Book abstracts

24. Prest, William Blackstone (27 Dec 2015)

by kurto

A narrative life of 18th-century jurist William Blackstone, renowned for distilling dense English common law into a more readily understood framework. The fatherless son of minor gentry, Blackstone rose through diligent classical studies to a place at Oxford’s All Souls, where postgraduate and administrative energies led to intra-university political activity. His initial foray as a London barrister was unsuccessful; his lectures on the common law made him a name; but his taking most of the income of newly endowed chair earned Blackstone a whiff of odium. Or was it more simply undignified ambition in Hanoverian and Georgian England? The future George III was a fan, Jeremy Bentham was not. The author’s counterbalances his own opinion. Later an MP, Blackstone was only modestly effective because of his back-bench independence and also a diffident speaking style: he failed notably during the rough-and-tumble of the Wilkes affair. But his practice grew, and some years after leaving Oxford for good, he won the judgeship he sought. Again opinions were divided, between churlish, high-church Tory and diligent national treasure. In fact he was something of a rationalist modernizer. Like Everitt’s

    Cicero

, the book could spend a bit more time elucidating the kernel of Blackstone’s thinking itself.

1. Bromwich, Intellectual Life of Burke (31 Jan 2016)

by kurto

A patiently elaborated intellectual biography of Edmund Burke that falls short of its ulterior objective, to demonstrate the Anglo-Irishman is not a source of modern conservatism. A professor of English literature, Bromwich reads Burke’s published works and private correspondence alike as political action (i.e., thought leadership), concluding Burke treats politics as civic morality. So far so good. However, the author cannot reconcile Burke the reformer with Burke the defender of entailed inheritance qua tradition: he doesn’t or hasn’t understood that Burke ‘changed his stance but not his ground’ — a reasonable description of 20th-century neoconservatism, which is problematic for Bromwich. So he settles on a view of Burke solely as a reformer and seeks to read him out of the conservative canon. The ambition fails both by not considering Burke in contradistinction to, for example, the philosophes, as a historian would, and also in failing to show how the generations of conservatives who have drawn inspiration from Burke were somehow mistaken. Bromwich wrongly suggests that because Burke was not a contemporary Tory, he cannot be seen as the fount of the right. Prone to social psychology, but well written. A promised successor volume, which must cover the years following from the American Revolution, faces the bigger challenge of explaining away

    Reflections

.

2. Hamilton, Echo of Greece (7 Feb 2016)

by kurto

Most of the leading thinkers of ancient Greece lived in the fourth century, after the democratic triumph of Pericles and the fall of Athens. Hamilton sketches the oeuvre of these men, particularly emphasizing the humanistic qualities and also contrasting Plato with Aristotle, the latter so long in the former’s shade. Ultimately, the Greeks sought to identify freedom, the Romans order. The conclusion is a departure: what would have become of the Christian church had it followed the Greeks?

3. Hazareesingh, How the French Think (27 Feb 2016)

by kurto

Surveys elite and popular ideas in France since the revolution, in an effort to characterize predominant modes of Gallic thinking. The author begins with the rationalist, deductive thought of Rene Descartes, which spilled from science into the social sciences and the humanities: Cartesian thinking remains the feature of the French worldview. Other conceptual treatments include utopianism, left-right artefacts, and metropolitan-regional oppositions. The final third of the book focuses on postwar notables such as Camus and Sartre, the communist left, and the postmoderns — de Gaulle merits comparatively little notice. Surprisingly, the left-liberal author concludes postmodernism (and implicitly communism) has proven a dead end, and even blames the mindset for spurring contemporary pessimism. Well written and honest, if bien pensant.

5. Fenby, The General (13 Mar 2020)

by kurto

A biography of a 20th century’s great, emphasizing his distinctive approach to military and political leadership. Charles de Gaulle was a ‘lifelong teacher’ of men, dating to his days as a World War I prisoner war. He saw military organization as the model for the mass-production economy and also government management of society. Great leaders surpass hierarchy to act independently, accordingly they must be distant, reserved. De Gaulle evinced autocracy but was to work through referenda; notwithstanding Roosevelt’s views he was a committed democrat, using established institutions. He held out French rationalism as the native counter to fascism.
de Gaulle had broken with Petain well before the treason of 1940, yet was strongly opposed by such London Frenchmen as Raymond Aron and Jean Monnet. His popular appeal via radio outlasted Hitler and Roosevelt. Free French (yet less than 20,000) had scored several tactical successes in Africa, thereby winning Churchill’s grudging support, and established its elan. By 1941, he had prevailed over admiral Emile Muselier and opposition leader Jean Moulin. He then relocated the Free French to Algiers to reestablish himself of on French soil, and in 1943 was recognized as supremo by Eisenhower.
In country from 1944, after the war he blocked the Communist from the ‘three great levers’: foreign affairs, military, interior (police) – each of which had been conceded in Eastern Europe. Though the logical executive, he disavowed a political party a la Bolingbroke, seeking to become a ‘national arbiter’ above the fray, and so left politics. His strategy for return was to take the electoral route while allowing the establishment to envision his leading a coup, thereby ‘frightening [the [populace] into acquiesce’. By the time of the Algerian crisis, he was seen as the only rampart between communism and fascism; in the 1958 elections 344 of 475 incumbent deputies lost their seats.
Under de Gaulle, centralized authority expanded: power lay not in the legislature but unelected civil servants or state-run corporations. He himself was Olympian in hauteur, ‘crab like’ in duplicity. France depended on his status, justified in settling the Algerian civil war and German rapprochement. But the OAS affair forced him to abandon the presidential for the partisan – the beginning of the end of the regime, evidenced by poor elections result of 1962. By 1965 he could no longer claim to represent the general will. He blundered in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; in 1968 he could still outwit politicians but not the new generation of students; only the disconnect between students and unions prevented a disgraceful exit.
De Gaulle poses a problem for historians who deny individual greatness – he twice saved France from cataclysm (surrender, civil war), twice showed himself a natural autocrat in service of popular nationhood and rule. Fenby suggests the authoritarian start of the Fifth Republic could not be sustained, yet the country’s movement toward parliamentarism is better observed in the European Union. Genuinely rooted in the country’s claims to greatness, Gaullism is merely a political behavior (not unlike Peronism). The author writes crisply yet fails to elaborate what is the France his subject saved.

21. Banner, Ever-changing Past (15 October 2022)

by kurto

The discipline of history depends on evidence, which element is protean, and seeks for relevance, which changes with passing generations. Therefore conclusions are in the long run unstable. So runs the main tenet of Banner’s argument for historicism. ‘Only by writing for their own times and in response to questions of their day can historians make the past comprehensible to those who wish to learn of it. … What to one person and one age is orthodoxy to another is revision, and vice versa’ (p. 269). Banner commences with the contrast between Herodotus, who valued informal culture and mindsets, and Thucydides, who preferred tangible deeds and recorded public affairs. Put another way, whether the discipline’s purpose is to advance moral understanding or be objective (Ranke’s as it actually happened) is an important source of competing perspective. Revisions may also stem from method, which prompt different queries. After a tour of such revisionists – really pioneering practitioners – as the 4th-century theologian Eusebius and Marx, the author establishes himself as a postmodern fellow traveler. The premise of deconstruction is admitted; objectivity is ‘masculine’; historical propositions usually cannot be falsified; the would-be neutrality (positivism) of psychology is smuggled into historical practice to demonstrate the impossibility of conclusion. Yet Banner is pleased to defend the mandarinate’s expertise: ‘Whatever modern and postmodern doubts about the objectivity ideal have arisen since the nineteenth century, it is impossible to imagine that the inborn human thirst for dependable historical understanding will suffer significantly among professional historians and members of the general public because of these uncertainties’ (p. 262)! And: ‘Such prudent relativism in historical thought has never come close to being so unhinged and radical as to threaten historians’ commitment to truth and accuracy’ (p.265). The usual (circa 2021) progressive platitudes are frequently aired. Lacking any boundary between ‘revisionism’ and nihilism, Banner tacitly encourages postmodern attacks on the heritage of Western society. The matter of historicism is treated by recognizing it is not the answers but the great recurring questions that establish transcendence.

5. Sandoz (ed.), Roots of Liberty (26 March 2022)

by kurto

A series of essays exploring shifting interpretation of England’s ‘ancient constitution’ and Magna Carta, sweeping from Fortescue to Augustan England and colonial America, addressing the charter as emblematic of Saxon culture, original intent, rule of law and government by consent, and the source of executive power. Effectively premised on JGA Pocock’s

    Ancient Constitution and Feudal Laws

, the contributors agree one’s views on such topics as the rights of subjects (e.g., trial by jury of peers) and limits of authority are relevant not only to jurisprudence but also the political conditions of liberty. Pocock had observed (among other things) that it was judicial process, rather than black-letter law, which was immemorial. Sandoz writes Fortescue and the common law grounded Coke’s opposition to the monarch. Holt observes Magna Charta was both a grant of liberties and a legislative act. Brooks writes, somewhat against the grain, that 16th-century lawyers were little concerned with constitutional theory and more interested in humanist (neoclassical) law. Christianson, sketching the skirmishing between early Stuarts (i.e., James I’s absolutism) and the Parliamentary opposition (Selden’s mixed monarchy, Hedley’s constitutional monarchy grounded in common law) which came to blows in the Five Knights case and provision of supply, essentially pitted rival views of the ancient constitution rather than absolutism vs constitutional government. Reid: 17th- and 18th-century lawyers thought the ancient constitution gave Parliament and common-law courts standing against arbitrary monarchy (which resonated with American revolutionaries). The common laws which had survived were the best evidence of English liberty. (Later, Burke held prescription the most solid of the titles to property, custom being the proof point of time time.) The merit of ancient constitution was security against government caprice – in an unwritten charter, no element was more essential to thwarting slavery to government. Reid adds: in this era, forensic historical work deployed the ancient constitution for proof of authority, establishment of consent, and bulwark against new government claims; in the latter century, the British chose government by consent (i.e., king in parliament) whereas the Americans settled on rule by law (following Coke, not a sovereign granting rights but a people delimiting executive power). The Saxon constitution represented liberty; the Norman charter arbitrary power; the Americans converted the dynamic to the notion of original intent. He asks why English lawyers, alone in Europe, sought to formalize understanding of rule of law – a matter now relevant to American originalists (vs progressivism) and Brexiteers (vs European Unionism).

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

by kurto

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

5. Stanlis, Edmund Burke (10 Apr 2016)

by kurto

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

6. Knightley, Australia (20 Apr 2016)

by kurto

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