Orwell on historical truth

George Orwell is celebrated for his recognition of the role of political lies in the conflicts of his time. For example: "Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Part of his awareness of self-serving lies about history by states and political partisans developed through his experience in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Events that he himself had observed and participated in -- for example, the street fighting in Barcelona in May 1937 -- were grossly misrepresented by the Communists. Ultimately his own faction, the POUM, was accused by the Communists of having engaged in conspiracy and having fomented the street violence that occurred during these weeks. Orwell was a participant, and he knew first-hand that this was untrue. It is instructive to read Homage to Catalonia from the lens of "historical truth".

So what were the facts about Barcelona in spring 1937?

IT will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned from other eyewitnesses whom I believe to be reliable. I can, however, contradict some of the more flagrant lies and help to get the affair into some kind of perspective. (70)

In what follows Orwell offers a judicious account of the events and pronouncements that preceded and followed the beginning of street fighting in Barcelona in May 1937 -- first between the anarchists (CNT) and the Guardia Civil, then with several parties of the left joining with the CNT on the barricades. He makes an effort to recover documents and contemporary news articles to piece together the sequence of events that culminated in the suppression of the POUM. And he finds that reportage in the press was almost invariably incorrect, whether purposefully or not. The Communist line was consistently antagonistic to the anarchists and the Trotskyists (POUM). 

A tremendous dust was kicked up in the foreign anti-Fascist press, but, as usual, only one side of the case has had anything like a hearing. As a result the Barcelona fighting has been represented as an insurrection by disloyal Anarchists and Trotskyists who were ‘stabbing the Spanish Government in the back’, and so forth. The issue was not quite so simple as that. Undoubtedly when you are at war with a deadly enemy it is better not to begin fighting among yourselves; but it is worth remembering that it takes two to make a quarrel and that people do not begin building barricades unless they have received something that they regard as a provocation. (73)

In particular, the Communists were active in constructing a propaganda platform against both POUM and the anarchists.

Since the beginning of the war the Spanish Communist Party had grown enormously in numbers and captured most of the political power, and there had come into Spain thousands of foreign Communists, many of whom were openly expressing their intention of ‘liquidating’ Anarchism as soon as the war against Franco was won. In the circumstances one could hardly expect the Anarchists to hand over the weapons which they had got possession of in the summer of 1936. (73-74)

Orwell explicitly considers his own position and potential bias in constructing the narrative that he offers. He credibly offers a commitment of his own intention to report honestly what he has observed.

I have tried to write objectively about the Barcelona fighting, though, obviously, no one can be completely objective on a question of this kind. One is practically obliged to take sides, and it must be clear enough which side I am on. Again, I must inevitably have made mistakes of fact, not only here but in other parts of this narrative. It is very difficult to write accurately about the Spanish war, because of the lack of non-propagandist documents. I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest. But it will be seen that the account I have given is completely different from that which appeared in the foreign and especially the Communist press. It is necessary to examine the Communist version, because it was published all over the world, has been supplemented at short intervals ever since, and is probably the most widely accepted one. ... In the Communist and pro-Communist press the entire blame for the Barcelona fighting was laid upon the P.O.U.M. The affair was represented not as a spontaneous outbreak, but as a deliberate, planned insurrection against the Government, engineered solely by the P.O.U.M. with the aid of a few misguided ‘uncontrollables’. More than this, it was definitely a Fascist plot, carried out under Fascist orders with the idea of starting civil war in the rear and thus paralysing the Government. The P.O.U.M. was ‘Franco’s Fifth Column’ —a ‘Trotskyist’ organization working in league with the Fascists. (74)

Throughout he establishes the ideological and propagandist "line" taken by the Communists, and he demonstrates its deliberate mendacity.

In a moment I will give some more extracts from the accounts that appeared in the Communist press; it will be seen that they are so self-contradictory as to be completely worthless. But before doing so it is worth pointing to several a priori reasons why this version of the May fighting as a Fascist rising engineered by the P.O.U.M. is next door to incredible. (75)

...

The alleged Fascist plot rests on bare assertion and all the evidence points in the other direction. We are told that the plan was for the German and Italian Governments to land troops in Catalonia; but no German or Italian troopships approached the coast. As to the ‘Congress of the Fourth International’ and the ‘German and Italian agents’, they are pure myth. So far as I know there had not even been any talk of a Congress of the Fourth International. There were vague plans for a Congress of the P.O.U.M. and its brother-parties (English I.L.P., German S.A.P., etc., etc.); this had been tentatively fixed for some time in July—two months later—and not a single delegate had yet arrived. The ‘German and Italian agents’ have no existence outside the pages of the Daily Worker. Anyone who crossed the frontier at that time knows that it was not so easy to ‘pour’ into Spain, or out of it, for that matter. (65-776_

And Orwell proceeds with a point-by-point refutation of the anti-Anarchist propaganda narrative offered by the Communists.

It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no other purpose than to work up prejudice. Hence, for instance, such statements as Mr Pitcairn’s in the Daily Worker of 11 May that the ‘rising’ was suppressed by the Popular Army. The idea here is to give outsiders the impression that all Catalonia was solid against the ‘Trotskyists’. But the Popular Army remained neutral throughout the fighting; everyone in Barcelona knew this, and it is difficult to believe that Mr Pitcairn did not know it too. (78)

By contrast with the organized and coordinated Communist narrative, Orwell's account of the street fighting in Barcelona in 1937 has the authenticity of an honest participant who offers his own account of events in which he participated. It is plain that he had sympathies -- for example, he refused the invitation to leave POUM and join the Communist International Brigade because he was not willing to risk being ordered to fire his rifle against Spanish workers (anarchists). But his sympathies do not appear to have interfered with his critical eye and his willingness to tell his story unflinchingly and honestly.

Moses Finley's persecution by McCarthyism

MI Finley (1912-1986) played a transformative role in the development of studies of the ancient world in the 1960s through the 1980s. He contributed to a reorientation of the field away from purely textual and philological sources to broad application of contemporary social science frameworks to the ancient world. His book The Ancient Economy (1973) was especially influential.

Finley was born in the United States, but most of his academic career unfolded in Britain. The reasons for this "brain drain" are peculiarly America. Like many other Americans -- screenwriters, actors, directors, government officials, and academics -- Finley became enmeshed in the period of unhinged political repression known as McCarthyism. Finley was named as a member of the Communist Party of the United States by fellow academic Karl Wittfogel in his own sworn testimony to the McCarran Committee (United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security). (Pat McCarran (D-NEV) was also the primary sponsor of the Subversive Activities Control Act (1950), which provided for mandatory registration of members of the Communist Party and created the legal possibility of "emergency detention" of Communists. Police state institutions!) When Finley was called to testify under oath to the committee, he declined to answer any questions based on his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. He was subsequently fired by Rutgers University for his refusal to answer the committee's questions. (Daniel Tompkins' essay "Moses Finkelstein and the American Scene: The Political Formation of Moses Finley, 1932-1955" provides some valuable information about the first half of Finley's career until he departed the United States; link.)

It should be noted that one's Fifth Amendment rights do not allow the witness to pick and choose which questions he or she is willing to answer. Many of the witnesses who took the Fifth during this period were fully willing to discuss their own activities but were not willing to name associates -- for example, Case Western Reserve professor Marcus Singer. Here is a brief summary of Singer's case taken from his New York Times obituary (October 11, 1994).

In 1953, when he was on the Cornell University faculty, Dr. Singer was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and questioned about his political affiliations. He admitted having been a Communist until 1948, although he said he had never held a party card. He refused to name Communists he had known while teaching at Harvard, from 1942 to 1951, on grounds of "honor and conscience" and invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment.

In 1956, he was convicted of contempt of Congress, fined $100 and given a three-month suspended sentence in Federal District Court in Washington, which ruled that he had waived the Fifth Amendment's protection. In 1957 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit set aside the conviction, saying its ruling was required by a Supreme Court decision in a similar case. The court sent the case back to Federal District Court with instructions to enter a judgment of not guilty.

In hindsight the willing participation of university presidents, law professors, and other faculty in the effort to exclude Communists or former Communists from faculty positions, and to fire professors who chose to plead the fifth amendment rather than provide testimony to the various congressional committees about their associates seems to reflect an almost incredible level of hysteria and paranoia. Ellen Schrecker documents the compliant actions of many administrators, trustees, and fellow faculty members (link). This was a betrayal of the principles of academic and personal freedom. One does not need to be an advocate of the Communist Party in order to defend a strong principle of academic freedom for all professors; and yet administrators and faculty at many leading universities were eager to find ways of supporting these anti-Communist measures. Schrecker quotes an official statement of the AAU in 1953 that provided grounds for firing faculty for membership in the Communist Party and for refusal to testify about their activities (link):

The professor owes his colleagues in the university complete candor and perfect integrity, precluding any kind of clandestine or conspiratorial activities. He owes equal candor to the public. If he is called upon to answer for his convictions, it is his duty as a citizen to speak out. It is even more his duty as a professor. Refusal to do so, on whatever legal grounds, cannot fail to reflect upon a profession that claims for itself the fullest freedom to speak and the maximum protection of that freedom available in our society. In this respect, invocation of the Fifth Amendment places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society. (325)

The AAUP eventually issued a statement condemning firing of professors for these reasons in 1956; but the damage was done.

But what about MI Finley? Was he a member of the CP-USA? And did this membership influence his thinking, teaching, and writing? Was he unsuitable to serve as a professor at an American university? F.S. Naiden answers the first question unequivocally: "Incontrovertible evidence now shows that Moses Finkelstein, as he was then named, joined the Party in 1937–8. The Party official who enrolled him, Emily Randolph Grace, reported this information in a biographical note she wrote about Finley in order to prepare for an international conference in 1960" (link). And Naiden suggests that his membership continued through the mid-1940s. 

Let's take Naiden's assessment as accurate; so what? Should Finley's membership in the 1930s be viewed as basis for disqualification as a professor fifteen years later? Here the answer seems clear: Finley's choices in the 1930s reflected his political and social convictions, his ideas and thoughts, and should fairly be seen as falling within his rights of freedom of thought, speech, and association. If his political ideas led him to commit substantive violations of the law, of course it would be legitimate to charge him under the relevant law; but there is no suggestion that this was the case. So Finley's persecution in 1953 -- along with the dozens of other faculty members who were fired from US universities for the same reason -- is just that: persecution based on his thoughts and convictions.

And what about his teaching? Did his previous membership in the Communist Party interfere with his professional responsibilities to his students or to the academic standards of his discipline? Again, the answer appears to be unequivocal. Finley, like the great majority of other professors dismissed for their Communist beliefs, appeared to make a strong separation between his personal political beliefs and the content of his teaching. He did not use the classroom to indoctrinate his students. And his activism in the 1930s -- organizing, leafletting, efforts to persuade others -- was clearly separated from his academic performance. (He had not even completed his PhD during the prime years of his membership in the Communist Party.) So any unbiased observer from Mars would judge that Finley was a fully ethical academic.

Finally, what about his research and writing? Did his membership in the Communist Party distort his scholarship? Did it interfere with his ethical standards of honesty and evidence-based historical research? Again, by the evidence of his writing, this charge too seems wholly unsupportable. Finley was a superb scholar, and his research is grounded in a reasonable and extensive marshaling of evidence about the social and economic realities of the ancient world. Finley was not a communist hack; he was not a dogmatic ideologue; rather, he was a dedicated and evidence-driven scholar -- with innovative theoretical and methodological ideas.

It is especially interesting to read Finley's short essay on the trial of Socrates in the context of his political persecution in the United States in 1953 (Socrates on Trial, first published in slightly different form in Aspects of Antiquity in 1960). Though there is an obvious parallel between the trial of Socrates and the encounter between Finley and the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security -- in each case the accused is brought to legal process based on his thoughts and criticisms of the society in which he lives -- there is no indication in this text that Finley wishes to draw out this comparison. Instead, most of his essay focuses on the point that much of the trial of Socrates has been mythologized for political purposes -- to attack direct democracy and the tyranny of the majority. Plato's text is a work of literature, not a transcription of the details of the accusations and the responses of Socrates. 

Paradoxically, it is not what Socrates said that is so momentous, but what Meletus and Anytus and Lycon said, what they thought, and what they feared. Who were these men to initiate so vital an action? Unfortunately, little is known about Meletus and Lycon, but Anytus was a prominent patriot and statesman. His participation indicates that the prosecution was carefully thought through, not merely a frivolous or petty persecution.

And Finley attempts to understand the thinking of the jurors themselves by placing the trial in the context of the massive Athenian trauma of the Peloponnesian War and two devastating plagues:

One noteworthy fact in their lives was Athens had been engaged in a bloody war with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 B.C. and did not end (though it was interrupted by periods of uneasy peace) until 404, five years before the trial. The greatest power in the Greek world, Athens led an exceptional empire, prosperous, and proud -- proud of its position, of its culture, and, above all, of its democratic system. But by 404 everything was gone: the empire, the glory, and the democracy. In their place stood a Spartan garrison and a dictatorship (which came to be known as the Thirty Tyrants). The psychological blow was incalculable, and there was not a man on the jury in 399 who could have forgotten it.

So Finley offers a historically dispassionate reading of the trial of Socrates. But we might draw out the essential parallel between the two cases anyway. We might say that Finley, like Socrates, was attacked because he "denied the gods of the city" -- in Finley's case, he challenged the unquestioned moral superiority of capitalism over socialism; and because he threatened to "corrupt the youth" -- to teach through his classroom and his example an unwholesome inclination to "communism". Might we say that the "crimes" of Socrates and Finley were similar after all, in the minds of their persecutors: they were too independent-minded and too critical of their society for the good of society?

I.F. Stone's Trial of Socrates offers a fascinating perspective on Socrates that is relevant to these connections to Finley; and in fact, Stone suggested to Finley that he should write a memoir of his experience (Tompkins (link) p. 5). In Trial of Socrates he writes: "Was the condemnation of Socrates a unique case? Or was he only the most famous victim in a wave of persecutions aimed at irreligious philosophers? ... Two distinguished scholars ... have put forward the view that fifth-century Athens, though often called the Age of the Greek Enlightenment, was also ... the scene of a general witch-hunt against freethinkers." The same words could apply to MI Finley and the dozens of other faculty members who lost their careers to McCarthyism, and to the regrettable failure of liberal democracy in those decades of ideological warfare against critics of capitalism.

Marxism and British historiography

It is noteworthy that some of the very best historical research and writing of the 1930s through 1970s in Britain was carried out by a group of Marxist historians, including E.P. Thompson, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and a few others. Many belonged to the British Communist Party and were committed to the idea that only sweeping revolution of economy and politics could bring to an end the exploitation and misery of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism. These historians did not align with the democratic socialists of the Fabian and Labour varieties (link), and the chief demarcation line had to do with the feasibility of gradual reform of advanced market economies. These were gifted and rigorous historians with a particular set of ideological commitments (link).

All of these historians researched some aspect or other of the history of "capitalism", an effort that required dispassionate and objective inquiry and assessment of the facts. Equally, all of them embraced a view of capitalism and a stylized history of capitalism that derived from Marx's writings -- especially Capital and the scattered writings defining the theory of historical materialism. Third, all of them had an ideological apple to peel (as a Dutch friend of mine used to say): they took the view that exploitation and misery were so intimately bound up in the defining institutions of capitalism that only wholesale revolution could root them out. And finally, most of them were politically committed to a party and a movement -- the Communist Party -- which itself made harsh demands on the thinking and writing of its adherents. The "party line" was not merely a form of discipline, it was an expression of loyalty to the cause of communism. And since Soviet communism dominated throughout the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, the party line was almost always "Stalinist" in the most dogmatic sense of the term. So the difficult question arises: how is it possible to reconcile a commitment to "honest history" with a commitment to Marxism and revolution?

Harvey Kaye's British Marxist Historians provides a detailed treatment of many of these historians, including Dobb, Hilton, Hill, Thompson, and Hobsbawm. Kaye fully recognizes the dual nature of the thinking of these historians: "I consider their work to be of scholarly and political consequence" (x). Kaye evidently believes that the scholarly and political commitments of these historians are in no way in conflict. But this is an assumption that must be examined carefully.

Kaye's book can be read as an effort to establish a careful geography of Marxist theoretical ideas about the development of capitalism and how those ideas were both used and transformed in the hands of these historians. His account of Dobb offers a detailed account of Dobb's view of a "non-economistic" historical treatment of capitalism, and he expends a great deal of effort towards identifying the key criticisms offered of Dobb's views by Paul Sweezy, Rodney Hilton, Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, and others. The chapter can be read as a meticulous dissection of the definition of key ideas ("mode of production", "relations of production", "feudalism", "class conflict", ...) and the theoretical use that these various Marx-inspired historians make of these ideas to explicate "capitalist development" and the notion of "transition from feudalism" in its various historical settings. Most compelling is Kaye's treatment of E.P. Thompson's historical and theoretical writings. He makes it clear that Thompson provides a highly original contribution to the idea of "class determination" through his insistence on the dynamic nature of the formation of consciousness and experience in the men and women of the British laboring classes.

Kaye makes clear in his treatment of each of these historians that their research never took the form of a dogmatic spelling-out of ideas presented in Marx's writings, but rather a much more rigorous effort to make sense of the historical record of feudalism, the English Revolution, the early development of capitalist property relations, and the like. These were not Comintern hacks; they did not treat Marxism as a more-or-less complete theory of history, but rather as a set of promising insights and suggestions about historical processes that demand detailed investigation and analysis. And none of the books of these historians that Kaye discusses can be described as "orthodox Comintern interpretations" of historical circumstances. Kaye quotes Christopher Hill (102): "A great deal of Marxist discussion went on in Oxford in the early thirties. Marxism seemed to me (and many others) to make better sense of the world situation than anything else, just as it seemed to make better sense of seventeenth-century English history." And later in this chapter he quotes Hobsbawm (129): "An advantage of our Marxism -- we owe it largely to Hill ... was never to reduce history to a simple economic or 'class interest' determinism, or to devalue politics and ideology." These comments seem to point the way to partial resolution of the apparent conflict between political commitments and historical integrity: Marx's writings about capitalism, class, and historical materialism constitute something like a research programme or analytical framework for these historians, without eliminating the need for historical rigor and objectivity in searching out evidence concerning the details of historical development (in England, in France, or in Japan). 

If we wanted to assess the possible distortions of historical selection and analysis created by party commitments with regard to historical writing and inference, one natural place to look would be at the selection of topics for research. Are there topics in British history that are especially relevant to the ideological concerns of the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s, and did the British Marxist historians stay away from those topics? Kaye remarks on Hobsbawm's own assessment of the role the party line played in defining issues and positions for the British Marxist historians: very little, according to Hobsbawm (15). He quotes Hobsbawm: "There was no 'party line' on most of British history,' at least as far as they were aware at the time." So we can reasonably ask: when these historians treat "politically sensitive" topics, do the analyses they offer seem to reflect ideological distortions? 

Kaye notes that one topic that should be of interest to Marxist historians is the history of the labor movement in Britain. "The 'modern' historians of the Group were naturally most anxious to pursue and make known the history of the British labour movement and, no doubt, were encouraged in their efforts by the British Communist Party. And yet this was the one field in which constraint was felt in relation to the Party. As Hobsbawm has stated on a number of occasions, there were problems in pursuing twentieth-century labour history because it necessarily involved critical consideration of the Party's own activities" (12). Kaye also quotes from an interview Hobsbawm offered in 1978:

[Hobsbawm] acknowledges that he took up nineteenth-century history because when "I became a labour historian you couldn't really be an orthodox Communist and write publicly about, say, the period when the Communist Party was active because there was an orthodox belief that everything had changed in 1920 with the foundation of the C. P. Well I didn't believe it had, but it would have been impolite, as well as probably unwise, to say so in public". (134)

This passage makes it clear that Hobsbawm avoided twentieth-century British labor history precisely because the party line was in conflict with the historical realities as Hobsbawm saw them. So Hobsbawm refrained from writing about this period.

So a preliminary assessment is perhaps possible. When these Marxist historians went to work on a given historical topic, they exercised rigor and care in their assessments of the past; they enacted fidelity to the standards of honesty we would wish that historians universally embrace. And indeed, the historical work done by these historians does indeed conform to high standards of honesty and independence of mind -- even as the research focus on "capitalism" is framed in terms of Marxist concepts. But the example of Hobsbawm's statements about twentieth-century labor history imply that certain topics were taboo, precisely because independence of analysis would run counter to the party line. (Kaye also suggests that Hobsbawm's continuing adherence to the 'base-superstructure' model derived from his deference to the orthodox Party line on the nature of the mode of production; 135.)

But we can also ask an even more fundamental question: did the historians of this group take any public notice of the crimes of Stalinist USSR -- the Holodomor, the terror, the show trials, the Gulag? Or was explicit condemnation of systemic actions like the Holodomor or the Gulag too much of a repudiation of the Communist Party for these historians to accept? Should they have made public mention and condemnation of these occurrences? Does their silence cast doubt on their honesty as historians? To this question Kaye's book provides no clear basis for an answer.

It is intriguing to ask about Harvey Kaye's own ideological orientation. He makes it clear in the Preface that his book is a sympathetic treatment of the circle of British Marxist historians, and in fact he acknowledges feedback and comments from several of these authors. His later book, The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History, is likewise committed to defending the insights offered by Western Marxist historians. So his is something of an insider's account of the Historians' Group. We can ask, then, whether Kaye's own sympathies have colored his assessment of the objectivity and rigor of the historians in this group. Does he bring the necessary critical edge that we would expect from an historiographic assessment of a group of historians? (I should confess too that the historians that Kaye studies are also among my list of favorites as well. I would add Marc Bloch and a few others from French and German history, but the broad framework of historical narrative and analysis developed by Dobb, Hilton, Thompson, and Hobsbawm is one that has been powerful for me as well.) 

My own assessment is that Kaye's sympathies do not distort his interpretations of these historians. Rather, he offers a careful, reflective, and knowledgeable analysis of the development of their historical ideas and the relations that emerged among them, and he documents the willingness of these historians to avoid the dogmas of CP-driven "party lines" about history. For example, Kaye's critique of Hobsbawm's continuing use of the base-superstructure model illustrates Kaye's willingness to apply a critical eye to these historians (154 ff.). Only obliquely does he address the hardest question, however: did these historians speak out about the atrocities and crimes of Stalinism? Many of these figures (not including Hobsbawm or Dobb) rejected Stalinism through their decision to leave the British Communist Party after the Soviet brutal use of force against Hungary in 1956. But this is still less than forthright recognition of the horrendous crimes of the Soviet dictatorship throughout the 1930s and 1940s, extending through the death of Stalin and beyond.

The penultimate paragraph of the book appears to encapsulate Kaye's own perspective as well as the collective view he attributes to the group of Marxist historians he considers:

In other words, they [British Marxist historians] have accepted that the making of a truly democratic socialism -- or libertarian communism, requires more than 'necessity' -- the determined struggle against exploitation and oppression -- and more than organization. It also requires the desire to create an alternative social order. And yet, even that is not enough. There must be a 'prior education of desire' for, as William Morris has warned: 'If the present state of society merely breaks up without a conscious effort at transformation, the end, the fall of Europe, may be long in coming, but when it does, it will be far more terrible, far more confused and full of suffering than the period of the fall of Rome.'

And this passage perhaps expresses an appealing resolution as well to the question of how to reconcile political commitment with historical objectivity.

(Ronald Grigor Suny has written quite a bit of interesting material on the falsifications offered by "Stalinist history". A few snapshots of his views can be found here: "Stalin, Falsifier in Chief: E. H. Carr and the Perils of Historical Research Introduction" and "The Left Side of History: The Embattled Pasts of Communism in the Twentieth Century".)

A new course on the terrible twentieth century

I've spent the last several weeks designing a new honors course for juniors on the catastrophes of the twentieth century. It's not a "history" course, and it's not a philosophy course. Instead, I conceive of it as a learning experience for our honors students aimed at deepening one's capacity for coming to understand the past as human reality. It is practice for taking historical knowledge seriously, and how to do so. I've tried to pick out readings that both illustrate the human intensity of the catastrophes and the individual experiences of several especially evocative contemporary observers. Here is the course description:

The course takes on the largest challenges of the twentieth century – war, genocide, racism, socialism, dictatorship, and fascism. It considers the catastrophes that states and dictators have created for millions of human beings, and it looks as well at some of the ways in which human beings can strive for freedom and equality in the modern world. Many of the readings are chosen in order to find a single person’s human voice on these enormous catastrophes.

There are a handful of permeating issues that are woven through the topics and readings: the harsh inequalities of life created by the capitalisms of the 1930s; the recurring racisms that occur in the American South, Nazi Germany, and Hindu-Muslim hatreds in India; the powerful creations of fascist dictatorship that arose in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Soviet Union. And there is an overriding philosophical question throughout the course as well: is it possible to create a working social democracy that ensures the freedoms and equality of all members of society?

These are general historical questions. But the course aims to help students to gain an experiential understanding of the practical human circumstances represented by these moments of suffering and catastrophe that occurred from Wigan to West Bengal, from Babi Yar to Kursk, and from Alabama to Oklahoma. George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier offers an honest and specific account of the lives of coal miners and their families. Arthur Koestler's Invisible Writing expresses Koestler's particular experiences of Communism, Stalinism, the Holodomor, and the Gulag. Vasily Grossman's writings about Treblinka and "Ukraine without Jews" passionately express this honest journalist's observations and compassion in reaction to the murder of the Jews of Berdichev (his home city and the place his mother was murdered by the Nazis) and throughout Poland and Ukraine. Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem Babi Yar expresses vividly the horror of the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Kiev -- and the silence of the USSR about this atrocity. The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror offers students a contemporary description of the murderous violence of the Nazi dictatorship -- and a case study in propaganda and the Big Lie. Varlam Shalamov's short stories about the Gulag in Kolyma Tales are personal and gripping. Tom Joad, the protagonist of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, speaks for many of the powerless men and women destroyed by the Great Depression, and the photography of Dorothea Lange and other Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers help to make these testimonies vivid for students. The poetry of Langston Hughes and a narrative of the Scottsboro case give students a direct exposure to the violence of the Jim Crow regime. And V.K. Ramachandran's extensive interviews with an Indian landless worker trapped in debt bondage (link) will give students a much deeper understanding of oppression, domination, and exploitation in India. In each case my goal is to help students connect to these historical human experiences in ways that give them a more intense sense of engagement with these human realities.

I find it intriguing that many of the texts I've chosen are far from "canonical" -- in fact, most of them have probably had almost no readers in decades. Who has read Koestler's autobiography, The Invisible Writing? And yet Koestler offers a powerful and engaging first-person account of many of the most terrible events of the century. It is sobering that such expressive and truthful voices from the relatively recent past can disappear so quickly from popular imagination. Even the Road to Wigan Pier, though not forgotten entirely, is rarely read or discussed when the question of a just social system is considered.

Whenever I create a new course I find that I learn new and unexpected things. In this case I learned about the 1933 book, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag. The Reichstag fire was the stimulus to Hitler's seizure of dictatorial powers and the beginning of his rule by massive violence. But there is a mystery: who was responsible for this arson? Koestler refers to the Brown Book in Invisible Writing, and I thought it might be a useful contemporary assessment of the Hitler dictatorship. According the the title page of the book, it was "prepared by the world committee for the victims of German fascism with an introduction by Lord Marley". The book gained wide exposure internationally, and it offered as fact a conspiracy theory of the arson: that the arsonist Arinus van der Lubbe had acted on the instructions of Nazi officials (Göring and Goebels) for the purpose of providing an incident justifying Hitler's seizure of extra-constitutional power. The Nazi theory of the arson was equally conspiratorial; the Nazis claimed that van der Lubbe was a Communist agent working at the orders of higher-level Communist officials. But the facts turn out to be quite different. The Brown Book was not the product of "neutral anti-fascist activists", but rather the work of the propaganda office of the Communist International. And there was no supporting evidence whatsoever for either the Brown Book claim or the official Nazi story about the conspiracy. Both narratives, it now seems certain, were pure propaganda, and van der Lubbe acted alone. There was no conspiracy.

Here is the summary offered by Anson Rabinbach in "Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror" (link):

The campaign around the Brown Book and the trial of Georgi Dimitrov and the other defendants in Leipzig from September to December 1933 was so skillfully managed that it persuaded many observers outside Germany as well as reputable historians until the 1960s that the fire was the work of a Nazi conspiracy. (97)

The book and the campaign that accompanied it was the creation of Willi Münzenberg, the renowned international communist impresario and Reichstag deputy who earned the title "Red Hugenberg" for his organizational empire, which included the International Workers Aid (IAH), numerous dailies and weeklies, journals, and the highly successful illustrated weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), with a circulation of nearly half a million. (100)

And, it emerges, Arthur Koestler himself had a minor role in the Comintern propaganda machine. Here are comments from Invisible Writing:

I ARRIVED in Paris in the middle of the Reichstag Fire Trial, which was holding Europe spellbound. The day after my arrival I met for the first time Willy Muenzenberg, Western Propaganda Chief of the Comintern. The same day I started work at his headquarters, and thus became a minor participant in the great propaganda battle between Berlin and Moscow. It ended with a complete defeat for the Nazis—the only defeat which we inflicted on them during the seven years before the war. (237)

The 'we' in this context refers to the Comintern's propaganda headquarters in Paris, camouflaged as the 'World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism.' I arrived in Paris, as I have said, in the middle of the battle, and my part in it was a subordinate one. I had to follow the repercussions of the trial, and of our propagands, in the British Press and in the House of Commons, to study currents of British public opinion, and draw the appropriate tactical conclusions. For a while I also edited the daily bulletins which we distributed to the French and British press. (242)

And so the homeric battle of blind-man's-buff between the two giants ended. It had taught me that in the field of propaganda the half-truth was a weapon superior to the truth, and that to be on the defensive is to be defeated. It taught me above all that in this field a democracy must always be at a disadvantage against a totalitarian opponent. My years with Muenzenberg have made me sceptical regarding the West's chances of waging 'psychological warfare' against opponents like Hitler and Stalin. For to wage effective psychological war the West would have to abandon precisely those principles and values in the name of which it fights. (249)

This is an important topic for students to consider when they think about the twentieth century: how can we sort out the lies from the truths and half-truths about important historical realities? Spin, conspiracy theories, concealment, and obfuscation are strategies of falsification of history that are all too familiar -- whether in the political journalism of the 1930s, the French De Gaulle government's narrative of the fate of French Jews during the occupation, or the pervasive lies that shape public opinion on social media today. (Once, while visiting a university in Asturias, Spain, I overheard a passionate disagreement between the provost and the head librarian over whose troops had attacked the university during the Civil War -- Franco's troops or anarchist miners. Each person had family stories and memories, and their accounts were diametrically opposed.) How can ordinary citizens cultivate their capacity for critical reading and thinking that will help them sort out the truth about issues they care about?

This is one reason that I have such admiration for Marc Bloch and his Historian's Craft (link). Bloch embodies what are for me the central moral commitments of the historian: fidelity to the facts as he or she has uncovered them, and a willingness to allow the historical evidence to be the final arbiter for historical belief. This is not to doubt that there are problems for debate about the interpretation and validation of historical data; but the historian should not put a thumb on the scale to support his or her own preferred ideology.

Eric Hobsbawm's history of the Historians' Group

photo: Hobsbawm at work

The British historian Eric Hobsbawm was a leading member of the British Communist Party-affiliated Historians' Group. This was a group of leading British historians who were members of the British Communist Party in the 1940s. In 1978 Hobsbawm wrote a historical memoir of the group recalling the important post-war decade of 1946-1956, and Verso Press has now republished the essay online (link). The essay is worth reading attentively, since some of the most insightful British historians of the generation were represented in this group.

The primary interest of Hobsbawm's memoir, for me anyway, is the deep paradox it seems to reveal. The Communist Party was not well known for its toleration of independent thinking and criticism. Political officials in the USSR, in Comintern, and in the European national Communist parties were committed to maintaining the party line on ideology and history. The Historians' Group and its members were directly affiliated with the CPGB. And yet some of Britain's most important social historians were members of the Historians' Group. Especially notable were Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Maurice Dobb, Raphael Samuel, Rodney Hilton, Max Morris, J. B. Jefferys, and Edmund Dell. (A number of these historians broke with the CPGB after 1956.) Almost all of these individuals are serious and respected historians in the first rank of twentieth-century social history, including especially Hobsbawm, Hill, E.P. Thompson, Dobb, and Hilton. So the question arises: to what extent did the dogmatism and party discipline associated with the Communist Party since its origins influence or constrain the historical research of these historians? How could the conduct of independent, truthful history survive in the context of a "party line" maintained with rigorous discipline by party hacks? How, if at all, did British Marxist historians escape the fate of Lysenko? 

The paradox is clearly visible in Hobsbawm's memoir. Hobsbawm is insistent that the CP members of the Historians' Group were loyal and committed communists: "We were as loyal, active and committed a group of Communists as any, if only because we felt that Marxism implied membership of the Party." And yet he is equally insistent that he and his colleagues maintained their independence and commitment to truthful historical inquiry when it came to their professional work:

Second, there was no 'party line' on most of British history, and what there was in the USSR was largely unknown to us, except for the complex discussions on 'merchant capital' which accompanied the criticism of M. N. Pokrovsky there. Thus we were hardly aware that the 'Asiatic Mode of Production' had been actively discouraged in the USSR since the early 1930s, though we noted its absence from Stalin's Short History. Such accepted interpretations as existed came mainly from ourselves— Hill's 1940 essay, Dobb's Studies, etc.—and were therefore much more open to free debate than if they had carried the by-line of Stalin or Zhdanov....

This is not to imply that these historians pursued their research in a fundamentally disinterested or politically neutral way. Rather, they shared a broad commitment to a progressive and labor-oriented perspective on British history. And these were the commitments of a (lower-case) marxist interpretation of social history that was not subordinate to the ideological dictates of the CP:

Third, the major task we and the Party set ourselves was to criticise non-Marxist history and its reactionary implications, where possible contrasting it with older, politically more radical interpretations. This widened rather than narrowed our horizons. Both we and the Party saw ourselves not as a sect of true believers, holding up the light amid the surrounding darkness, but ideally as leaders of a broad progressive movement such as we had experienced in the 1930s.... Therefore, communist historians—in this instance deliberately not acting as a Party group—consistently attempted to build bridges between Marxists and non-Marxists with whom they shared some common interests and sympathies. 

So Hobsbawm believed that it was indeed possible to be both Communist as well as independent-minded and original. He writes of Dobb's research: "Dobb's Studies which gave us our framework, were novel precisely because they did not just restate or reconstruct the views of 'the Marxist classics', but because they embodied the findings of post-Marx economic history in a Marxist analysis." And: "A third advantage of our Marxism—we owe it largely to Hill and to the very marked interest of several of our members, not least A. L. Morton himself, in literature—was never to reduce history to a simple economic or 'class interest' determinism, or to devalue politics and ideology." These points are offered to support the idea that the historical research of the historians of this group was not dogmatic or Party-dictated. And Hobsbawm suggests that this underlying independence of mind led to a willingness to sharply criticize the Party and its leaders after the debacle of 1956 in Hungary. 

But pointed questions are called for. How did historians in this group react to credible reports of a deliberate Stalinist campaign of starvation during collectivization in Ukraine in 1932-33, the Holodomor? Malcolm Muggeridge, a left journalist with a wide reputation, had reported on this atrocity in the Guardian in 1933 (link). And what about Stalin's Terror in 1936-1938, resulting in mass executions, torture, and the Gulag for "traitors and enemies of the state"? How did these British historians react to these reports? And what about the 1937 show trials and executions of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov, along with hundreds of thousands of other innocent persons? These facts too were available to interested readers outside the USSR; the Moscow trials are the subject of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, published in 1941. Did the historians of the Historians' Group simply close their eyes to these travesties? And where does historical integrity go when one closes his eyes? 

Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and many ex-communist intellectuals have expressed the impossible contradictions contained in the idea of "a committed Communist pursuing an independent and truth-committed inquiry" (link, link, link). One commitment or the other must yield. And eventually E. P. Thompson came to recognize the same point; in 1956 he wrote a denunciation of the leadership of the British Communist Party (link), and he left the Communist Party in the same year following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. 

Hobsbawm's own career shows that Hobsbawm himself did not confront honestly the horrific realities of Stalinist Communism, or the dictatorships of the satellite countries. David Herman raises the question of Hobsbawm's reactions to events like those mentioned here in his review of Richard Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History and Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (link). The picture Herman paints is appalling. Here is a summary assessment directly relevant to my interest here:

However, the notable areas of silence -- about Jewishness and the crimes of Communism especially -- are, ultimately, devastating. Can you trust a history of modern Europe which is seriously misleading about the French and Russian Revolutions, which barely touches on the Gulag, the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution, which has so little to say about women and peasants, religion and nationalism, America and Africa?

And what, finally, can we say about Hobsbawm's view of Soviet Communism? In a review called "The piety and provincialism of Eric Hobsbawm", the political philosopher, John Gray, wrote that Hobsbawm's writings on the 20th century are "highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism." Tony Judt wrote that, "Hobsbawm is the most naturally gifted historian of our time; but rested and untroubled, he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age." Thanks to Richard Evans's labours it is hard to dispute these judgments. (199-200)

Surely these silences are the mark of an apologist for the crimes of Stalinism -- including, as Herman mentions, the crimes of deadly anti-semitism in the workers' paradise. Contrary to Hobsbawm, there was indeed a party line on the most fundamental issues: the Party's behavior was to be defended at all costs and at all times. The Terror, the Gulag, the Doctors' Plot -- all were to be ignored.

Koestler's protagonist Rubashov in Darkness at Noon reflects on the reasons why the old Bolsheviks would have made the absurd confessions they offered during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s:

The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats -- and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience.  They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves.  There was no way back for them.  Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game.  The public expected no swan-songs of them.  They had to act according to the text-book, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night....

This is the subordination of self to party that was demanded by the Communist Party; and it is still hard to see how a committed member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s could escape the logic of his or her commitment. Personal integrity as an intellectual was not part of the bargain. So the puzzle remains: how could a Hobsbawm or Thompson profess both intellectual independence and commitment to the truth in the histories they write, while also accepting a commitment to do whatever is judged necessary by Party officials to further the cause of the Revolution?

Regrettably, there is a clear history in the twentieth century of intellectuals choosing political ideology over intellectual honesty. Recall Sartre's explanation of his silence about the Gulag and the Soviet Communist Party, quoted in Anne Applebaum's Gulag: 

“As we were not members of the Party,” he once wrote, “it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrels over the nature of the system, provided no events of sociological significance occurred.” On another occasion, he told Albert Camus that “Like you, I find these camps intolerable, but I find equally intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press.” (18)

So much better is the independence of mind demonstrated by an Orwell, a Koestler, a Camus, or a Muggeridge in their willingness to recognize clearly the atrocious realities of Stalinism.

(Here is an earlier post on the journal created by the Historians' Group, Past & Present; link. And here are several earlier posts about post-war Marxist historians; link, link, link.) 

João Ohara's new synthesis of the philosophy of history

What is the subject matter of the philosophy of history? This is an extremely difficult question to answer given the wide range of topics, methods, and philosophical perspectives that have been included under the umbrella since 1750. It is therefore a welcome development to read João Ohara's very interesting and illuminating discussion of this topic in his recently released Cambridge Element, The Theory and Philosophy of History: Global Variations. As Ohara puts his aim in the book in the opening section, "this Element is dedicated to ... arguing for a broad and inclusive understanding of the theory and philosophy of history" (1).

Ohara's approach is an appealing one. He draws a number of clear distinctions between "philosophy of history", "theory of history", and "philosophy of historiography", but he resists the idea that it should be possible to give a clear, exact, and sharply delineated definition of the discipline of the "philosophy of history". Instead, he argues for an open-ended set of intellectual questions and approaches that all concern "history" but derive from substantially different intellectual orientations. And in aid of this approach, Ohara's deep knowledge of the many literatures that have contributed to philosophical statements about knowledge of the past gives his analysis great credibility.

Ohara brings a specialist's knowledge to the work of tracing out the various groups of thinkers who have reflected on "philosophy of history", "philosophy of historiography", and "theory of history". He identifies clear exemplars of each phrase, and shows that they involve rather different assumptions about the nature of the task of "reflection upon our knowledge about the past". For example, he points out that Leyden and Gardiner use the latter two phrases interchangeably; whereas in his view, they need to be separated; 16. And he prefers Herman Paul's definition in Key Issues in Historical Theory of historical theory: “conceptual analysis of how human beings relate to the past”. Ohara's careful and specific delineation of different conceptions of these sometimes interchangeable concepts is a highly valuable contribution to the practice of "philosophical reflections on historical knowledge".

Ohara gives particular attention to the theory of "narrativism" associated with Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit (6 ff.). Here the crucial questions surround the issue of historical truth and objectivity. Does narrativism force the reader to adopt the view that there are alternative and apparently incompatible narratives about the same major events in history, and there is no rational basis for judging that one account is more true, or better supported by the available evidence, than another? Here Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen's "post-narrativism" (Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography) provides a relevant basis for recasting and defending the ideas of "approximate truth" of various historical accounts.

Another valuable dimension of Ohara's treatment is his global approach to the question of the nature of "history". He is equally comfortable with Continental, Anglo-American, and Latin American and South Asian contributions and insights into how we create and understand "history". He emphasizes the historical fact of colonialism as a crucial dimension of non-European thinking about "history" and historical events. Ohara takes up this theme in detail in section 3, "Theory and philosophy of history beyond 'The West'." One part of the difficulty for intellectuals in colonized societies, or post-colonial societies, is the fact that much of the conceptual space concerning "history" has been filled by the very traditions and nations that exercised colonial dominion over their own countries. This is the issue of Eurocentric historical thinking (much along the lines contested by Bin Wong when it comes to China's history (link)). And Ohara believes that important new insights can be gained by reading seriously the writings of non-European thinkers on the topic of history. Referring to Spivak, Mbembe, Chakrabarty, and Seth, he writes: "All these authors raise questions that are fundamental to our philosophical and theoretical understanding of history, from the metaphysics of historical experience to the epistemology of historiography" (22). Ohara's treatment makes it clear that there is much to be learned from the different perspectives found in diverse world traditions of thought about "history". A concrete example has to do with the perspectives taken by philosophers on colonialism and liberation in South Asia or Latin America:

As introduced in Argentina in the 1970s, the philosophy of liberation sought to overcome the “model and deviation” framework by exposing the Eurocentric foundations of modern Western thought. For one of its proponents, Enrique Dussel, Western philosophy’s claim to universalism was inseparable from Western colonialism and imperialism: “Modern European philosophers ponder the reality that confronts them; they interpret the periphery from the center. But the colonial philosophers of the periphery gaze at a vision foreign to them, one that is not their own. From the center they see themselves as nonbeing, nothingness”. (Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation)

In the end Ohara favors an inclusive conception of the philosophy and theory of history, serving as an umbrella for philosophical consideration of a number of different kinds of issues raised by the tasks associated with gaining knowledge about the past. He quotes Herman Paul once again with approval, from Paul's 2021 contribution to Kuukkanen's Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives:

Paul has proposed that we think of a “hermeneutic space” where historians and philosophers of history can engage each other’s ideas in an open-ended conversation, a space he called the History and Philosophy of History (HPH). As the “hermeneutic” adjective suggests, this space does away with the need for previously agreed concepts, approaches, or questions, or a well-defined research agenda. Instead, “the only demand that this space makes upon participants is that they are, and remain, committed to dialogical virtues (curiosity, generosity, empathy, open-mindedness) without which no productive exchange can take place”. (40-41)

This open-ended approach raises the question, how do working historians contribute to the philosophy and theory of history? Ohara refers to Aviezer Tucker's view that philosophers of history should observe the actual intellectual work of historians, but should pay little attention to the historian's comments about the nature of that work, on the ground that historians are not often well equipped to provide compelling theories of the historical enterprise (12). But Ohara's approach suggests that this draws too sharp a line between "doing history" and "theorizing history". And in fact, there seems to be a wide variation in the interest that historians have in "theorizing" history. E.P. Thompson, for example, is an outstanding social historian; but it is hard to think of anything he wrote that could be regarded as a serious, thoughtful contribution to the question, "how historians reason" (link). On the other hand, Robert Darnton -- likewise an outstanding social and cultural historian -- had a great deal of substance to say about the nature of historical research and reasoning (link). So the jury is out -- but that implies that philosophers of history should at least seriously consider the reflective writings of historians about their discipline.

Theory and Philosophy of History: Global Variations is a valuable and instructive contribution for anyone interested in understanding how philosophy intersects with historical knowledge. Ohara makes the case for an inclusive and open-ended definition of the field, inviting new questions and new approaches. His preferred specification of the scope of philosophical questions about historical knowledge is "theory and philosophy of history" (41). This pluralistic approach welcomes perspectives coming from the many strands of thought in western philosophy of history; but it also emphasizes the fundamental importance of opening the discipline to the perspectives of scholars and intellectuals from other global cultures. Ohara demonstrates what is all too often overlooked: that research and theory in the human sciences proceeds on the basis of different mental frameworks in different world traditions. The Eurocentrism that characterizes much discourse in social and historical research is best undone by taking seriously the intellectual traditions and discoveries of other global intellectual networks. Ohara has helped us do that in the field of the philosophy of history.

(Here are several earlier posts on global history; link, link.)

A culturally conservative streak in Tony Judt

Tony Judt was a remarkable historian of the twentieth century and a sparkling public intellectual. In most dimensions he was a progressive force within the space of commentators on recent history and contemporary politics. However, in a number of instances he was a bit tone-deaf in his version of American progressive values. This tendency is most evident in Ill Fares the Land (2010). 

Most evidently, he seems excessively bothered by "identity politics" in US universities. He tends to portray the generation of young people in the 1980s as solipsistic, self-interested, and trivial.

The narcissism of student movements, new Left ideologues and the popular culture of the ’60s generation invited a conservative backlash. (94)

When I began university teaching, in 1971, students spoke obsessively of socialism, revolution, class conflict and the like—usually with reference to what was then called ‘the third world’: nearer to home, these matters appeared largely resolved. Over the course of the next two decades, the conversation retreated to more self-referential concerns: feminism, gay rights and identity politics. Among the more politically sophisticated, there emerged an interest in human rights and the resurgent language of ‘civil society’. For a brief moment around 1989, young people in western universities were drawn to liberation efforts not only in eastern Europe and China but also in Latin America and South Africa: liberty— from enslavement, coercion, repression and atrocity—was the great theme of the day. (235)

Students frequently tell me that they only know and care about a highly specialized subset of news items and public events. Some may read of environmental catastrophes and climate change. Others are taken up by national political debates but quite ignorant of foreign developments. In the past, thanks to the newspaper they browsed or the television reports they took in over dinner, they would at least have been ‘exposed’ to other matters. Today, such extraneous concerns are kept at bay. (120)

The new Left, as it began to call itself in those years, was something very different. To a younger generation, ‘change’ was not to be brought about by disciplined mass action defined and led by authorized spokesmen. Change itself appeared to have moved on from the industrial West into the developing or ‘third’ world. Communism and capitalism alike were charged with stagnation and ‘repression’. The initiative for radical innovation and action now lay either with distant peasants or else with a new set of revolutionary constituents. In place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of ‘blacks’, ‘students’, ‘women’ and, a little later, homosexuals. (86)

In these passages and other similar ones, he sounds a bit curmudgeonly, as though the struggles against racism, patriarchy, sexism, and gender discrimination were trivial. But they are not, and curiously enough, Judt sometimes inadvertently illustrates this fact through his own comments about women in other writings. (His excuses in Reappraisals for the sexual predations of Arthur Koestler are far too forgiving.)

Moreover, Judt's offhand remarks about the egoism and materialism of the current generation of young people in the United States (people in their 20s in 2010) are unfair to the generation. Having met many students at public universities and in public service programs like City Year and AmeriCorps, I know first hand that a great many of these young people are moved by "practical idealism" and engagement in community service and partnership. These are not self-interested "wolflings of Wall Street" just looking out for the gold ring; many young men and women in this generation are deeply interested in changing the world and making a better future.

Also of interest is Judt's complete silence on populist authoritarianism. This was a social development that he simply could not anticipate. He assumes that liberal democracy has prevailed (as of 2010), and the remaining disputes have to do with the scope of the state, the level of economic intervention that is justified for state agencies, and the characteristics required in an adequate "social-democratic" state ensuring a decent level of wellbeing for all citizens. In a sense, he suggests that there is no powerful agenda left for the left.

Social democracy, in one form or another, is the prose of contemporary European politics. There are very few European politicians, and fewer still in positions of influence, who would dissent from core social democratic assumptions about the duties of the state, however much they might differ as to their scope. Consequently, social democrats in today’s Europe have nothing distinctive to offer: in France, for example, even their disposition to favor state ownership hardly distinguishes them from the Colbertian instincts of the Gaullist right. The problem today lies not in social democratic policies, but in their exhausted language. Since the authoritarian challenge from the left has lapsed, the emphasis upon “democracy” is largely redundant. We are all democrats today. (143)

But Judt missed completely the emergence of a virulent, powerful, and politically persuasive conservative populist reaction, founded on racism, anti-immigrant hatred, and misogyny. The Front National is not mentioned once in the book, nor are its near-fascist leaders. Even the term "racism" appears only once in the book. Western democracies suffer from "dilapidated public conversation" -- and yet here we are, just over a decade later, involved in a life-and-death struggle for the survival of liberal democracy with the forces of reaction -- the Orbans of Europe, Asia, and the United States.

I suppose all this shows is that no historian or social commentator, can see through the crystal ball with precision. But some of Judt's assumptions seem to have led him to be especially unreceptive to the signs of racism, authoritarianism, and populist extremism that were already present in the world in 2010. In this respect his friend and colleague Timothy Snyder has proven to be a more insightful commentator on the current moment.

Errata

Judt describes the land grant colleges and specifically mentions the University of California, the University of Indiana, and the University of Michigan. The University of Michigan was not a land grant university -- it was established decades before the land grant program (the Morrill Act) was envisioned in 1863. There is no "University of Indiana", but rather "Indiana University". Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, was the only land grant university in the state of Michigan, and it continues to carry out the mission of public service envisioned by the Morrill Act. 

River warfare in the US Civil War

The mental images that most Americans have of the American Civil War involve the scenes of major land battles -- Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg. Armies marched dozens of miles, prepared encampments and defensive works, and either attacked the enemy in its own prepared defenses or awaited contact with the enemy. The picture is Napoleonic: an army marching across terrain to fight other slow-moving armies.

It is therefore highly interesting to realize that naval warfare on rivers -- especially the Mississippi River -- played a key role in the success of Union forces in 1862-1865, and that armored steamships were critical to victory. To an extent that is now hard to imagine, with modern transportation networks including dense highway networks, as well as air and rail systems, how important control and navigation of the Mississippi River was to both Union and Confederate war fighting. General Ulysses S. Grant's strategy for bringing the war to the South was dependent on the objective of gaining control of the Mississippi River; and the river was a key component in the movements of troops, supplies, and field headquarters around the contested territories.

maps: Feis, Grant's Secret Service, p. 12

The reason for this importance of control of the Mississippi has to do with speed of deployment and logistics. (There was also a major economic consideration: if the South could close the Mississippi, it would cause great hardship for the Northern population.) But consider the logistics and speed issues. The speed of advance of an army on the march through water-logged terrain with poor roads -- conditions that obtained during much of Grant's campaign in the west -- was minuscule in comparison to a steamship moving unhindered several hundred miles along the river. As a rough estimate, it would take an army 21 days to march from Cairo, Illinois to Vicksburg, Mississippi, whereas it would take a steam-powered riverboat about three days to travel the same distance. And steamships could carry all the materiel required for the campaign. (Travel up-river the same distance would take longer.) Maintaining a supply line for the mountains of food, horse fodder, ammunition, replacement equipment, and evacuation of the wounded required by an army in the field depended on heavy transport -- by rail or river boat. Rail transport was substantially faster than riverboat transport -- the average rail speed unhindered by sabotage of tracks, etc. was 25 mph, compared to 5-7 mph for river transport. So rail transport was preferable. However, controlling and maintaining rail networks in hostile territory was extremely difficult, since local sympathizers could sabotage tracks and bridges in dozens of remote places. As a result, naval operations were a key part of the Union's war fighting in the west of the country. The Mississippi River represented the great north-south highway along which the war in the west was fought.

The strategic importance of strong fortifications with heavy guns at locations along the river permitting control of traffic was plain to all sides; so major battles developed involving attempts to seize fortified places like Vicksburg, Mississippi. Grant's persistent effort to besiege and occupy Vicksburg was a mark of his strength as a general, and the eventual success of his plans represented a turning point in the Civil War. But key to success at Vicksburg (and Fort Henry a year earlier) was the availability of a growing force of river warships, from lightly armed gunboats to ironclad and timber-clad steamships with heavy armaments capable of assaulting land-based fortifications. And almost none of this range of river craft existed before the onset of war. The use armored river steamboats of the Civil War thus represented a major technological shift in warfare -- perhaps as dramatic in 1861 as high-precision artillery has been in Ukraine in 2022.

The high end of these armored vessels were the City-class gunboats ("turtles"). These were ironclad vessels designed for service in rivers rather than open seas. They had shallow draft of six feet, were armed with thirteen guns, and could cruise at eight knots. Seven boats were delivered by January, 1862, and they played a significant role in major battles along the Mississippi River, including Vicksburg. These ships included the USS Baron DeKalb, Cairo, Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, and Pittsburgh.

Complementing these ironclads was a larger group of wooden vessels that also played a major role in river warfare during the Civil War. Angus Konstam's book Mississippi River Gunboats of the American Civil War 1861-65 provides a review of the rapid development of armored wooden gunboats as the war in the west heated up. These craft needed to be shallow-draft, and they needed to be maneuverable enough to manage the twisting courses of the midwestern rivers. They were steam-powered and relatively slow, but provided both heavy mobile armaments and heavy transport for the strategic thrusts of the army. They could be used to transport troops, and they therefore permitted rapid shifts in the location of land-based attacks.

A rapid effort at ship-building and conversion ensued by both Confederate and Union militaries after the outbreak of war, and within a year each side had a number of river-based warships. The earliest heavy gunboats in the Union arsenal were converted commercial vessels -- the Conestoga (572 tons), the Lexington (362 tons), and the Tyler (420 tons), launched in summer 1861 and shielded with thick timber. In addition to the heavy gunboats, the armies also needed a larger number of smaller river gunboats (150-250 tons) that could be used to patrol the river and serve as transport up and down the river (9). The flagship of the river navy, also converted from commercial use, was the USS Black Hawk (902 tons). (All these data are drawn from Konstam's table of ships operated by both sides.) These wooden river warships were immediately thrown into the struggle.

What emerged was a campaign involving the attack on these Confederate naval and riverside defenses by two fleets: One descending the river from Cairo, Illinois, and the other (after the fall of New Orleans in April 1862) working its way up from the Gulf of Mexico. After a brilliantly executed attack on Fort Henry and Fort Donelson [by forces commanded by Grant] on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, Union naval forces in the upper Mississippi faced a series of imposing fortifications. (Konstam, 5)

Fortifications and heavy guns at Vicksburg were the most significant of these Confederate capabilities on the Mississippi River, and it took great fortitude for army and naval forces to eventually take Vicksburg in July 1863. This represented a major turning point in the Civil War.

What is particularly interesting to me about this quick exposure to river warfare in the 1860s is the fact that there were several tempos of operations in the Civil War -- the movements of armies at 15-20 miles per day, the movements of troops, officers, and materiel by steamship at perhaps 100 miles per day and by rail when available at 400 miles per day, and the transmission of messages at Internet speed by telegraph. The faster pace of steamboat and rail warfare fundamentally changed the challenges and opportunities confronting the generals. It is plain, then, that the American Civil War was a high-tech war, with innovations and adaptations introduced into war fighting in real time. (Even the evolution of heavy weaponry and ammunition moved forward quickly during the five years of fighting.) Here again, the similarity to the Ukraine war is striking.

(Here is an interesting photo essay on the evolution of Civil War gunboats; link. And here is a National Parks historical video on the battle of Vicksburg; link.)

Philosophy after the Holocaust

The sustained, extended atrocities of the twentieth century -- the genocide of the Holocaust, the Holodomor, totalitarian repression, the Gulag, the Armenian genocide, the rape of Nanjing -- require new questions and new approaches to the problems of philosophy. What are some of those new questions and insights that philosophers should take up? How can philosophy change its focus in order to better recognize and address the evils of the twentieth century?

If philosophy matters at all, its importance derives from the honest efforts of philosophers over the past millennia to answer fundamental questions about the good of a human life and the nature of a good society. Philosophy is about values and the prospects for a peaceful, free future for all of humanity. Its most basic problems have to do with how we human beings create meaning and values for ourselves, and how we can create structures of social life that permit the unfolding of the freedoms and capabilities of each of us. The evils of the twentieth century demonstrated that there are dark alternatives that can be realized in history on the largest scale imaginable: mass killing, enslavement, dehumanization, degradation, and totalitarian subordination of whole peoples. How can philosophy address these terrible realities? How can philosophy contribute to humanity's ability to prevent those atrocious outcomes in the future?

First, philosophy must be engaged in the realities of human life and history. There is an urgent need for greater concreteness and historical specificity in philosophical discussions in ethics, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of history. Philosophy can become more genuinely insightful by becoming more concrete and historical. One way to achieve this specificity is to include study and reflection about the first-person documents deriving from participants’ experience. Philosophers are inclined to couch their ideas at a high level of generality. But understanding the evils of the Holocaust requires us to find ways of making even better use of these first-hand experiential sources, without the suspicion of “bias” that often hampered previous historical uses of them. Survivors’ testimonies and interviews, travelers’ reports, and other first-person statements of what happened to individual people must be treated with seriousness, compassion, and a critical eye. Piecing together a single incident on the basis of a few hundred survivors’ reports turns out to be extremely difficult (Christopher Browning). And yet without the reports of participants, survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators, it is virtually impossible to come to a deep human understanding of the realities of the experience of roundups of Jews in Berdichev or daily life and death in Treblinka. A crucial part of the learning we need to do from the Holocaust or the Holodomor is to gain the painful understanding of the individual human suffering experienced by each individual, in the tens of millions. This suggests the relevance of "phenomenological" and descriptive approaches to human life circumstances, informed by real historical understanding of the concrete and lived experience of participants.

Second, it is plain that the scope of events like the Holocaust requires new thinking about historical knowledge. The topic is enormous, encompassing world war, a totalitarian state, organized murder in dozens of countries, a pervasive and varied ideology of hate, and associated violence and murder by affiliates and collaborators throughout a vast region. Specialized historical research is needed into a vast range of topics and locations -- for example, Ukrainian nationalist collaborators, the command structure of Einsatzgruppen, the role of Krupp and Farben in the genocide of Europe’s Jews. All of these specialized investigations are crucial to a broad collective understanding of this continent-wide catastrophe. And yet they contribute to a patchwork of areas of understanding of the Holocaust, distributed over hundreds of journals, monographs, and institutes. A historian who specializes in the genocide against Ukraine’s Jews may know little or nothing about the circumstances of the extinction of Hungary’s Jews in 1944. There is thus a critical role for historical synthesis at a higher level of scope – like the work of Timothy Snyder and Alexander Prusin – that helps to knit together factors that would otherwise seem separate.

Third, there are the familiar questions of explanation that must be confronted by historians and philosophers concerning the Holocaust, on a vast scale. What were the political, social, and ideological causes of Germany’s genocidal intentions? What were the features of organization and control through which these intentions were brought to implementation in such ferocity and persistence across Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states in just a few months in 1941? It is crucial to maintain an understanding of the “ conjunctural and multi-causal” nature of large episodes like the Holocaust, and historians should be cautious about simple, single-factor explanations.

Similarly, there are questions of understanding of human actions during these evil times. What were the political and ideological circumstances that led ordinary central European men and women to engage in murder and torture against their Jewish neighbors? How can we understand this mentality and these choices? What were the states of mind of senior military officers in the Wehrmacht who carried out genocidal orders? What about the ordinary soldiers who were sometimes called upon to commit murder against the innocent? How can we understand these actions?

Fifth, philosophy is forced to reconsider common assumptions about human nature, morality, benevolence, and rationality that have often guided philosophical thinking. The simple assumptions of the social contract tradition – whether minimalist in the hands of Hobbes or more nuanced in the hands of Rousseau – do not suffice as a basis for understanding real human history. It is true that sociality, a love of freedom, and a degree of benevolence can be discerned in human affairs; but so can cruelty, hatred, betrayal, and irrationality. It is inescapable that human beings are neither wild animals nor benevolent and rational citizens. Instead, it is important to follow out Herder’s ideas about the contingency of culture and values, and reconstruct more nuanced understandings of human nature in specific historical and social settings (link).

Philosophy for a democratic people

These points have to do with understanding the past, in the aim of preparing for a better future. But understanding the present is also a crucial task -- both for philosophers and for citizens. Philosophy needs to help citizens in a democracy to diagnose the malevolent tendencies of hatred and authoritarianism as they emerge, rather than after they have come to full fruition. And philosophy needs to provide citizens with the habits of mind of engagement and motivation that permit them to resist those tendencies while resistance is still feasible. If the common human impulses of "looking the other way" and remaining passive guide our behavior when authoritarianism and hatred emerge, it will be too late to oppose those tendencies once they have seized states and political movements. Hungary's citizens have been silent too long for the health of their democracy. If Donald Trump had been swiftly removed from office through impeachment and conviction following the January 6 insurrection based on a bipartisan consensus, think about how much more secure democracy in the United States would be today.

In the year 2022 citizens in western democracies have two highly sobering examples before them that need their attention. First is the plain and determined effort by former president Donald Trump to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and to subvert the institutions and laws that surround the election process in order to do so. The investigations undertaken by the House January 6 committee make it clear that Trump’s efforts, and the concerted and organized efforts of his supporters, amounted to an attempted coup against American democracy. The democracy of the United States was at its greatest risk since the American Civil War.

The second example from 2022 is even more terrible: the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in February, 2022, and the atrocious war against innocent civilians that has ensued. Russian forces have tortured and mutilated civilians, executed civilians, targeted hospitals and sanctuaries with artillery and bomb attacks, and have sent untold thousands of civilians to “filtration camps” in Ukraine and Russia. All of these tactics are war crimes over and above the war crime of conducting aggressive war against a neighboring country (link). International institutions like the United Nations have been powerless in opposing this war of aggression, while the European and North American military alliance NATO has provided substantial support to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The devastation that Ukraine and its citizens face is comparable to the harm it suffered from Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1943. This event underlines the continuing potential of totalitarian regimes to undertake atrocities against the innocent.

The first example illustrates that democracies are vulnerable to attack by unscrupulous political leaders and their loyal and sometimes violent followers. Democratic political institutions are not a guarantee against seizure of power by anti-democratic political forces and leaders. Further, there is a growing level of ideological support from “ordinary people” for the anti-democratic and racist political appeals of political leaders inspired by Trump, and there is a growing network of violent individuals and organizations who are prepared to use force against the state and against their fellow citizens to achieve their ends. Equally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates the point that authoritarian dictatorships wield substantial power and capacity to impose suffering on other populations. The potential for evil persists in contemporary societies.

But there is an even more fundamental lesson to learn, about the need for public activism and civic engagement in support of democratic institutions. (That is the motivation for the image at the top of groups demanding legislation supporting gun safety.) We citizens in democracies need to be much better prepared to defend our institutions and our values, if the forces of hate and extremism are not to prevail. Democracy is not just about voting in elections; it is about engaging in peaceful mobilization and protest in support of democratic values, and against the efforts of the extremist right to dismantle our institutions.

Philosophy needs to be engaged in the world we face, and to actively contribute to preserving our democratic values. It is crucial for philosophers themselves to recognize that the atrocities of the twentieth century represented a singular moment in human history: a moment when states, parties, leaders, and ordinary citizens engaged in monstrous crimes, and a moment that must be confronted if those crimes are not to recur in the future. Philosophy must find fruitful ways of contributing to that dialogue. Is philosophy up to the task, or are philosophers forced to retreat to the study and consider only the most abstract and universal problems that have so often defined the field?