Author: kurto

5. Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation (30 Jan 2026)

by kurto

An intellectual biography of a Dutch monk in print’s dawning era who effectively became the first of ‘public intellectuals’, and yet a Catholic whose humanism was only tangential to the Reformation.

Erasmus’ success turned on prodigious work-rate and philological genius combined with a highly aesthetic and ethical perspective. Prizing liberty of conscience, his bonae literae promoted moral education and general tolerance as the means of spiritual harmony.

For a theologian, Erasmus was little concerned with personal revelation. His youthful character had been delicate; he was obliged to moderate it, replacing sentimentality with wit expressed in elegant Latin; and his transition from literature to religion was no conversion. His mental growth reveals no defining crises, unusual for a great mind.

Highly prolific, Erasmus’ oeuvre subtly passed, almost imperceptibly to him, from emending Latin and Greek in order to simplify and clarify the original spirit of Christianity, to theological intervention and even innovation. Jerome was his favorite. The essentials of Christianity were ‘peace and unanimity’, and one should leave as many questions as possible to individual conscience.

At the dawn of Reformation, he characteristically avoided taking sides, to preserve independence. Consequently his influence was extensive but not intensive: he made nothing like Luther’s decisive mark on history.

Erasmus idealized the antiquity of Cicero, Horace, and Plutarch against an obscurantist medieval Church, whose allegories and scholastic syllogisms (including the work of the ‘baptised Hellenes’) he ridiculed. His individualism overlooked redeeming values of institutional forms and customs.

The Adagiorum Collectarea (1500) established his name. The 16th-century educated classes could now access hundreds (and later thousands) of classical proverbial sayings. Where scholasticism used technical systems of thought addressed the Bible, humanism turned on rhetoric and philology to express daily life, in the vernacular. Erasmus thus crossed ethics and common sense, ancient and contemporary life.

In Praise of Folly (1511) demonstrated the difference between foolishness and salutary myths that smooth over the intolerable with worldly wisdom, resignation, leniency. No creature is unhappy that lives in accord to its nature. The humor which enlivened Praise is what made Erasmus’ mind immortal. The Colloquia (1518) best captures his ideals: good morals born of Christianity, simplicity, moderation, kindliness, and toleration.

Erasmus disdained sinecures, so as to promote ecumenism, but was also constantly pleading his case of benefactors, and frequently relocating. He relished the new technology of publishing, often working in the printer’s office, and equally he enjoyed books as a product. Such immersion led to his producing a great many booklets and letters which would now be considered journalism or even polemics. (Important men were conscious many would read their correspondence, and newly becoming aware it would be published.)

The years 1516-18, mostly resident in modern Belgium, were his apogee of fame if not productivity. Ahead lay conflict with Luther, which would compel the ambivalent Dutchman to confirm himself Catholic, disappointing fellow intellectuals.

Huizinga is a consummate historian, well read of original sources, sympathetic to his protagonist, cautious of the unwarranted.

NB: caute legenda – to be read with caution.

1. Schuyler, ed., Maitland: Historian (2 Jan)

by kurto

Frederic Maitland renovated understanding of the medieval common law, perhaps the most distinctive of English institutions. Resisting generalization in fidelity to the era’s documents, his scrutinous work also established methodological standards for the historical profession. Legal history was to be distinguished from antiquarianism, and not to blandly accept Whiggish constitutional narratives.

The medieval law was fairly criticized by humanists. Written in bad Latin and worse French, its weaknesses might have opened the door for Continental Roman law – a ‘reception’. Under Henry VIII, the Parliamentary act Lex Regia gave force of statute to the king’s proclamations. There were new courts grown out of the king’s council and using a summary procedure devised by legists. Scotland was contemporaneously establishing a Roman Court of Justice under James V. In 1535 More was executed and the Year Books ceased publication. Maitland quotes Burke: ‘To put an end to reports is to put an end to the law of England’.
‘Might not the council and the Star Chamber and the Court of Requests do the romanizing work that was done in Germany by the Imperial Chamber Court, the Reichskammergericht?’

After Henry VIII passed in 1547, the common lawyers pushed back; civil law was preeminent in Mary’s reign; but the common law afterward recovered its former status. Maitland’s opinion that the common law was in danger in the second quarter of the 16th century had not been sustained by mid-20th century historians, Schuyler observes.

The Inns of Court and also the Year Books are characteristically English. No other institution could have preserved common law in the Renaissance era. Not so Parliament, nor trial by jury, which existed in France. England’s schools of the national law had no parallel on the Continent, whose universities (e.g., Bologna) had faculty of Roman civil law and ecclesiastical canon law. The Year Books are further notable in as much as printed books did not yet exist; lawyers advanced their skills and practice by taking notes and sharing works. Every lawyer had to read them, every prominent lawyer had to give lectures of them. This hardened the cohort of the common-law tradition. They are medieval England’s distinctive intellectual product, vernacular reports or oral debate, written by lawyers for lawyers. They show the dynamics of economic and moral currents in which the logic of law elicits the settled views of contemporary society.

Bracton’s main debt to Roman law is spirit and method but not principle, contra Sir Henry Maine, who wrongly asserted one-third of his work was Roman. Much less so, it was ‘a method of reasoning, of interdependence of rules and place in hierarchy. He assumed Roman law was complementary to distinct English law and borrowed to fill in the gaps, there being nothing like copyright.

Why was there little or no historiography of medieval English law? English lawyers, intimidated by the record of French and German law, have exaggerated the latter’s earlier development. Second, the lawyer wants authority – precedent – the newer the better. Third, those who understand the topic want to build their practice, not to write an account.

Much of this work’s excerpts are set in the reigns of Edward I and II (1272-1307 and 1307-27, respectively). Examining the Parliament of 1305’s concerns with affairs of state (especially ‘foreign policy’), legislation, taxation or supply, petitions of the crown (in three courts), and judicial matters (criminal and civil), Maitland showed there were yet no hard lines between petition for royal justice and grace, and wide scope for discretion. Further, petitions of the lords and commoners assembled were indistinct. It was also not yet established that representatives of the shires or towns could put their grievances and interests to the king in council. He concludes: it’s easy to fall into anachronism, and to dismiss institutions and techniques that seemed to contemporaries to work well enough, however flawed or frail they may appear to successors.

A separate essay on law prior to Edward I examines the varying meaning of words used in contemporary documents, showing they do not map to latter-day understandings. For example, a serf is not a chattel slave. On the manor, even the lowliest were rarely working for the lord, and even Bracton discusses the ‘relativity’ of status.

Studying Anglo-Saxon land books and charters, Maitland concluded historians had underestimated the king’s extent of rights over the land of freeholders. He might be entitled to a large, yearly quantum of produce while he was in situ. If in England the duty of feeding the king became a tax or rent, it was comparable to Scandinavia, German tribes and even Romans. Such derived practices – down to tenancy – did not appear as an abuse during feudal times when kingship devolved to landlordship, office to property, tax to rent. The early land books evidence that the king’s giving land is more the giving of certain privileges that are yet some ways from ownership; the Anglo-Saxon land book (i.e., the charter) never really ceased to be an ecclesiastical instrument. The king gave privileges of land for the benefit of his soul. It was land held by royal grant under Church sanction.

Feudalism, various services owed to superiors for protection and used of land, was a natural stage of English history. He insists: there is no way to reach from the 8th to the 16th century without its features. Feudalism was a civilizing sequence: separation of employment (division of labor); possibility of national defense, of art and science; the cathedral and the library. The growth of peasants subject to seignorial justice (i.e., the manor and its villeins) in place of free village / open fields is explicable and demonstrable in law. Civilizational progress is often cruel, especially in hindsight.

On county courts: there were many small freeholders on estates of lay lords, and many other residents with defined rights. When Henry I revived the duty to attend courts, it was incumbent of freeholders whose overlords had no immunity to attend; no one attended who didn’t have to. The ‘right’ to do what no one wants to do is no right.

The difficulty of historiography is in erasing clear views and returning to obscure, yet-undefined concepts – in a systematic fashion. For example, by overpopulating towns and villages. In previous centuries, the ‘corporate one’ held sway over common lands. The ‘plural many’ is a latter development. Where were the powers of the nebulous majority? ‘The law sees differences of kind where nature has made differences of degree’.

Maitland noted the Celtic language faded from use, though historiography suggested the Celts were the balance of the population: why? The victors established themselves: ‘true English villages with open fields are not Celtic, not Roman, but German’.
On the Mirror of Justices: in 1289 the English legal regime had sunk to a low level through corruption, a unique event of the late medieval era. Maitland exposed the document as the work of an amateur: even then trained jurists did not speak of law as being for the purposes of religious redemption. Written between 1285-90, it is a jumble playing on the known loss of public confidence in tribunals.

On criticizing text: Maitland rationally concludes that divergent copies of the same event may have been made simultaneously; he shows that a supposed statute could not have been so. All is in attention to detail.

In a final extract, Schuyler culminates by showing even careful scholarship could prove erroneous or in need of correction, as when Maitland surmised Elizabeth had adopted ‘etc’ in her title in order to sidestep controversy over the English crown doubling as head of the Church. Subsequently scholars shared Mary had previously done the same, for the converse reason of wishing not to offend the Pope.

NB: ‘Simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety; it is the goal not the starting point.’ Moreover, the further back one goes ‘instead of the simple we find the indefinite’.

15. Ward and Ward, ed., Natural Right and Political Philosophy (17 August)

by kurto

A festschrift organized in four categories: ancient, early modern, and American political thought and politics in literature. Often an elusive subject because it may encompass liberty, virtue, or responsibility with or without stating whether natural right is assumed, denied, or displaced by another dynamic.

Pangle: Socrates presents mastery of the body as essential to an excellent soul. In Xenophon’s telling, the best life is that of the athlete who masters the self-control needed for moderation, a guideline exceeding Aristotle’s middle way.

Cherry: All can participate in the Aristotelian pursuit of justice and equality. To depend on a derived philosophy such as cosmology is an error – better to start with what we know, what everyone can know. The ideal polity is a mixed regime for common advantage, incorporating the wealthy and virtuous among the ordinary multitude. Virtuous actions and political thought differ by individual, are not uniform; wealth-poverty isn’t the sole axis.

Nichols: Aristotle wrote the Politics because experience yields insufficient guidance: political science is the fruition of political life. In seeking for unity from diversity, pure ideas fall short. Humanity is political by nature because its various associations (e.g., families, friends, political communities) all entail participation. Plato treats friends as part of the whole, in contrast to Aristotle’s Ethics which asserts their intrinsic value. Both truth and friends are valuable. In reducing individuals to a class, Plato denies them the diversity of goods they seek. Multiple interests are necessary contributions to the community.

Keys: Augustine observed Rome commanded a disproportionate share of citizen loyalty, at the expense of natural rights. The state’s overreach itself caused grievance. God created mankind as capable of reason and freedom. Humanity itself is a natural right. Dignity and humility must ally for humanity to reach knowledge and justice; these goods depend on reverence.

Schaeffer: Montaigne lowers humanity’s aspirations, a la Machiavelli. We shouldn’t zealously pursue heretics: if it’s natural to deviate from reason, to what degree are men responsible? Contra Aristotle, the Frenchman sees that the ‘value and height of true virtue … lies in the ease, utility, and pleasure of its practice’, which even children can pursue. Montaigne’s Essays are conventionally seen as having evolved during course of composition, but it’s more likely he was nurturing his readers.

Lee Ward: Spinoza thought theocracy did not fit the classical typology of government: it has no balancing power, no universal basis of legitimacy. Having divided authority between the priest and the military commander, such that neither could rule alone, the Mosaic regime created deep social conflict, which naturally led to monarchy as resolution.
Divine law cannot be known prior to revelation, while natural law is immanent, available to all via unassisted use of reason. Mosaic law is unscientific and narcissistic, even if beneficial, because it must always refer to its foundation. It cannot be broken, where natural law allows for default.
In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza claims intellectual freedom including free speech is vital to the polity’s success, contrary to conventional views of free speech as license. The Hebrew state was unable to promote freedom: lack of liberty, incoherent basis of political legitimacy and obligation leads to unchanging, rigid views of civil conduct. Further, theocracy’s demands inevitably expand as the means of meeting new contexts. Spinoza sought for a religion consistent with natural rights, a problem because each religion has very particular concepts of its civil contribution.

Sullivan: Montesquieu held ‘the citizen’s liberty depends principally on the goodness of the criminal laws’. He restricted civil authority from the conscience. Divine justice is distinct from human justice; the individual conscience is not to be inspected by human tribunals.
Sacrilege and treason are both conducted via conspiracy. The state’s ‘vague proofs’ are steps toward despotism: action not thought must be the threshold. Speech and though are not answerable in courts of law, but only deliberate acts exhorting treason.

Church: Hegel is the source of criticizing the individual of Locke’s social contract. Though he follows Locke in many (often unrecognized) respects, he denies human goods are inescapably ethical and political. For Locke, the individual has no liberty or indeed identity without exclusive right to property as a product of labor. For Hegel this was merely selfish (i.e., subjective). The main good is freedom, understood as a rational and common. The political community, instead of being instrumental to protecting natural rights, expresses self-realization (overcoming objective alienation) in the scope of Geist.

Ncgorski: The Bible demands obedient love, philosophy autonomous understanding. Strauss’ choice of philosophy is paradoxically an act of faith, since the best way to live might indeed be in pursuit of religion. John Paul II, though calling ‘faith and reason like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth’, asserted but could not prove revelation trumps reason. Interestingly, the duo also shared a Socratic approach.

Lawler: Locke’s understanding of personal identity depends on Christian (i.e., Puritan) understanding of natural right. It reworks of Biblical doctrine in light of what we can know of ourselves through unaided reason: what is natural follows from what is true of the will of the creator. Many features of personal liberation valued by Locke are Christian, for example opposition to slavery, equality of women in marriage, and egalitarian political community. A post-Christian Lockean is a believer in freedom without personal salvation. This attempt to transform God into an uncaring being is at odds with free society based on secure personal liberty.
America is a compromise between Locke and Puritanism, as we see in Tocqueville. Puritans are hypermoral, Virginians amoral. The Puritans could have learned liberty of conscience from the Virginians, mistakenly assigning to the church what is the state’s job. But renouncing religion in the name of science and progress curtails the mind, as per Marilynne Robinson. Tocqueville says modern / technical language works against metaphysical distinctions, draining humans of their distinction from animals

Yarborough: Jefferson believe in man’s teleological progress but probably would not have endorsed progressivism. Croly and Dewey made no use of natural right
Nichols: Gouvernor Morris sees property as the ideal grounding a republican state, where property is the product of labor (rather than inherited). But where others see wealthy vs poor, or property rights versus human rights, Morris sees freedom versus tyranny. As much as Hamilton he saw the potential of a strong national government and so labored at the Constitutional Convention for a modern economy, ending slavery, political parties, and a strong executive.

Alvis: Examines the Constitutional Convention’s debate over the executive office, which considered the Articles of Confederation, a weak (limited) or strong (expansive) position, one or several officeholders, and popular election. The settlement of voting, the electoral college, was very different from Hamilton’s Federalist 10, focused on elites, whereas Morris asserted electors should represent the common voter. Hence it was not intended to curb direct democracy to channel it. The need for an energetic executive was reconciled with limited government that protected individual rights, a problem acute in republics: ‘where law is the product of consent, its lax enforcement would call into question the very principles on which the nation is founded ‘ (Federalist 70). It was to be a ‘republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government’ (Federalist 10).

Schaub: Studies Booker Washington’s appreciation of Lincoln’s statesmanship inpublic addresses and writings. It was an inverted relationship: Lincoln appealed to natural equality to promote the physical liberty of slaves; Washington pitched to the spiritual liberty in pursuit of civic equality.

Emmert: Teddy Roosevelt’s histories, essays, and biographical sketches lead to an account of US history (i.e., statesmanship and constitutionalism) which is broadly grounded in moral and intellectual excellence: courage, moderation, and public spiritedness. Statesman wed common sense to reflections of political forms, the most important being the rule of law underpinned by charter or constitution. Roosevelt opined people need leaders not masters: biography is a form of education for the people in learning to choose elected representatives.

Spiekerman: Brutus is the hero of Julius Caesar, and by inviting us to consider his actions, Shakespeare brings us to ask of the nature of conspiracy. The playwright suggests Brutus and Cassius are refined intellectuals, not ‘men of action’; Shakespeare did not conclude anti-republican forces would not have won but for contingency: he says it was a close call, that the assassins made unforced errors. Hence the famous ‘tide of men’s affairs’ quote in untrue.
Shakespeare seeks to make Brutus attractive to friends of liberty while acknowledging his evident faults, to make the loser attractive to those who want to win, which has been made problematic by the republican failure. Did he see a link between philosophy and political weakness?

Pangle: In Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the narrator displays Averroism based on ‘natural light’ not Christian faith. He seeks to debunk the ‘Christian imperialism’ of chivalry, the militancy of contemporary religion. The work shows how monotheism appears to the philosopher.
Henderson: Tom Stoppard’s critique of utopianism in the Coast of Utopia stems from personal interests and politics being grounded in humanity.

NB: Machiavelli in Discourses: ‘For whoever has a stained conscience easily believes that one speaks of him; one can hear a word, said for another end, that perturbs your spirit and makes you believe it was said about your case’.

25. Talbot, Season of the Witch (28 Dec 2025)

by kurto

Valorizes libertine, gay San Francisco circa 1965-85 as a Nietzschean escapade-cum-morality tale, flattening socioeconomic context and ignoring externalities. Whether or no these were the city’s animating spirits, Talbot reads as though the late 20th century’s progressive paradigm was inevitable rather than contingent on events that also included neighborhood reshuffling after 1989’s earthquake and the Internet boom of the next decade. Equally, why and at what cost should counterculture be not merely accepted but endorsed?

Narrating via sympathetic character sketch of local celebrities and leftist politicians, Talbot moves from Haight-Ashbury bohemians to Filmore’s music scene to city hall. The Sixties amounted to a cultural dialogue between metropolitan London, falling fast, and a depopulating northern California city of approximately 725,000, supported by Motown Detroit. Music, fashion, drugs, and sex surpassed the civil rights movement, welfare-state expansion, declining industrial and Keynesian economics, or the Cold War (save Vietnam).

Like other US cities, San Francisco’s wartime and postwar industrial heights were passing, families migrating to the suburbs (their commute aided by the unmentioned 1972 debut of BART), and violent crime rising. Talbot alludes to working-class neighborhoods, portrays the police as a corrupt, closed ‘Gaelic and garlic’ shop, and paints felonies in the colors of moral equivalence. Municipal administration improves with the election of George Moscone, trailed by the beatified Harvey Milk – both complicit in Jim Jones’ degradation of electoral politics. Amid the Dan White’s notorious assassinations, one learns the Board of Supervisors somehow remained a 6-5 majority of ‘moderates’. Who were these benighted voters? Why is Dianne Feinstein, quarterback to 1981’s $25 million bailout by California and praised for prompting a conference of American mayors to establish an AIDS task force, a ‘good government moderate’?

The 1950s are ‘dark days’ for labor activists. Reagan is seen to put a ‘genial face on callous policies’ as governor in the 1960s and president in the 1980s, when the city heroically responded to AIDs (originally GRID). The underdog 49ers are most laudable for being gay-friendly, unlike the hegemonic Dallas Cowboys, whose Hall of Fame but Christian coach exhibits an equally regional trait. And so on.

Talbot questionably reports Vincent Hallinan, an early hero, has an Olympic-size swim pool in his Marin backyard – most unlikely. Later one reads 15 percent of returning Vietnam veterans were addicted to heroin, without citation. Oral history without reference to other evidence, however readable, seems to sacrifice accuracy and balance.

Cities are ‘social enterprises built on the tacit compact that one racial or religious group or neighborhood won’t start warring on another’, Talbot writes. On what basis do they function well? He ventures:
By taking care of suffering men [during the AIDS crisis], San Francisco finally became a unified city. …The plague burned down to the city’s core, where one simple truth was revealed: we must take care of each other. No matter how sick or helpless or untouchable people are.

The contemporary left transforms Hobbesian individuals into Marxist/postmodern classes, whose claims are borne not of natural right but Rousseau’s compassion, demanding not only toleration but approbation. How to meet the costs of such as regime? The burdens of California’s Proposition 13, its latter-day capital-gains tax, and other scarcities endemic to the peninsular city disproportionately fall not on patricians like Feinstein or nouveau riches but working classes and families, the citizens who seemingly comprise Talbot’s ‘conservatives’.

Even as a cultural synthesis of how it felt to contemporaries, Season assumes that which is to be explained: that which might have been grounded in San Francisco’s up-and-down 150 years since the 1840s, or contrasted with contemporary American cities, is lionized in isolation. Season may serve as a standard treatment not as a treatment of any standard.

23. Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918 (13 Dec 2025)

by kurto

The 19th-century Habsburg monarchy took as its raison d’etre acting to stabilize Mitteleuropa but failed to keep pace with either liberalism or nationalism. After the tumult of 1848, the dynasty’s repeated pursuit its own interests – the army and financial administration (i.e., taxation) – led to constitutional muddle which could not reconcile emergent peoples to German-flavored federalization. Surrendering the possibility of greater Germany after 1866, the empire turned away from liberalism following the crash of 1873, thereafter stumbling into the train of Magyar Hungary and Prussian Germany. The empire fell not because it was unworkable but since the national elites envied sovereignty without exercising responsibility. Her successors also struggled to convert the peasantry to liberalism, instead becoming agrarian democracies ill-equipped to manage power, as Metternich predicted.
The empire’s ‘missions’ had included defending Europe from Ottoman Turks in the 16th century, promoting the Counterrevolution in the 17th, and promoting Enlightenment in the 18th, as a means to the permanent, paramount cause of the dynasty’s honor and glory. In the 19th, it unsuccessfully sought to block Greater Germany, too late in seeking to enter the Zollverein and then the Confederation.
1620’s Battle of White Mountain determined the empire’s character: the Czech nation and Protestant religion was submerged, Germanic Austria extended to Bohemia. Hungary, reconquered after a final Turkish assault in 1683, sidestepped the same outcome in 1707 and 1711, latterly by the Peace of Szatmar in which the Magyars gained recognition for the county gentry’s managing judicial and fiscal matters (the comitat) in exchange for recognizing Charles VI as sovereign. The bargain was reinforced by 1740’s Pragmatic Sanction, intended to secure Maria Theresa’s succession, which swapped the indivisibility of Habsburg lands in illogical exchange for Magyar privileges. The pact foreshadowed 19th-century efforts to position the master-nation peoples (Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland) against one another.
Habsburg lands were entailed estates, not a nation, a collection of ‘Irelands’ whose nobility were loyal to Vienna (save those in Galicia and Italy). Imperial bureaucrats were town dwellers in Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, Brno, promoting the Enlightenment.
Joseph II (reigned 1765 as co-regent to 1780, then as monarch to 1790) saw the empire as Germanic, breaking with the Hungarian settlement and also the Catholic Church in the interest of a centralized state. Land reforms were intended to increase property subject to tax, but restricted sales among social classes, meaning the social (i.e., formative national) character of peasant communities was strengthened and not subsumed in German ways. Simultaneously, magnates amalgamated the lands of petty nobles, creating incipient capital. (Freeing Jews from restrictions typical of Russia created a class grateful to the dynasty.)
Following the Congress of Vienna, Francis II (Holy Roman Emperor from 1792-1806, then Emperor of Austria 1804-36) upheld Metternich’s system borne of 1819’s Carlsbad Decrees (imposing censorship and control of national university groups) as well as the Holy Alliance with Prussia and Russia, these the two pillars of the empire’s contribution to the Concert of Europe.
Metternich sought to arrange regional diets in support of the dynasty; but regional bodies in 1825 and 1830 had demanded the use of popular languages. He wrongly supposed the Magyars would be content with the post-Napoleonic settlement, but winning the Hungarian gentry to federalism would have meant ending comitat privileges and otherwise making liberal concessions. His rival, Kolovrat, standing as an independently wealthy Bohemian to a Rhinelander in need of dynastic employ, won control of domestic policy after balancing the crown’s accounts in 1831; Metternich regained sole control on Ferdinand’s 1835 succession. Louis Kossuth’s Magyar nationalism both made the running of awakening Diets and, like the Habsburgs, pursued pseudo-liberal policies, for instance in replacing Latin with Magyar but not Romanian (in Transylvania), Croatian, etc. Before 1848, this was mainly the handiwork of intellectuals in towns of more than 100,000 – Milan and Venice, Prague, Budapest – where a Rights of Man worldview was contending to supersede Germanic bourgeois liberalism. Italian nationalists sought not Magyar privilege but outright independence for Lombardy and Venetia, and so threatened Metternich’s entire domestic system as well as the policy of deterring French aggression.
***
1848 commenced with February riots in Paris, then followed Budapest, where Kossuth perceived that unless the gentry acted radical intellectuals would capture the peasantry. The March laws, established in Bratislava’s diet (subsequently removed to the Hungarian capital), converted the constitution to recognizing solely Francis Joseph’s personal rule; abolished the Hungarian chancellery and set up a viceroy without reference to Vienna; incorporated Transylvania and Croatia; abolished the robot, established the Magyar language and enlarged suffrage; and established a separate army, budget, and foreign policy. Ferdinand acceded.
Bohemia simultaneously overreached, demanding unification of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia despite lack of historical precedent; Silesia was predominantly German, as were Moravian elites. In the Slav congress of June, Palacky launched Austroslavism, neither Russian nor German, as an alternate to Slav nationalism. The Prague meeting produced both a revolutionary manifesto, for instance seeking the reunion of Poland, and an address to the emperor calling for improved treatment of subject peoples. The bifurcation identified the substance of the empire’s final mission, its ‘decisive question’. Street fighting broke out, to be crushed by the imperial army; but the empire was not uniformly strong-willed.
In Lombardy, also in March, locals called for aid from the King of Sardinia, which invasion Radetzky was initially ordered not to resist, leading to claims on all Habsburg Italian lands; however, Germanic students in the Tyrol and Trieste remained loyal and so checked the momentum. The army in Lombardy-Venetia, having withdrawn to the Quadrilateral (Verona, Peschiera del Garda, Mantua, and Legnago between the Mincio and Adige rivers), recovered with Lombard victories in July and, following siege, Venetian surrender in August 1849.
In Vienna, Archduchess Sophia led the engineering of Metternich’s resignation; but Viennese middle and working classes went further – in April Windischgratz’s army narrowly kept order. The dynastic court fled to Innsbruck; ministers remaining in Vienna promulgated an imperial constitution styled on Belgium’s, and the following month, conceded a constituent assembly.
September’s Act of Emancipation was the most consequential legislation of Ferdinand’s reign, abolishing without compensation the hereditary (comitat) rights of landlords and the robot, while establishing peasant security of tenure. Subsequently, landowners were no longer interested to retain peasants, some of whom sold and moved to the towns, providing labor for industrialists and support for the swamping of German elites. Soon they wished for schooling in the vernacular, especially in Bohemia and Slovenia, and switched from opposing aristocrats to contending among one another as subject (i.e., incipient) nationalities. The abolition of hereditary jurisdiction ceded power to imperial officials, but only in Hungary did the decline of petty gentry matter – elsewhere it was too small – and remaining peasants lost their revolutionary fervor.
Broadly, the court and revolutionaries each came to accepted remodeling along the lines of the master nations; the dynasty preserved but was never serious about working the subject peoples. Habsburg policy acknowledged Croatia but not Transylvania, which was left to the Magyars. Bohemia exposed its dilemma, for the regional elite’s Germanic character had given way. The bourgeois retreated from these views as the revolutionary tide receded, but had indicated a fundamental preference for German confederation.
Insurrection had not ended: in October, Viennese radicals rose, but were unsupported by peasants in lower or upper Austria and suppressed by Windischgratz. At the same time the restored Croat leader Jellacic invaded Hungary, effectively rescinding Habsburg acceptance of the March Laws while also indicating the Magyars would not be free of popular discontent. Jellacic, after helping suppress Vienna, was defeated. Ferdinand abdicated in December; in March 1849 Francis Joseph issued the centralizing March constitution. Kossuth declared independence, which went unrecognized and prompted Russia’s May invasion, restoring matters to status quo ante. Hence both greater Germany and national Austria failed in 1848, and national Hungary in 1849.
***
Afterward, the already dwindling German elites hoped for revived imperialism, while fissiparous peoples such as the Bohemian Czechs wished for federalism. The dynasty thus reasserted itself as ruling subject peoples – the ‘empire of 70 millions’ – whom Francis Joseph trusted no more than liberalism. The Bach system launched with 1850’s abolishment of Hungarian tariffs, persisting until 1859. The decade saw great capital investment especially in railroads, but 1857’s crisis shook liberal faith. Foreign affairs predominated: as in Metternich’s time policy sought to deter French interest in Italy and check Russia’s pursuit of Danubian principalities as a route to Turkey. The Crimean war’s outcome blocked the latter, yet the empire lost. Russia blamed her for threatening to join the allies, while the allies thought the war could have been prevented had she done so earlier. Worse, the allies had stopped Russia alone, and the Peace of Paris stopped Austria herself advancing to the mouth of the Danube. The empire’s Mitteleuropa mission was compromised.
Martial law was lifted form Lombardy-Venetia in 1857; the following year Napoleon III agreed to help Cavour expel the Austrians. Sardinia was given an ultimatum to disarm, but the Habsburg army mobilized more slowly than the French. Radetzky lost at Magenta and then Solferino. Peace, struck directly between France and the empire, surrendered Lombardy but not Venetia or the Quadrilateral, and demonstrated the dynasty must share power with the master nations. The prestige of the army, vital to survival in 1848, suffered.
The October Diploma of 1860 was intended as a federalist document, with legislation to derive from the diets and a Reichsrat. The countervailing February Patent of 1861 made the Vienna parliament imperial, the diets reduced to acting as regional electoral colleges. Voting was weighted for urban Germans and landlords. Neither addressed the erstwhile Hungarian concessions of 1848. Francis Joseph insisted the Reichsrat must never interfere with foreign policy or the army, never to relent.
Then followed constitutional absolutism under Schmerling. In 1863 the minister persuaded Francis Joseph to bid for leadership of the German confederation; Prussia declined to attend a Frankfurt convention, and subsequently thwarted the empire’s application to the Zollverein. Austrian bourgeois and intellectuals, mistakenly thinking the Habsburgs to be turning to German rationalism, wholly went over to the Habsburgs (as German liberals would the Hohenzollerns in 1866).
Francis Deak, repudiating the scope of Kossuth’s ambitions, thought the Magyars could not oppose both the Habsburgs and Hungary’s own subject peoples, and so chose to ally with the empire, to reassert as a historic Habsburg nation. Publishing Magyar demands in the summer of 1865, he drew Francis Joseph to Budapest to recognize the grants of 1848. Schmerling fell. Hungary’s gains came at the expense of the Reichsrat: Deak demanded a ministry responsible to the emperor, Belcredi – appointed to resolve Hungarian matters so as to prepare for Prussian war – countered with a comitat and ‘national’ diet. Andrassy, returned from exile with Kossuth, suggested a compromise of delegations of Hungarians and Austrians that would be responsible for internal matters and work together on imperial matters (i.e., the nationalities), essentially the basis of 1867’s dualism.
After 1863, war with Prussia was inevitable: Italy allied with the Hohenzollerns, refusing the empire’s belated offer to cede Venetia (which was then offered to France). Routing Austria at Sadowa in July 1866, Bismarck opened negotiations promptly, to block French or Russian participation, which resulted in Austria’s final exclusion from unified Germany.
Beust, a Saxon, succeeded to the mission of pacifying subject peoples, so as to restore the anti-Prussian possibility of empire. And again Hungary was to be mollified. He revived the February Patent, narrowing the Reichsrat to ‘constitutional Austria’, the emperor retaining sole control of foreign policy and the military. Under the Dualist settlement, each delegation had 60 members, the Austrian side imperial in scope, the Hungarian strictly national. Economic policy was shared between the two delegations, tariffs among the empire were to be settled very 10 years, generally creating leverage for the Hungarian magnates’ agrarian demands at the expense of imperial industrial interests in cheap food. The empire’s declining aristocracy acceded because of its unwillingness to rule; the liberals did not understand they had no real role; the dynasty was content with maneuvering to retain power; Dualism was a return to Bach.
Francis Joseph resented the liberals’ interference with Dualism over 1867-79, and so doubled down on the Magyars. Hungary after 1867 had seen the disappearance of 100,000 landowners, resulting in one-third of the country being owned by magnates, one-fifth by some 300 families. Agrarian protection turned the magnates into nationalists, much as the Junkers became German patriots. Land reform having killed Austria’s regional nobles, capitalist successors concentrated in Vienna, weakening any would-be federalism. But the economic crisis of 1873 shook industrialist and bourgeois faith in liberalism: they turned for protection to the Habsburg state, simultaneously making way for nationalism. In the succeeding era of 1879-93, Taafe balanced the subject peoples. The Czechs, able to compete for jobs, turned loyal to constitutional Austria; but this produced Germanic backlash. Proposals to extend the franchise raised more fears. He was dismissed in favor of a nationalities coalition of ministers, another Habsburg reverse of course, again government disrupted while administration persisted.
Austria in her final years was a vast body of state servants, amid three competing constitutional frameworks – the October Diploma, the February Patent, and Dualism. Every year the provinces gained responsibility, yet could not contain nationalist discontent, but only relay it to the Reichsrat. There being very little power in the private sector, every small matter of railway, schools, or postal appointment was politically fraught. In the 1890s the price of defeating liberalism emerged as the diversion of emergent middle-class aspirations to national autonomy, which redounded to claims that eventually reached further than parliamentary purview of foreign policy and the army. Loyalty to the emperor no longer sufficed for intellectuals or urban classes, as it had for the military and bureaucracy. Indeed, Christian socialism (more populist than Germany’s Center) and Social democracy presented more alternatives; while these acted to deny nationalist claims, they sought for the same distributive socioeconomic functions.
The dynasty achieved liberty to manage constitutional Austria by following a foreign policy sympathetic to Germany. When the latter abandoned Bismarck’s pacificism for Weltpolitik, the empire and its peoples became beholden to Germany’s bid for mastery of Europe – no liberty after all. Austria-Hungary was neutral in the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish war but consequently gained responsibility for Bosnia-Herzegovina, adding Slavs to the empire, which reinforced the Bismarckian intention of Germanic predominance in the Balkans. But the chancellor’s dismissal led to Wilhem II committing Germany to follow Austrian lead in the Balkans in 1889. 1905’s Moroccan crisis, Germany’s first attempt to subdue France and Russia, was the dynasty’s last independent effort.
The Austro-Russian entente of 1897, which swapped Russian non-interference in the Balkans for recognition of her interests in the Straits, was intended to promote domestic stability. Instead it enabled subject peoples to make claims of the dynasty, e.g., fuller use of the Czech language in Bohemia. These prompted German demonstrations in Austria, unprecedented since 1848, and thence Badeni’s dismissal. The same year, Hungarian tariff negotiations, eventually postponed to 1903, opened new attacks on Dualism (e.g., against the common army), prompting further protest from the German ‘people of state’.
The final dynasty’s insurmountable challenge would come from the South Slav idea. Strosmajer (not Tito) was the real creator of the South Slav idea, but his conception didn’t reconcile the Serbs (who’d fought Turks) and Croats (who’s opposed Magyars and sometimes Habsburgs); the Serbs took their culture from Paris, the Croats from Germany; Slovenia, isolated from both by the Hungarian frontier, naturally allied with the Czechs. All the missteps of 1907-14 sprang from mistaking Serbia, totem of the South Slavs, for Piedmont. The Magyar proposal to make Hungarian the sole language of local rails, even in Croatia, aggravated Serbo-Croat intellectuals. More significant, Bosnia-Herzegovina was annexed in 1908, in exchange for Austria’s supporting Russian warships passing through the Dardanelles. Supervision was justified, annexation was not. In the late days of the empire, military spending lagged behind the other Great Powers.
Magyar support for Germany in World War I was Hungary’s foremost concession to greater Germany. Kossuth had expected that for Mitteleuropa’s nationalities to emerge, the empire must fall. Tisza supposed Hungary could remain independent of Germany too because the Prussians were reliably anti-Slav. He checked Germany attempts to win over Romania via Transylvanian concession. Most nationalities had 2-3 natural opponents, the Czechs only the Germans, fearing victory as fatal to an independent Bohemia. Francis Joseph passed in 1916, succeeded by Charles, who sought Magyar mollification and independent negotiation with the allies. Tisza threatened to withhold food. The Czechs demanded to add Hungarian Slovakia. The Poles finally broke with the empire over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’s recognizing a Ukraine which included parts of historic Poland. In 1848 the threat of social revolution rallied the upper classes to the dynasty. In the war’s dying stages, they sought strength in nationalism. Masaryk won Wilson away from the ‘Austrian mission’ of federalism to self-determination, aided by American Slovaks willing to support to the new Czech state.
The empire’s successors faced problems in establishing domestic authority and security against revanchist Germany. They were little better than the Habsburgs. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, borne of nationalist expression, became new versions of the Austrian idea.
***
Rather than narrate events and draw conclusions, Taylor deduces ineluctable logic, a technique dependent on construction or interpretation. Further, his is often discursive, constantly renewed with addition, subtraction, refinement.

14. Aylner, Rebellion or Revolution? (27 July 2025)

by kurto

England’s civil war can’t be classed a revolution because the Restoration complicates its departure; yet its religious and political upheaval exceeds military rebellion; and cultural memory was enduring and polarized. It was fought on the ground of constitutional ambiguity, of good-faith disagreement about sovereignty, with persisting suspicions of one another’s sociopolitical motives.
Contingencies figured in the events of 1640-49 but the efficient causes included the Tudor seizure of Catholic Church lands, the rise of Puritanism out of the Reformation, conflict with the Calvinist Scottish Church, crown administration little changed since circa 1560 (e.g., persistence of monopolies and cartels in agriculture, tradecrafts, and transport – all Puritan milieu – plus chartered trading companies), disputes with the Old Irish and Anglo-Irish, and obviously the extended failings of James I, Charles I, Laud, Wentworth, etc.
Owing to the Bishop’s War, both the Scottish and Caroline armies were unpaid, exposing the king’s grasp of events. The Short Parliament of 1640 complained of religious policy (i.e., Laud’s administration), civil administration (notably Strafford in Ireland), and Parliamentary privilege (i.e., its role in granting supply). Commons saw itself as defending ancient rights, Lords failed to mediate. The former’s willingness to separate the proxy Strafford from Charles indicated it sought reform not confrontation. But its resolution was evident: the following year, its committees expanded to religion, trade, ‘grievances’, Ireland (Catholicism as a threat to all English Protestants, and the cost of suppression), courts of justice, before finally the ‘state of the kingdom’ – a sea change that produced the Grand Remonstrance.
Reform tipped into rebellion in March 1642 with the passage of the Militia Ordinance establishing Parliament’s right to appoint military commander. The country divided, loosely speaking, between the royalist north and west and the Parliamentarian south and east. The rivalry was often inter-or even intra-county, prosecuted by rival garrisons or between competing elites or broader socioeconomic interests; but this is not to demonstrate class interests. Puritanism set the tone but as a movement did not precipitate events; in some ways the war was a contest between Westminster and the City. The explosion of sermons and pamphlets, especially in the City, evidenced polarization.
Marston Moor having denied the royalists northern England’s manpower in July 1644, it was evident by 1645 military victory was all but impossible save for Parliament’s falling out with the Scots. (Irish forces were little help to the royalists.) The Scots, however, seeking a full Calvinist settlement, were not entirely aligned with Pym’s Presbyterian-minded Parliamentary center-left. Abolition of the Anglican episcopacy did not unify the Puritans, for democracy in church might lead to democracy in government, threatening the entire social order. Further, the extent of the Presbyterian system, while insufficiently doctrinal for the Scots, was too intolerant for the Congregationalists, the Baptists, etc. The sale of bishops’ lands were also contentious. This phase, described as three-party affair by JH Hexter (the other two being ‘conservative’ and Independents comprising Puritan-Congregationalists and republican-radicals), is alternately seen by revisionists as a two-party affair, Holles’ preeminence over 1646-47 seeming to simplify divisions.
Failed negotiations in Oxford (1642-43) and Uxbridge (early 1645), though both more favorable to the King than the 19 Propositions of 1640, as well as Charles’ absolutism, maladroit politics, and general duplicity ruled out restoration as a focus on settlement. Denouement often depends on context as much as content.
Preceded by the February 1645 reorganization of Parliamentary forces as the New Model Army, Cromwell’s championing the Self-Denying Ordinance before exempting himself is conventionally seen as hypocritical; but Carlisle’s subsequent publication of his letters and speeches refutes the charge. The April 1647 election of army representatives (‘agitators’) was the signature moment in the army’s politicization; many officers resigned, tilting the corps still further.
Parliament had been slow to create a central executive to replace the Privy Council, the effects most obvious in military funding. Holles belatedly offered indemnity, pay in arrears, a halt to drafting units to serve in Ireland, and mass demobilization; but Army demands were now extended to religious freedom and reform of legal privileges. In May 1647 a City (i.e., Presbyterian) mob forced Parliament, driving MPs to the Army, which then advanced on Westminster, detaining Holles and ten associates. Pride’s Purge almost inevitably followed in November. It’s easy for military forces to act against elected bodies, and once done readily becomes habitual.
The Putney debates among the NMA’s general council in October-November 1647, chaired by Fairfax (and seconded by Cromwell in the former’s illness), matched the conservative Ireton against Rainsborough, Sexby, and Wildman. Premised on the Levellers’ Agreement of the People, the discussions advanced democratic views – many officers were willing to go part way – but Leveller-agitator influence had peaked the prior summer.
In the second phase of fighting, a short burst between February and April 1648, the Army came to hold Charles personally responsible and hence condemnable; whereas Parliament, though thinkingly similarly of his role, mostly hoped yet for reconciliation.
The war’s destruction of Anglican churches was modest compared with Henry VIII’s time. Anglican clergy drew back from overt political roles, become an adjunct of the peerage and gentry. The Commonwealth era was more favorable to enterprise while also promoting mercantilism, especially amid the Dutch wars. Yet there a nebulous limit to the decline of deference.
***
After Charles’ execution, Ireland and Scotland were quickly subdued by English troops. Cromwell didn’t seek military rule but his intent cannot be shown as his bill for narrowing Parliament has not survived. The mostly Presbyterian Rump was the primary threat to Cromwell’s backers, the ‘gentry republican’ and ‘populist millenarian’ factions in the Army, who eventually provoked dissolution.
Cromwell was a Puritan Congregationalist and a mixed constitutionalist – no dictator. The Protectorate’s foundational instrument combined the Heads of Proposals, the Levellers’ Agreement of the People, and the lost Rump Parliament bill, its main features being rule by a single person supported by a council (5 of the first 14 being military types) and periodic parliaments. Though ad hoc, it is as close to a written constitution as England has had but was never put to popular consent nor turned into a formal charter. It did claim the right to rule without Parliament from April 1653 to September 1654. This was unusually legalistic authoritarianism.
The Commonwealth’s administrative focus was taxation to sustain the military, most continued from the Civil War or raised by sale of royal properties. Still the state could not cover its needs including naval war with the Netherlands and by decade’s end, public debt had grown quite large, notwithstanding piracy of Spanish shipping.
At any rate, the Commonwealth could not survive its founder’s demise. The military couldn’t agree with Hesilrige and other civilian republicans nor lead a fully radical reconstruction. The country’s elite disliked the prospects of further social upheaval, were worn out. Monck, duplicitous, ultimately steered the Army’s withdrawal from politics. His crossing the Tweed rallied English landed classes and urban elites to meetings and petitions calling for a ‘free Parliament’, meaning (but not stating) restoration of the Stuarts. London, which had remained Parliamentarian, resenting the rise and rise of taxes, had already turned royalist and the general’s arrival there brought out survivors of the Rump. Monck’s subsequent withdrawal without further fighting, much credited by historians, and largely due to the Commons’ sensible restoration of county militias, is less remarkable that Charles II’s accession with so few conditions, for Parliament retained control of the state, its church, and local government.
NB: ‘When evidence is lacking and the historian has to weigh probabilities, it is normally sensible to prefer the simpler explanation of the alternatives available’ (p.89)

24. Howard, War in European History (14 Dec 2025)

by kurto

Surveys the evolution of continental conflict through professional and socio-national lenses from the medieval ages to the Cold War, observing the extent of 20th-century warfare (if not the moral conditions) had returned to that of the Dark Ages. Howard is often interested to demonstrate an equilibrium between political events and military technology, or more broadly between offense and defense. Not only the proverbial generals but indeed modern societies misjudge the wars of the future: conflict, being pervasive, tends to overwhelm military doctrine with new challenges.
The waves of Saracen, Magyar, and above all Norse attacks had prompted the rise of local strongmen; the Norman conquest created Christian Europe’s most complement implementation of feudalism. By the 14th century laws and limitations of knightly warfare and service obligations were fairly uniform. A century later, after the French taille became permanent, her kings maintained standing armies which replaced knightly warlords. Swiss pikemen were the elite infantry, by dint of technical structure and sociopolitical organization; the cavalry comprised aristocrats; and improving artillery could reduce fortified castles – conditions recognizable in the Napoleonic era.
Infantry fighting in the 16th century was shaped by the tercios of Spain, where the cavalry were less prestigious (but indeed nobles in the ranks). Holland was the century’s outlier, her armies regularly paid and drilled, producing a previously unknown discipline in the ranks. In the era of exploration, ships had to be able to cargo and to fight; privateers were the equivalent of condottiere. The profit of the West Indies was in smuggling and piracy. But on land, contrary to the prior ages of mercenaries pillaging of peasant countrysides, rival dynasties were increasingly able to tap the ‘national’ creation of wealth, such as by chartered companies, and trade was seen as a form of war, for example by Colbert. By result, they could operate bureaucracies to run armed forces.
In the 18th century, the proto-nation-state took full control of warfare, including at seas. War became the province of professional soldiers, especially the officer class. Again the Dutch were tactical leaders in defensive fortification (digging) as well as drilling. The stoicism required by rank formation sat well with the Protestant ethic of self-discipline.
Well-qualified generals had begun to appear in the second half of the prior century, the greatest being the Duke of Marlborough. The notable administrators were Michel Le Tellier and his son the Marquis de Louvois, serving Louis XIV, which helped the French army to become the most efficient instrument of state power yet seen. Meanwhile the Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg traded his notables recognition of existing privileges for a small grant of funds to raise a stranding army. In effect they conceded their right to tax themselves. Consequently royal officials were sent to assess land values, which produced further monies for additional personnel and hence further tax. The Prussian officer ranks became a social elite. Armies, being expensive, were concerned to avoid battle and potential loss. Campaigns were inconclusive, over short four-to-five month windows. Strategy focused on siege, fortification, supply and logistics.
The Enlightenment saw war as unreasonable, the economist as destroying wealth. But professionalization and theory would be supplanted by nationalism, beginning with Napoleonic France. The resulting enlargement reintroduced speed of movement and scale of attack, while requiring coordination of deployment (but not always supply). The entire populace was involved in production, coordinated by government, so the whole of the enemy nation had to be reduced.
Napoleon sought to concentrate fire against a single point made vulnerable by the division of forces, often that point being the communications linchpin. When neutralized, the enemy was forced either to capitulate or to fight in smaller (inferior) units. He introduced broad dispersion coupled with rapid reassembly. All European forces would adopt his organization of forces, divided and subdivided among corps, divisions, brigades, and so on.
The British navy exploited new signaling systems allowing for more elaborate use of improved battle tactics. In the Napoleonic wars, its role was not to stop trade with Europe, but to blockade so as to force commerce through Britain, to complement attritional strategy. Consequently Napoleon was forced to install the hated Continental system to requisition needed military supplied. Russia, in part for lack of English timber and grains, responded by changing sides in 1812. Winter in Russia as well as Wellington in Spain then denied the French the decisive battle of concentrated forces.
Afterward Europe’s sought to contain ‘liberal’ / national sentiments, for example in the Habsburg empire. Later in the 19th century, Moltke converted Germany’s staff officers to an elite which rotated in and out of command posts. 1870 was as much a systemic as a military victory, the romantic heroism of independent command falling to wayside. Britain and the US later joined suit, following poor performance in the Boer and Spanish wars (in Cuba).
Prior to the Great War, it was assumed population for the army’s ranks, economic production, and railroad capacity would determine military capability, in contrast to the 18th century’s preference for caliber of professional forces. Between 1815 and 1914 communications capabilities transformed strategy, and newly destructive technology changed tactics. The impetus was attack – despite evident of growing defensive advantage – in order to make the enemy use finite resources. Howard dismisses the idea that elites promoted the national fervor of 1914-15; they distrusted nationalism. Enthusiasm belonged more to democratic views promoted by Hegel, Mazzini, etc. By the end of World War I, the artillery took ground, the infantry held it, and ground itself was important for observing and siting artillery. Simultaneously gaps between professional soldiery and democratic politicians were emerging.
Technology not only increase the destructiveness of weapons but also the care of troops. In the 18th century, casualty by injury and disease outnumbered battlefield deaths by 5:1; now the ratio reversed. The popular understanding of World War I’s ‘alienation’ is far from wholly true: the interwar years evidence nostalgia for clear purpose, especially in MittelEuropa (i.e., fascism).
Naval defeats of Spain (by the USA in1898) and Russia (by Japan in 1904) foretold the changing naval balance of power, while making clear technology (not popular participation) dominated war as sea. Submarines were the primary example. Though the cult of the mass army had passed by the end of World War II, latter-day societies were more thoroughly subsumed in economic production or exposure to mass bombing, taking them back beyond the early modern era.

9. Dudley, Hegel, Nietzsche and Philosophy (10 May 2021)

by kurto

Conjoining Hegel and Nietzsche comprehends German idealism’s view of freedom as established by philosophy. Hegel sees philosophy as articulating self-determining, rational categories that complete themselves and structure ordered liberty. Nietzsche sees philosophy – especially genealogy – as disrupting and overcoming convention, as compelling the subject to live in a perpetually unfinished state.
Anglo-American liberalism – Berlin’s negative liberty – is necessary but deficient in lacking a force of moral self-determination or personal responsibility. Moreover, Hegel and Nietzsche go beyond Kant in requiring philosophical practice to create understanding of what it is to be free.
Hegel: freedom results from transfiguring the subject’s finitude into the infinite, which occurs as the external is internalized. Humans are liberated through reconciliation, renouncing abstract independence. Socially this means recognizing Geist (Spirit), the current phase of the philosophy of history. In the slang, objective Geist considers spiritual beings to be willing beings: its components are abstract right, morality, and ethical life (which are external). Judgment is the act of dividing a concept between subject and predicate. It is both logical and ontological, reflecting how the word passes reality and how self-consciousness understands itself and the world.
In abstract right, the individual will identifies its freedom as something external. Its development toward freedom amounts to a progression of relationships among universal, particular, individual. The relation of will to will is the highest progression – true freedom. Should one commit a crime, punishment is for the sake of justice and freedom. The moral will thus divides itself as to individual and universal interests. Choosing may occur on the basis of the subjective (for its own will) or the objective (existing in the world, in accordance with freedom, in accordance with universal subjectivity): choosing universal interests of one’s own volition is the triumph of the moral over the abstract.
All that the moral will has is conscience. It depends on something else for judgment, for rationality. It is also capable of evil: both stem from self-certainty, since will cannot objectively know good. But the voluntarist corporation transforms the individual such that he has honor in the estate, provided the corporation seeks freedom and protects individuals from themselves; more formally, the corporate objectives embody freedom through documents, laws, etc.). The less self- control, the more external control is needed: the ethical subject knows itself as an objectification of will. This resonates of Rousseau’s general will? But where is the defense against tyranny of the majority or thumos? Can Spirit effectively say who should run the corporations, who should rule?
Purposive relations may be reconceived as a syllogism where subject equals major premise and object the minor, as a teleological outcome, a reuniting that overcomes finitude. This is the cunning of reason, its example par excellence is God’s will (i.e., the subject) acting via humans (the object). Dudley makes an analogy of swimming-pool chlorine (p.78). It is a finite structure, depending on logic of object, because genuine realization of subjective purpose is dependent on the objective. The natural world does not have as its purpose a rational state, but the subject may so impose. Hence the animating spirit remains subjective: willing good is subjective and so ‘in need of reconceptualization in the absolute idea’. For the willing subject does not comprehend ethical life required by freedom (lack of finitude). In ethical life, the willing subject experiences the community’s customs – the content of the universal will – as necessary and so free but cannot know if these customs are required by freedom. It lacks adequate understanding.
The solution to finitude borne of the subject – externality amounts to a syllogism of necessity (not formality), requiring integration of thought and being. Knowing that the objective world of nature is not forever external to the spiritual subject does not lessen the subject’s dependency but does show it’s bound to the self (via willing integration) and so is free. ‘To know one’s limitation means to know of one’s unlimitedness’. The externality is eliminated.
Hegel identified three activities of the absolute spirit (art, religion, and philosophy), all of them surmounting the subjectivity of the willing, of which finitude is the primary hurdle, that is, the presupposition that spirit and nature, subject and object are fundamentally alien. (Such a construction does not appear to encompass personal responsibility – how are we to distinguish between license and overcoming? And since change in immanent, how are we to separate progress from error? Hegel himself says progress is intelligible only retrospectively – the owl of Minerva.)
At any rate, the three activities cannot be the replacements for sociopolitical struggle to be free but only the guides to freedom. In order to be free, man must know he is free, to recognize the absolute spirit; no one is free unless all are free. Hegel does not believe political freedom requires philosophic justification: Dudley analogizes of a doctor who commands ‘don’t smoke’ but cannot not smoke for the patient. Yet it’s necessary interdependent categories of understanding conditions of freedom as well as actually existing socioeconomics.
Nietzsche, as unsystematic as Hegel is structured, presented the stages of freedom as decadent, noble, and tragic. Like Hegel, the subject’s ability to choose (the liberal definition of freedom) does not guarantee willing is autonomous: forces external may remain determinative.
‘Revenge and hatred as metaphysical concepts insist the strong are free to be weak, thus dragging themselves down, thereby suggesting the essence of weakness is a voluntary choice’. Subjection of will to reason is seen by decadents as self-denial of evil instincts and therefore virtue. Then morality justifies caring for others more than oneself. The highest value of the decadent reality is lack of suffering. Faith in the metaphysics of weakness is guaranteed by prohibiting thinking – but what happens to excoriating rationalism? Nonetheless it allows the weak to will. Morality is a symptom of weakness because one cannot organize one’s thoughts and instincts for achievement. The ‘ban’ on knowledge and doubt makes faith the only ground for purposeful action. Submitting to faith is equivalent to submitting to a common law – which is herd morality because there is no evidence of individual will. The weak can will but it’s not their own choice. Herd morality uses all the experience of some established categories, and gets the same outcomes – too quickly. Hence to be educated is to learn to defer judgment. Knowledge and thus freedom require losing oneself, one’s conventional will, one’s perspective. He echoes Rousseau in seeing social convention, institutions are inherently corrupting of will to be free, are for the week.
Reason and language shore up metaphysical belief: ‘philosophical mythology lies concealed in language’. For humans to become free they must will the ascension of the will. Science also rests of belief, in rationalism. Wagner evidenced simplification of one’s drives. Genius improves humanity for the future. (But what if it’s a false path?) A genius can strike the balance between memory and forgetting; the weaker have the greater need to forget external stimuli. Will should vary by person (which is disastrous as a policy prescription). The noble will remains unfree because it’s still subject to external compulsion: indeed it requires a tyranny to organize disintegrated instructions into a unified will. They are invented from personal needs: one must be selfish but constituted by fixed categories, which is limited by the very success of escaping the herd. Independence cannot be outside of the other bust must be enmeshed in it. Hence ‘sickness’ is necessary to become healthy. The free spirits must cycle through the range of possibilities, no sacrifice being too great.
The coming century (i.e., the 20th) could be dangerous: there is no morality with an exclusive monopoly on the moral (p. 187). As an individual prescription, many will not return from license; as communities, the tyrant or social engineer will force us to be free. (So close to Rousseau, so far from Burke.)
Freedom’s requirements establish distinction between scientists and scholars, who are merely skeptics, and philosophers, whose skepticism is in service of constructing the larger whole with new values – true creators. The will to power wills overcoming the other, willing its incorporation, and refuses to engage with what it cannot so incorporate. This is ‘great health’.
The eternal return is both metaphysical and psychological. The tragic journey creates nothing unless something is destroyed, and the creation too must pass. But re-creation doesn’t have to repeat itself precisely in sequence, though it could be over and again. This is a test of affirmation. Only great health of the tragic will love sickness-and-restoration. Is this a kind of Stoicism? – no says Nietzsche. Nihilist ennui is the fate of those who think the permanent is valuable (i.e.. natural law); these do not have a free future. The tragic sees impermanence as virtuous. (Nietzsche’s becoming seems to preclude recourse to what has happened.)
There are three challenges for the tragic: determining the extent of the unalterable, improving the alterable, and not acting in ways that make the present worse. (At last, responsibility!) To see the abyss is to know there’s no firm ground for taking one’s bearings: the past must always be justified by the present, and every such justification is impermanent.
The death of God celebrates the shedding of herd morality, of permanence. It is man’s responsibility to redeem himself. To be original is to be misunderstood; for the paradox of avoiding convention must mean not wanting to be comprehended.
But Nietzsche cannot tell us of conditions hostile to freedom because of his hostility to particularity. He cannot ground norms, Dudley says.
Every word contains prejudice toward that which is to be surmounted by the tragic will. Freedom requires understanding the current hegemony is supported by words, is unfree. Philosophy is a primary source of linguistic exposition and transformation, and so a primary source of freedom. Discovering these prejudices is genealogy. Transforming one’s will and one’s language are two side of the same coin. Freedom depends on successfully a) disrupting conceptual structures through genealogical research and b) transforming those structures through linguistic experimentation, the two intertwined.
For both Hegel and Nietzsche, liberalism fails to require freedom that entails individual willing to produce the world’s content. For Hegel, formal freedom is the freedom to choose and act without rational guidance. Absolute knowing is reason determining (revealing) itself, generating and justifying its own categories. We must know what we ought to will, and then we ought to act on it because it is right not because we are compelled. (External categories are revelation, empirical science, social convention, given consciousness, even nature). Reconciliation with nature (i.e., the other) is superior because it’s not one-sided. Alienation between subject-object is overcome. Philosophy is the rational bond (as well as art, religion, the other activities of the absolute spirit).
For Nietzsche, rationality is no guide to an impermanent world. Where Hegel sets the course of Spirit, Nietzsche says there is no course but only eternal return. Where Hegel, sees philosophy as self-deterministic of thought, the subject becoming free by following the laws and mores reason has produced, Nietzsche understands philosophy as disruption of received thought (convention), pursued by genealogy. Freedom is perpetually incomplete.
Yet they are complementary is the sense that one sets the bounds of order, and the other calls for constant challenge of the bounds. Both ask how thought can be free, avoiding dependency or convention. What is the relationship of thought and the world? Hegel says rational completion, Nietzsche says perpetual becoming. What for Hegel is attractive about systemic autonomy is for Nietzsche the danger of ossification. The two schools should take each other’s warnings more seriously, Dudley says.
In Hegel, metaphysical progress leads to the individual’s ethical reconciliation with nature. In Nietzsche, metaphysical recurrence creates the need for psychological affirmation; otherwise ones falls into nihilism (!) and ressentiment (i.e., envy and hatred which cannot be acted on). The free subject is reconciled with the world in that free subjects and communities must develop symbiotically because they share language. Hence they ought to be ‘open to transgression and reorganization’ (p242), within the general limits of freedom. Eternal return is metaphysical, a cosmological hypothesis, in that the Nietzsche suggests the universe is finite but time infinite, therefore all configurations recur infinitely. This is to reject Hegelian teleology. Dudley therefore argues against French interpretations which endow the doctrine with psychological flavor, of willingness to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Though a psychological element is present, it’s inferior to cosmology.
German idealism’s view of freedom is overly rational, underestimating what Burke or Berlin would see as necessary or immanent tension. The idealists, replacing moral limits with reason, required an objective reconciliation that Nietzsche himself showed was never compete and final. Freedom lost its character of principled refusal or resistance: at the intersection of freedom and thumos, the power of the institution grew. Necessitating a philosophic understanding privileged an elite, downgrading ordinary agency and leaving the people to Rousseau’s coercion.

21. Blainey, Before I Forget (26 Nov 2025)

by kurto

A taut biography of the prolific, populist historian’s Victorian Youth and adventures into professional, long-form journalism specializing in mining.

Blainey’s dad, an itinerant Methodist minister who was reassigned every four years, effectively showed him an unusually broad perspective of the state during the interwar and wartime years, notably Ballarat and Geelong. Congregations and towns then were tightly knit; their merits may resurface. Later he hitched around New South Wales and Tasmania, before flying on assignment to Queensland, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia, such that by 30 he would have been better traveled than all but a few Aussies.

His big break was a scholarship to Melbourne’s Wesley College, paid for by a Ballarat banker who had previously left his dad’s church. Starting out a leftist, he realized he did not believe in the perfectibility of human nature. Burke’s Reflections advanced his course, though he hadn’t remembered reading it until rediscovering a schoolboy notebook. He did well at Melbourne University but left without taking a degree; it was later granted by an administrator going ‘behind his back’; later he returned as economics professor.

He liked visiting the country’s mining sites, particularly going underground, and following a successful corporate history of a Tasmanian company, saw ‘most’ of Australia’s pits. The profession was more prestigious in the 1950s through the 1970s, and skilled miners would have had a higher standard of living than British colleagues. A keen reader, he was equally skillful in capturing oral history. The surprise in writing Tyranny of Distance was discovering geography (distance) as a variable such as class.

• A Geelong fan. In the wartime era, only players wore team colors
• Every British visitor of distinction was mentioned in the newspaper

An enjoyable read, though yarns which once rang as unlikely later border on name dropping: at what point did he become the insider in outsider’s clothes? It would also be interesting to know more of his relationship with mentor Manning Clark, who tended (in Blainey’s view) to downplay Australian achievement.

NB: Try to spend less time at work but to work harder (more effectively)

17. Jenkins, Short History of London (3 September 2025)

by kurto

The City predominated medieval and early modern London, at Westminster’s expense. Thereafter the British capital has passed through phases of growth and decline without settling on effective local governance or planning. She’s been profligate with land, unable to strike a balance between the market and the needs of poorer residents or transportation. Consequently London’s physical development, i.e., geography in contradistinction to architecture or socioeconomic character, has sacrificed neighborhood continuity and civic historicity.

The medieval decision to situate London’s power outside the district of St. Paul’s shaped the capital’s early history. Following the 1348’s plague of the Black Death, the City regularized government in 25 aldermen from 12 guilds, bolstered by 100 representatives from 25 wards. Most of the former were lifetime positions, though because of the guild’s basis in trade, especially maritimes, the oligarchy was regularly, naturally renewed by changing fortunes. Well-to-do medievals could escape the city’s walls for the countryside: commercial power was not co-resident with political heft.

In seizing the monasteries Henry III added to his hunting estates and consequently such parks as St. James, Hyde, Kensington Gardens, and Regent’s. Richard Gresham and his son Thomas, Henry’s bankers, saw to the City’s admitting Flemish refugees from Spanish Netherlands, contributing to London’s surpassing Antwerp as the commercial hub of northern Europe. By 1600, half of the wealthiest were ‘suburban’, contributing to a rising gentry, and as such Elizbeth’s government restricted building beyond three miles – creating a proto-greenbelt.

During the Civil War, the City favored the Puritans before taking a compromise position at decade’s end. It had financed Cromwell and overawed Westminster, reaching the apex of its power. London’s classes began intermixing during the Restoration, as the building of aristocratic squares (e.g., St James, Grosvenor) required servant quarters nearby. Later these became slums, then gentrified townhouses. Outside the City, late 17th-century London was inadequately governed by parish vestries (Middlesex, Essex), lacking the guilds’ organization and self-policing. Thus Sacheverell’s 1709 attacks on Irish Catholics and other Dissenters provoked discord, leading to the passing of the Riot Act in 1714.

By the Hanover era, Westminster was no longer a suburb but truly a second city, built around St James and Mayfair mansions. Johnson, of Fleet St, personified London, observing he who tires of it ‘is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford. You will find no man that is at all intellectual who is willing to leave’. Campaigns by Henry Fielding and William Gogarth against cheap gin led to heavy taxes, for alcoholism and infant mortality soared over 1720-50, hitherto the only time the population had stagnated; and thereafter the populace switched to beer.

(In 1709, Cheyne Row was built in then-distant Chelsea, which shortly became one of the few estates to change hands, sold to Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum. In 1753 it was divided between his daughters, one of whom married the Welsh Lord Cardogan, who developed in Knightsbridge and in the 1880s was responsible for heavily rebuilding the north section in the redbrick, neo-Dutch style. His estate remains active; fortunately, the white-stuccoed terraces toward the Army hospital survived.)

The regulation of construction, which began after the Great Fire of 1666, accelerated with 1774’s Building Act, banning exposed woodwork and prescribing uniform streets. The century’s latter half also saw renewed estate building. The Napoleonic wars stimulated development, but the broad trend over 1720-1800 had been imperial trade moving to Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow as London’s docks were outmoded. Hence construction commenced in the Isle of Dogs and Wapping: the East End became England’s greatest working-class city – almost unknown to the rest of the town.
Victorian reform (sanitation) and improvement – rapid, ‘brutal’ railway construction – came hand in hand, both being piecemeal. The Metropolitan Board of Works originated in 1855 after poor water was identified as the cause of ill health; it would be replaced by the more expansive London County Council (LCC) in 1888. Other British town councils were already in place in the 1830s. Yet Salisbury’s Tories opposed a unitary capital government as too big and powerful, favoring the unreformed City, Poor Law administrators, and vestries as bulwarks. Fabian capture of the bureaucracy would soon prove his point. Notwithstanding serious problems in 1832, ‘48, ‘67, and ’88, threats to public order were minimal because tradesmen were separated into ‘little islands’, making citywide agitation too difficult, There remained land for expansion, to accommodate the growing residency, Jenkins cites of historian Roy Porter.

Shipbuilding virtually disappeared in the 1860s. Services now predominated, accounting for 60 percent of jobs, notably in finance, law, and public administration. One-third of these were filled by women. By 1900 individual buildings had surpassed the street or square as the cityscape’s best-known features. Urban sprawl accelerated with the coming of cars, ownership rising to 1 million after World War I. Separately, London’s deep clay would prove ideal for the tube (whose iconic map was modeled on an electrical circuit board).

Planning came into vogue in interwar era. The Blitz damaged London much less than Allied bombs rent Germany, those killed numbering 30,000 versus 500,000, but postwar Labour efforts were more political than practical, density remaining fairly low. Clearance of traditional communities led to unwonted gentrification, and its evident failure to alleviate housing shortage led laissez-faire development in the 1950s and early ‘60s. (South Kensington remains one of the town’s densest districts.) Patrick Abercrombie, author of 1944’s Greater London Plan, builder of the Barbican, and all-round promoter of brutalism, is the villain. In the 1970s, arts and education bodies too destroyed heritage sites in the spirit of progress. Jenkins chides politicians for ‘taking orders’ from architects, planners, and quangos lacking in civic spirit. From 1950-70 the population fell by 9 percent, 17 in the inner city districts. However, the smog of 1952 (the successor of the Great Stink of 1858), was addressed in a private bill of ’56, resulting in the banning of coal heating by 1968.

London’s rebirth commenced in 1980 with Thatcherite policy and the City’s Big Bang, Nigel Lawson’s disbanding of monopoly practices, later extended by Blair. The working class moved rightward as enrichment spread. London would become an international city – by 2001 nearly 40 percent were foreign born, and 55 percent considered themselves ‘non-white British’. The populace, which had fallen to 6.6 million in 1985, rebounded to 9 million in 2019; however, the West End became the province of empty second homes (especially along Chelsea’s King’s Road or in Kensington’s Phillimore estate, the combined borough’s residency falling at the 2011 census.) Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson are responsible for permitting London’s unruly towers.

Surprisingly, Jenkins makes no comparisons with other great, imperial cities. He writes not in the interests of policy; his efforts in that direction, such as recalling his native Camden, are incomplete or unconvincing; yet he is a kindly and fond narrator. His view that cities belong to residents as much as developers is resonant.