanity includes legitimate uses of authority, Aron observed: Napoleon’s tyranny demonstrates greatness unchained from humility. The unbounded will seeks to reshape nature and society, but energy without wisdom is of little use.

Cicero: contending with Caesar, the Roman served as prototype in exemplifying foresight via reflection not ambition or will.

Burke: Reason is to be tested against practical modifications; theory alone will fail: prudence needs principle as much as principle prudence. ‘Ingratitude is the first of revolutionary virtues’ (p. 40)

Tocqueville: a deterministic fatalism (‘democratic history’) cannot illustrate the role of greats in history.

Churchill: Berlin’s Mr. Churchill in 1940 is the consummate statement.

De Gaulle: depreciated ‘Nietzschean disdain’ for the limits of human experience, common sense, law, seeing instead the need for balance, what is possible, and mesure. The Maginot line was morally corrupt – effete. Where Aristotle’s magnamity countenances hauteur, de Gaulle’s great man was Christian.

Havel: the Czech’s genius was to identify and surmount the ideological traits of post-totalitarian (post Leninist-Stalinist) regime, no longer dependent on mass violence yet still repressive.

Reagan and Thatcher receive honorable mentions as conviction politicians.

13. McLauchlan, Short History of New Zealand (23 May 2024)

by kurto

Sketches pre-European anthropology and sociopolitics over 1840-2015, touting the country’s egalitarian mores without connecting them to economic dirigisme. Following imperial Britain’s 1835 recognition of Maori sovereignty, the Treaty of Waitangi was hurriedly oversold and then broadly ignored, precipitating struggle for farmland as well as cultural clashes. Frontier fighting in the 1850s and 60s, by which time whites were in the majority, culminated in British confiscation of land – rather in the Maori tradition of warfare. Following a gold rush, Dunedin was the economic capital; however, by 1900 the balance of residents were on the north island (with most Maori in rural areas). The urban-rural political divide emerged in the 1880s; the economic template, spanning 1890-1960, turned on pastoral exports (wool, meat, dairy), mostly to England. Like Australia, the universal franchise and the welfare state arrived early, cemented by Michael Savage’s 1938 Social Security Act. Postwar unionism, highlighted by dockworker and neo-communist strikes in 1951, brought the National Party back into contention. Parliament became unicameral in 1949, making legislation easy to pass. Social strife resurfaced in the 1960s, often around rugby competition with apartheid South Africa. Labor-led reform came in the 1980s, though discussion of ‘Rogernomics’ is slender. By late 20th century, three-quarters of Maori had moved to the towns, mostly in the north island. To a degree, contemporary economic stability owed not only to diversification of exports but also Australian-owned banking. Why did New Zealand decline federation with Australia? Aside from wartime alliance, what were New Zealand’s views of sovereignty prior to the shock of England’s joining the EEC? The author rushes to demonstrate anti-racist sensibilities but then spends more time of conservative Pakeha culture (e.g., prohibition and liquor laws), not even treating the phenomenon of the Maori Party.

9. Stern, Varieties of History (1 April 2024)

by kurto

Samples leading views of historiography over 1750-1950. In the 19th century, history played a polemical role similar to ideology in the 20th. This edition is willing to lend credence to ‘socialist history’ and demonstrates the mid-20th century’s fascination with Freud. Historicism is used in various ways, though generally negative; surprisingly, Butterfield’s Whiggish history is omitted. The profession has sometimes ruled out certain views, or at least reached consensus, but more typically moves from one waystation to the next – which may help explain the timebound views of historicism. The most persuasive, enduring approaches are those of Ranke (‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’; what actually happened, irrespective of the author), Meinecke, Trevelyan, and perhaps Barzun. Of note:
• Ranke: history should ascend from observing particulars to a universal view of events, knowledge of objective existence. It will focus on general concepts where nations have played an active role. ‘In power there appears a spiritual substance, an original genius, which has a life of its own, fulfills conditions peculiar to itself’. ‘We work in two directions: investigate the effective factors in historical events and understand their universal relationship’
• Trevelyan: no historical event can be so isolated as to deduce from it general laws. The ideals of any epoch are insufficient for a general way of life. There are three distinct functions: the scientific (gather factors, in sufficient evidence), the imaginative (recreate, guess, generalize), and the literary (restore to life; attract and educate). Great history is accessible to, and may be requisite, to a reading public of pronounced character. The truth is black and white – ‘in patches’
• Meinecke: the dispute between political and cultural history arises because neither is clear on the relationship between values and cause; the state may be central (a la Hegel), but not necessarily the highest, being subordinate to the spiritual or moral; that there are copious state records do not make it the leading institution
• Coulanges: what ideas or customs hold sway over individuals wills so as to make them happy? Institutions are to be studied over time
• Barzun: cultural history is not history of ideas – the former turns not on logic or scientific advance. Intellectual history is geometric, whereas cultural history requires Pascal’s espirit de finesse.
• Macaulay: the perfect historian has the imagination to fuel narrative, the discipline to preserve the integrity of his materials. He exhibits the character of the subject’s age. History does not have laws of progression but of method
• Holborn: the objective point of view paradoxically relies on the scholar’s subjective approach. Stern adds the most one can aspire to is ethical consideration of personal views and fidelity to truth (knowledge)
• Namier: when properly studied, what happened is specific knowledge; whereas how things do not happen should be intuitive – wisdom does not come from remembered events (which are ‘clutter’)
• Young: ‘go on reading until you hear people speaking’
• Thierry: in history simple exposition is safest, elaborate logic obscures truth
• Acton: overemphasis on analysis returns to synthesis (narrative)
• Mommsen: the historian is not born but trained, not educated but self-taught
• Orwell (echoing Macaulay and Trevelyan): history promotes a sense of possibility and liberty that tyrants must suppress
NB: Thierry – ‘Indeed, if it is merely a misfortune to suffer oppression imposed by the force of circumstances, it is shameful to display servility.

11. McMillan, Modern France 1880 – 2002 (28 April 2024)

by kurto

A disappointing collection of thematic overviews that fails to get at France’s approach to the great sociopolitical questions. The authors neither ground core problems nor suggest departures, but frequently trend toward sociology as well as left-liberal consensus circa 2000; the essays ignore Maastricht, fairly enough for a history but illogical in light of attacks on right-wing ‘identitarianism’.
• The long-term goal of the Third Republic was to build the state for plutocrats as well as bourgeois, never mind the Dreyfus affair’s ruptures. But radical democrats and emergent socialists found no common ground: democratic (i.e., liberal) socialism was ‘impossible’
• Fin-de-siecle governmental persecution of Catholics, led by Rousseau-Waldeck over 1899-1902, parallels Bismarck’s earlier efforts: the separation of 1904, undoing Napoleonic concordat, exposed the church’s dependency on the state. Despite the hostility, many clergy fought for France in World War I, earning some respite; in the early Fifth Republic, de Gaulle and other ministers again brought Catholics to the fore; there is no discussion of Muslim immigration
• France’s descent over 1815-1945 stems from demographic decline – there is no linkage to the Catholic plight – especially after Germany’s 1870 unification. By 1910, France was the world’s leading immigrant country, attracting Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and French colonials to work at large, industrial firms. Traditionally rural France, which contacted the outside world via the bicycle (presaging the Tour de France), finally succumbed in the postwar era to economic modernization – though small farms persisted, protected by the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy, and the state remains the country’s largest employer
• Only after 1936 did France subordinate her foreign policy to Britain, and in the postwar era much her impulse has been to restore independence and grandeur
• In addressing the French Communist party as well as ‘committed’ intellectuals (said to ‘think in German’), the authors allude to obvious dead-ends but adduce no evidence of remorse. However, the Fourth Republic collapsed because it was designed to counter the extinct Communist threat; Algeria mattered mainly to the political classes; the Fifth Republic minimized the influence of the Fourth’s ‘notables’, for example by referenda. Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste, succeeding the SFIO (Section francaise de l’Internationale ouvriere), wisely limit doctrinaire politics, mimicking the more flexible right, and so succeeding in 1981
NB: Barres: intellectuals are those who believe society is founded on logic