Sir Lewis Namier
Namierization-(also Namierisation) - The application of Sir
Lewis Namier's methods and theories to the interpretation of a historical
situation.
As regards Trevor Roper there have been four books of
letters and journals, a book of letters from Richard Cobb and David Caute's
Isaac and Isaiah which highlights the tense relationship between Isaac
Deutscher and Isaiah Berlin. As regards Berlin, a historian of ideas there has
been a biography, four volumes of letters and a book. In the last year alone
there have been biographies of E.J. Hobsbawm and JH Plumb.[1]
There is no denying that Naimer was a gifted historian. Whether
he was England's greatest 20th-century historian is open to
conjecture. As the title of the biography says, he was a conservative
revolutionary with many lives. He enjoyed the company of the upper echelons of
the British bourgeoise including friendships with leading figures of his day,
including Winston Churchill.
Throughout his career, Naimer was preoccupied not with the
history of working people. For him, working people belonged to the footnotes of
history. His study of history was the study of the elites, their thoughts and
actions. Despite being friends with many politicians, he had a view that all
politicians were after material and personal gain. He once declared that any
reference to ideas in political discourse was nothing more than 'flapdoodle'.
Naimer's method of working while being new at the time came under heavy criticism
with some accusing him of "taking ideas out of history" and being an elite
theorist which he was.
As Christopher Hill says "the Namier method proved
attractive during the period of the cold war when ideologically motivated
historians (however unconscious the ideology) wanted to play down the
significance of principles, whether religious or political, to proclaim
"the end of ideology." Here psychology became useful. The Reformation
was alleged to start from Luther's bowel troubles; it spread no doubt because
many Germans were similarly afflicted. Medieval and sixteenth-century heretics
were dismissed as "paranoid." The underlying assumption was that opposition
to any government is somehow irrational. Sir Geoffrey Elton, a much more
sophisticated practitioner, discusses sixteenth-century English history as a
matter of administration, sees all problems from the rulers' viewpoint.
Religion, whether Catholic or Protestant, plays a minor part in his account of
the century of the Reformation. "Revisionist" historians have
extended Elton's analysis to explain the origins of the English Revolution,
though they eschew the word "revolution." They see the English civil
war as an accident, the result of a series of coincidences. Again the
consequence is to minimise the ideological significance of that great turning
point in English history".[2]
Given that Naimer was such an important historian, it is
hard to believe that this is the first biography of him in over thirty years.
As was said at the beginning of this review, this is a superb example of how to
write a biography. The book is based on a significant range of sources,
including new archival material.
David Hayton, who is the Emeritus Professor of History at
Queen's University, Belfast, has written what will prove to be a definitive
study for the next generation of scholars. Hayton's book maintains a
significant amount of objectivity and avoids calling his subject matter by his
first name an annoying trait of some biographers. For a reader, one of the most
important things is to trust a biographer. It is more than annoying having to
double-check if a biographer has got something right. Hayton is a very
trustworthy biographer.
Hayton correctly shows Naimer to be a complex figure. According
to one source he could be a "crashing bore" and according to another 'Once let this fellow start talking, there was
no stopping him". The reader will have to make up their mind. But as
Hayton believes, the historian should be judged on his work not whether he was
a good diner guest or friend.
Too many reviews of Hayton's book have concentrated on
Naimer's personality. However, as Christopher Hill wrote "the great
historian, Sir Lewis Namier wrote three volumes about eighteenth-century
England in which he argued that the high-sounding principles which Whig and
Tory politicians mouthed bore little relation to their political actions. Here
the spoils of office and the patronage of rival grandees were far more
important. His books, written with a style and panache that few historians can
rival, were a great success and established the credentials of "the Namier
method": close and detailed analysis of the family and patronage affiliations
of members of Parliament, of their connections with economic interests—these
were the keys to understanding eighteenth-century politics. Principles were fig
leaves. Namier was accused of taking the mind out of history, but he was much
more cautious than that and made no claim to have discovered a universal key.
He dealt with a period in which political and ideological issues were in fact
of little significance among what he called "the political nation"
and what others might call the ruling class. Hence his success".[3]
It is not without some truth that Namier was one of the 20th
century's most original historian. He revolutionised historical study and
research. As Colin Kidd, in his review, writes "Namier's impact was not
confined to his historiographical patch. He profoundly changed – at least for a
time – what constituted best practice in research and exposition. Where once it
had seemed obvious that the historian's primary job was to narrate change over
time, Namier investigated the political elite at a particular moment. By
contrast with the dauntingly prosopographical analysis of Namier and his
disciples, narrative as previously understood seemed quaintly impressionistic,
yielding only a superficial understanding of past politics".[4]
As was said earlier, Namier was a complex figure. At the
same time, it is important to understand the early influences on the young
Naimer, namely his flirtation with socialism. As Hayton recounts in the book "So
deep was his hostility to the old dynastic empires of central and eastern
Europe — Austrian, Russian and Ottoman — that he was prepared to accept even
the Bolshevik regime as a step towards the liberation of subject nationalities".[5]
As Ng writes "Namier was almost alone, however, in his ardour for the Bolsheviks.
The pressure of war had radicalised Namier to such an extent that he concluded
that revolution must take place before evolutionary reform could be achieved.
'Evolution comes after the revolution to eliminate the moribund forms by a
gradual process. That is why systems survive revolutions and yet cannot be
killed apart from the revolution.'"4 It is a testimony to Seton-Watson's
fair-mindedness and tolerance that he included Namier's article 'Trotski' in
The New Europe, albeit with a note that the article did not necessarily
represent the journal's point of view".[6]
But as Kidd states "We should not overplay the
intellectual pedigree of Namier's ideas, however. When at Balliol between 1908
and 1911 he fell in love with the stolid, pragmatic instincts of the British
governing class and the empire over which it ruled, despite the anti-semitism
which prevailed in both. In 1910 he changed his surname from Bernstein to
Namier, and in 1913 became a British subject".[7]
Despite Naimer's love affair with the British bourgeoisie in
the early days of his career, this was a one-sided affair it rarely loved him
back. Kidd, like Hayton, believed that anti-Semitism played no small role in
Naimer's bad treatment during his time in academia. In 1947 Namier was passed
over for the regius chair at Oxford.
One example of this anti-semitism was a nasty piece in G.K.
Chesterton's weekly magazine New Witness. As Bernard Levin once wrote, "The
best one can say of Chesterton's anti-semitism is that it was less vile than
Belloc's; let us leave it at that."
Naimer's exclusion from academia did not halt his prodigious
output of work. The publication of his books on Georgian politics (in 1929 and
1930) established him as a very gifted historian. Young historians could learn
much from Naimer's attitude to historians craft.
Politically despite his misspent youth as a "socialist"[8]
Namier was a Zionist and a one-nation Tory or as he put it "a Tory
radical". His political outlook would shape his historiography.
Understanding his historiography is made all the more difficult because one of
the few standard biographies of him was by his widow. It has been said that her
"inclinations were mystical rather than historiographical". Without
being nasty, Hayton tends to ignore much of what she wrote. He thought it was
unreliable as a source.
Namier's most important work was on the Parliament of Great
Britain, in particular, English politics in the 1760s.
According to his
Wikipedia page "Namier used prosopography or collective biography of every
Member of Parliament (M.P.) and peer who sat in the British Parliament in the
latter 18th century to reveal that local interests, not national ones, often
determined how parliamentarians voted. Namier argued very strongly that far
from being tightly organised groups, both the Tories and Whigs were collections
of ever-shifting and small fluid groups whose stances altered on an
issue-by-issue basis. Namier felt that prosopographical methods were the best
for analysing small groups like the House of Commons, but he was opposed to the
application of prosopography to larger groups. At the time of its publication
in 1929, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III caused a
historiographical revolution in understanding the 18th century".[9]
Like many historians of his time, his brand of
historiography had a name Namierism given to it by his opponents. Like many
brands "it was born, flourished and died". What of Naimer's
conservativism, J. C. D Clark highlights
the difficulty "Some political scientists identify two sorts of
conservatism, the procedural and the substantive? Procedural conservatism
prioritises pragmatic, sensible adaptation to change.
Substantive conservatism
prioritises adherence to certain principles, beliefs, values and social forms.
Whigs insist that the change to which procedural conservatism always
capitulated was Whig change: Whigs could not lose. By contrast, Whigs announce
that the ideologies that substantive conservatism adhered to were absurd,
outdated, reactionary, implausible: Tories could not win".[10]
The reception of Hayton's biography has on the whole been
very favourable as befits such a good biography. Fitting Namerism into 21st
historiography is another matter. To conclude If Namier were alive today, it would not take
him long to fit in with today's conservative anti-revolutionaries? One of these
anti-revolutionaries Mr J.C.D Clark writes "Adherents of the Whig
interpretation of history naturally tried to marginalise so devastating a
critic, but the purposefulness of the Whig interpretation, its teleology,
meshed effortlessly with the Marxist commitments that spread in the
universities from the 1960s: the left establishment, too, had deep reasons for
denigrating Namier".
It is true that Naimer "stood head and shoulders above
many historians of his age in technical expertise and international range".
But what is Naimer's legacy? It is a shame that so few historians are reading
Naimer and that his legacy has declined to the point of virtual obscurity.
As John Cannon points out "To the world Namier was a
hard, combative man; yet he was vulnerable and saw himself ringed by enemies.
There are innumerable testimonies, of which those by Berlin and Toynbee are the
most charitable, to his awesome loquacity, which could empty any common room.
He found life hard. His childhood, he told Lady Namier, had been 'a mental
register of unforgettable rebuffs', and in old age, an encounter at Manchester
with a surly ticket-inspector was enough to set him brooding on the collapse of
civilised values (Namier, 16, 300–01). Taylor found him 'a strange mixture of
greatness and helplessness' (Taylor, 112), and Trevelyan, who had helped him to
his chair, muttered, in his terse way, 'Great research worker, no historian'.[11]
Over the last forty years, the revolution in social history
has indeed passed Namier by. Yet he does retain relevance for us today. One
does not have to agree with the way Naimer looked at the world, but like all
great historians, he should be read and learnt from. "Namier, an
extraordinarily talented man, had an extraordinarily unhappy life. Perhaps that
is the best definition of a Conservative revolutionary". He at least
deserves a revival, and it hoped this excellent biography does the job.
[2] Under the Tudor
Bed-Christopher Hill- www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/05/07/under-the-tudor-bed/
[3] Under the Tudor
Bed-Christopher Hill- www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/05/07/under-the-tudor-bed/
[4] Duels in the Dark- Lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n23/colin-kidd/duels-in-the-dark
[5] Conservative
revolutionary: The lives of Lewis Namier-By David Hayton
[6] A Portrait of Sir Lewis
Namier as a Young Socialist-Amy Ng
Journal of Contemporary History-Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct.,
2005), pp. 621-636
[7] Duels in the Dark-
Lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n23/colin-kidd/duels-in-the-dark
Journal of
Contemporary History-Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct., 2005), pp. 621-636
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Namier
[10] https://thecritic.co.uk/why-are-we-so-interested-in-historians-
[11] https://www-oxforddnb-com.ezproxy2.londonlibrary.co.uk/
