Comment: Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present-James H. Sweet | August 17, 2022
The historian David Motadel recently wrote an article for the BBC History Magazine called Should historians interpret the past through the prism of the present? His article somewhat tamely examined one of the fiercest and one-sided debates to explode last year.
The historical controversy arose over an essay entitled ‘Is History History? Written by James H Sweet, then president of the influential American Historical Association, it was printed in that organisation’s magazine in August 2022. Sweet’s article was intended to open up a discussion on the relationship between the present and the past. This is an important and complicated subject. It raises questions about both methods—the way sources are used and interpreted—and philosophy. Sweet raised legitimate concerns and should not have offered an apology or retraction when he was heavily critiqued.
Sweet said little new in the article that had not been written about over the last two decades. He noted that looking at history “through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” has diminished “the values and mores of people in their times”.
Historian Lynn Hunt made similar points as Sweet in 2002,[1] with little fuss being made about it. But today, Sweet’s article caused a “global social media backlash”. It was branded “crap”, and he had a “smug condescension”. He was even called a “white supremacist,” and as a “white man,” he had no right to comment on black or African history. The New York Times called it “one of the confusing messes that pop up from time to time in the highest reaches of academia”, while The Washington Post called it “academia’s most recent pratfall”. The AHA was forced to take its Twitter account private.
Instead of challenging this witchhunt, Sweet issued a grovelling apology, saying, “My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association. A president’s monthly column, one of the privileges of the elected office, provides a megaphone to the membership and the discipline. The views and opinions expressed in that column are not those of the Association. If my ham-fisted attempt at provocation has proven anything, the AHA membership is as vocal and robust as ever. If anyone has criticisms that they have been reluctant or unable to post publicly, please feel free to contact me directly.”[2]
However, as the Marxist writer Tom Mackaman points out, “Sweet did not explain what it was, concretely, that had caused all the “damage” and “harm” he now confesses to have inflicted. If he were to explain, he would have to admit that his column hurt no one, that there was nothing offensive about it. Instead, he would have to say that his column violated the unspoken rules of censorship that hold sway over academia and circumscribe American intellectual life. Having stepped out of line—the president of the AHA, no less!—Sweet needed to be brought to heel, and it was no less essential that he flog himself before his censors. The problem for Sweet is that the embrace of identity politics, which is a religion of the phoney “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party (and also the main route to funding and career opportunities for many academics), must be totally—observed in public statements as well as private thought. He will remain suspect![3]
What was Sweet’s first sin? He made the cardinal error of attacking the current fixation with Presentism. As was said above, Sweet’s attack on Presentism was principled but not new. All Sweet did was repeat Hunt’s warning and attack “short-termism and identity politics defined by present concerns,” He asked, “Wouldn’t students be better served by taking degrees in sociology, political science, or ethnic studies instead? History suffuses everyday life in many places as Presentism; America is no exception. We suffer from an overabundance of history, not as a method or analysis, but as anachronistic data points for articulating competing politics. The consequences of this new history are everywhere.”
His second sin was to critique the New York Times 1619 project, albeit very mildly. He wrote, “When I first read the newspaper series that preceded the book, I thought of it as a synthesis of a tradition of Black nationalist historiography dating to the 19th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent call for reparations. The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history. Ironically, it was professional historians’ engagement with the work that seemed to lend it historical legitimacy.
Then, the Pulitzer Center, in partnership with the Times, developed a secondary school curriculum around the project. Local school boards protested the characterisations of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison as unpatriotic owners of “forced labour camps.” Conservative lawmakers decided that if this was the history of slavery being taught in schools, the topic shouldn’t be taught. For them, challenging the Founders’ position as timeless tribunes of liberty was “racially divisive.” At each of these junctures, history was a zero-sum game of heroes and villains viewed through the prism of contemporary racial identity. It was not an analysis of people’s ideas in their own time, nor a process of change over time.”[4]
Sweet was not the only historian to attack the 1619 project. However, the Trotskyist movement, through the vehicle of the World Socialist Website, examined the true class nature of this falsification of history by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. It said, “The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history through the prism of race and racial conflict.”
In a Major article published both on the website and in book form, The website wrote, “The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is idealist (i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way around) and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of history is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analysed not as a specific economically rooted form of the exploitation of labour but, rather, as the manifestation of white racism. But where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.”
Sweet’s capitulation before social media was not a pretty sight. There has been no precedent for such an act of public contrition by the president of the AHA, not even in 1950s America. But deeper forces are at play than Sweet’s abject surrender. The witchhunt of Sweet indicates the advanced level of censorship and decline in American intellectual life. As David North and Tom Mackaman wrote in a letter published in the April 2020 issue of the American Historical Review: “It is high time for an intense and critical examination of the politics and social interests underlying the contemporary fixation with the unscientific category of racial identity, and its use as a battering ram against genuine historical scholarship. The Sweet Affair reveals that the time for this critical examination is well past due.”
Further Reading
[1] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism
[2] Is history History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present
James H. Sweet | Aug 17, 2022
[3] American Historical Association president issues groveling apology after racialist social media attack-wsws.org
[4] Is history History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present
James H. Sweet | Aug 17, 2022
Karl Marx- Critique of the Gotha Program-Translated Karel Ludenhoff and Kevin B. Anderson, PM Press/Spectre, Oakland, 2022. 128 pp., £15.99 pb
“The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labour, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand—as it does not now in any well-off family or ‘decent’ boardinghouse—any control except that of education, habit and social opinion”.
Leon Trotsky
‘you gentlemen who think you have a mission
to teach us of the 7 deadly sins
should first sort out the basic food position
then do your preaching that’s where it begins’
(Brecht, Three Penny Opera)
This new edition of Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, which comes with a new translation,should be welcomed.
At the beginning of the 1870s, there were two main socialist parties in Germany. The Social Democratic Workers Party founded by Karl Marx’s collaborator, Wilhelm Liebknecht, at a congress in Eisenach in 1869, and the General German Workers Association was founded by the late Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.
Marx’s criticism of Lassalle contained in Critique of the Gotha program was not episodic but was profound and had far-reaching significance for the German (and international) workers movement. Marx’s letters to Engels on the subject of Lassalle, and, for that matter, his direct correspondence with Lassalle, retain immense political and theoretical use.
According to a document of the founding of the Socialist Equality Party (Germany), “ the SPD was never a homogeneous party. The unification conference in 1875 in Gotha made numerous concessions to the supporters of Ferdinand Lassalle, who had died in 1864. Marx sharply criticised the Gotha Programme, which he accused of being “tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state”. Lassalle had wanted to establish socialism with the help of the Prussian state, which he regarded as an institution standing above the classes. He had even met secretly with Bismarck in order to exploit the latter’s conflicts with the bourgeoisie in the interests of the working class. Lassalle justified this opportunist “alliance with absolutist and feudal opponents against the bourgeoisie” (Marx) by saying that in relation to the working class, “all other classes are only one reactionary mass”. This ultra-left cliché blurred the difference between the democratic petty bourgeoisie, the liberal bourgeoisie and the feudal reaction. It was also reproduced in the Gotha Programme and was angrily rejected by Marx”.
The Critique of the Gotha Program has, in some radical and academic circles, been seen as the Marxist movement finally showing what the future will look like under socialism. At best, this is a miss reading of the book or, worse, a silly deception.
As the Marxist economist Nick Beams points out, “The development of a socialist society will not occur according to a series of prescriptions and rules laid down by an individual, a political party or a governmental authority. Rather, it will develop based on the activity of the members of society who, for the first time in history, consciously regulate and control their social organisation as part of their daily lives, free from the domination and prescriptions of either the “free market” or a bureaucratic authority standing over and above them. In one of his earliest writings, Marx made clear that “only when man has recognised and organised his powers as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished” (Marx, On the Jewish Question, Collected Works, Volume 3, p. 168).[1]
While this new translation of a Marxist classic is welcomed, it comes with a health warning. The politics of the organisation that produced it, to put it crudely, stink. The Marxist-Humanist Current was founded in the US by the State Capitalist Raya Dunayevskaya. Along with C L R, James Dunayevskaya, disagreed with Leon Trotsky's definition of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state and its bureaucracy as a caste, not a social class. During his time in the Socialist Workers Party(SWP), James, alongside Raya Dunayevskay, formed the Johnson-Forrest tendency that the Soviet Union represented a new form of "state capitalism" with imperialist tendencies. James exclaimed in his complete and open break with the Fourth International's perspectives: "Orthodox Trotskyism can find no objective necessity for an imperialist war between Stalinist Russia and American imperialism. It is the only political tendency in the world which cannot recognise that the conflict is a struggle between two powers for world mastery." [State Capitalism and World Revolution, 1950]. James would desert the SWP over its correct position in the Korean War. Moreover, the outbreak of the Korean War was the major postwar event which put the state capitalists to the test and decisively exposed them as apologists for imperialism within the workers' movement.
The Marxist Humanist Current has nothing to do with Marxism. It does not see the modern working class as revolutionary and has no interest in building a revolutionary party. The Current concentrates not on the working class but on the petty bourgeoisie.
As Peter Linebaugh states in his afterword, “We are at the edge of the abyss staring into the “ecological rift”’. His answer to mankind's problems is to rely on a rising among black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples, and the rebels against extinctions that will “become components of ‘the real movement’ that conquers as well as resists: ‘We can pluck the living flower to re-create the commons.’
Ironically, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, while aimed at the Lassalelans of the 19th century, could also be a scathing critique of their modern-day counterparts in the Marxist Humanist Current.
[1] Some questions and answers on life under socialism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/corr-m30.html
The Revolutionary Politics of Angela Davis-Naima Omar.Bookmarks Publication-£3.00-2020
This pamphlet is based on a series of articles written by Naima Omar. It includes a speech by Angela Davis after her release from prison in 1972 and an interview from June 2020 on the Black Lives Matter uprising. From a political standpoint, the Socialist Workers Party member Omar largely whitewashes the reactionary Stalinist politics of Angela Davis.
Davis was a political activist and writer from an early age, joining the Communist Party USA when she was fifteen. Her writings ranged from the struggle against racism and for prison abolition, for women's liberation to campaigning against imperialist war, and in support of Palestinian rights.
According to an article by Helen Halyard “ Davis has joined with other academics, such as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, to promote the theory that blacks in America remain the victims of a caste system epitomized by the disproportionate number of African Americans in the US prison system. Davis and a section of the pseudo-left have latched on to the massive growth of America's prisons as a rationale for promoting racial politics to divert attention away from the more fundamental class issues. While referring to the capitalist economic system, Davis described the prisons largely in racial terms, at one point saying, "it was a way to manage black bodies in the aftermath of slavery."[1]
Her most famous work was: Women, Race, and Class, published in 1981. While useful from the standpoint of a historical study of female oppression, its heavy concentration on race over class stemmed from her philosophical outlook. Davis's central premise is that race, not class, is the fundamental division in American society.
From an early age, she was influenced by philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a leading representative of the Frankfurt School. After fleeing the Nazis, Marcuse came to the United States, where he became a university professor and wrote several books, including One Dimensional Man, that influenced the 1960s student movement. Marcuse, as is well known, worked for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, during World War II.
Marcuse's anti-working-class politics led him to believe a "proto-fascist syndrome in the working class" existed. He thought the "revolution" would not be made by the working class but by the young intelligentsia, small fringe groups or guerrilla movements. Its driving force was not the class contradictions of capitalist society but critical thinking and the actions of an enlightened elite. Davis's promotion of racial politics has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. Her racial politics are the product of a strain of anti-Marxist thought going back decades, including postmodernism and neo-anarchism.
Suffice it to say the SWP mentions nothing of her reactionary political evolution. The pamphlet presents her as a radical activist still on the side of the oppressed. While mistakenly still seen as a figure of the left, she smoothly transitioned from left icon to "left" academia, securing a position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has recently retired.
[1] At University of Michigan symposium Angela Davis offers political cover for Obama- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/31/adav-j31.html
Letter to Janan Ganesh on "Elegant" Theories and the Ukraine crisis
Dear Janan
Given that you are a journalist in Financial Times Global Affairs department, I was a little surprised that you could only find two previously discredited and bankrupt theoreticians, namely Francis Fukayama and Samuel Huntingdon, to prove your assertion that there is no "elegant" theory to explain the "Ukraine Crisis".Fukayama's "End of History" hardly prepared him for the Ukraine crisis, and his train wreck of an analysis of the End of the Soviet Union was almost as bad.
An elegant document released at the time by the World Socialist Website provided a superb and, I might add, elegant rebuttal to Fukayama stating "the dissolution of the USSR provoked within the bourgeoisie and its ideological apologists an eruption of euphoric triumphalism. The socialist nemesis had, for once and for all, been laid low! The bourgeois interpretation of the Soviet Union's demise found its essential expression in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. Employing a potted version of Hegel's idealist phenomenology, Fukuyama proclaimed that the weary march of history had arrived at its final station—a US-style liberal bourgeois democracy based on the unfettered capitalist market. This was the summit of human civilisation! This theme was elaborated in countless variations by gullible and impressionistic petty-bourgeois academics, always anxious to be on what they take to be, at any given moment, the winning side of history".[1]
As a journalist for the Financial Times, you will have access to every global media publication online and in paper form. So it is a little surprising that you ignore the one publication that would refute your premise. That publication is the World Socialist Website (wsws.org). I can only assume that you ignore this publication out of ideological consideration. It is clear from your previous writings that from an ideological standpoint, you are an anti-Marxist. If you were to suspend your ideological prejudice, you would find several articles on their website that would provide an elegant and correct perspective on the Ukraine war.
Please permit me to quote a rather elegant analysis. A letter was sent by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North to a friend who requested his opinion on a recent online discussion held at a US college on the Russia-Ukraine war. David North makes the following point "Momentous events such as wars and revolutions invariably raise complex problems of causation. That is one of the reasons why the study of history is an indispensable foundation of serious political analysis. This general truth acquires exceptional importance in any discussion of Russia. This country was the site of arguably the most significant political event of the twentieth century, the 1917 October Revolution, whose historical, political and intellectual legacy still reverberates in our own time. The study of Soviet history remains critical to understanding the politics and problems of the contemporary world"[2].
Having read your columns on several occasions, I conclude that you have read very little about Russian history, particularly its revolution of 1917. Before writing such a provocative article, you should have brushed up on your history.
In doing so, maybe you would have suspended your anti-Marxism and not written a crass piece of journalism. Lastly, you write that "a strict realist wants you to believe that Putin would now be no trouble if only Nato had not moved east. Holding domestic values cheap, realism cannot explain why the sanctioning countries are almost all democracies. It cannot explain why Ukrainians want to face the west in the first place. When Putin himself cites culture and values, a realist must diagnose him with false consciousness and stress that what moves him is the dry calculation of the chessboard".[3]
I will call upon the elegant Mr North to refute your argument. North writes, "The examination of the aggressive foreign policy of the United States since the dissolution of the USSR is not only a matter of exposing American hypocrisy. How is it possible to understand Russian policies apart from analysing the global context within which they are formulated? Given that the United States has waged war relentlessly, is it irrational for Putin to view the expansion of NATO with alarm? He and other Russian policymakers are certainly aware of the enormous strategic interest of the United States in the Black Sea region, the Caspian region and, for that matter, the Eurasian landmass. It is not exactly a secret that the late Zbigniew Brzezinski and other leading US geostrategists have long insisted that US dominance of Eurasia—the so-called "World Island"—is a decisive strategic objective".
This is not to excuse Putin's actions. I condemn the war in Ukraine, but as the great Spinoza said once, " I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.[4]
Notes
[1] The Struggle Against the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/58.html
[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/19/cmmf-m19.html
[3] No grand theory can explain the Ukraine crisis- www.ft.com/content/881c14dd-08ce-4266-8127-24f3c398e8d3
[4] Baruch Spinoza 1632–77- Tractatus Politicus (1677) ch. 1, sect. 4
Historians capitulate to war propaganda over Ukraine
David North@davidnorthwsws
Mar. 4 2022
This article was initially posted as a thread on Twitter. It is a guest article by David North. The original article can be seen at www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/04/acad-m04.html
The war is having a devastating impact on historians. There are entirely principled and leftwing grounds upon which the Russian invasion of Ukraine should be opposed and which do not require adapting to the US-NATO coverup of fascism in Ukraine's past and present. But, unfortunately, even historians who have written major works on the fascist Stepan Bandera, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) are renouncing their own scholarship to suit the needs of the US-NATO propaganda campaign.
The "Statement on Ukraine by scholars of genocide, Nazism and WWII" is a disgraceful example of the intellectual and moral capitulation of significant segments of the academic community to the demands for historical falsification.
The statement begins with reference to World War II, bizarrely attacking Putin for being "obsessed with the history of that war," as if it is abnormal for a Russian president to be "obsessed" with a catastrophe that cost the lives of approximately 30 million Soviet citizens.
One must assume that the statement's signatories, who have devoted their professional lives to the study of genocide, are also "obsessed with the history of that war," whose central event was the Holocaust in which Bandera and OUN-B played a critical role. The statement's signatories declare: "We do not idealize the Ukrainian state and society. Like any other country, it has right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups. Ukraine also ought to better confront the darker chapters of its painful and complicated history."In the context of its history, this statement is indeed an idealization of the Ukrainian state and society. Ukraine is not "like any other country" which has "right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups."
Supporters of far-right parties carry torches and banner with a portrait of Stepan Bandera reads 'Nothing was stopped the idea when its time comes' during a rally in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)As the historians know, despite the horrific genocidal crimes committed by the OUN, under the leadership of their "Providnyk" (fuehrer) Stepan Bandera, the legacy of the fascist nationalists continues to exert an immense political and cultural influence in Ukraine.
Among the statement's signatories is the historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, who is the author of an important 652-page scholarly work, titled Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist—Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. Rossoliński-Liebe's book, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist - Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. This book not only documents the crimes committed by Bandera's movement. Rossoliński-Liebe also examined his cult-like status among broad segments of contemporary Ukrainian society.
In the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR, he writes: "Many monuments devoted to the victims of the Ukrainian nationalists or to heroes of the Soviet Union were replaced with monuments devoted to Bandera and the OUN and UPA' heroes.'"Bandera and Ukrainian revolutionary nationalists again became important elements of western Ukrainian identity.
"Not only far-right activists but also the mainstream of western Ukrainian society, including high-school teachers and university professors, considered Bandera to be a national hero... whose memory should be honoured for his struggle against the Soviet Union." Rossoliński-Liebe made the following significant and troubling observation: "The post-Soviet memory politics in Ukraine completely ignored democratic values and did not develop any kind of non-apologetic approach to history." How is this damning commentary on the post-Soviet intellectual life of Ukraine reconciled with the statement's cynical and historically apologetic reference to "independent and democratic Ukraine"? Rossoliński-Liebe also called attention to the significant international connections forged by Bandera's followers with the United States and other imperialist powers during the Cold War.
Iaroslav Stets'ko, who "had written letters to the Fuhrer, the Duce, the Poglavnik [the top Croatian Nazi], and the Caudillo [Franco], asking them to accept the newly proclaimed Ukrainian state, was in 1966 designated an honorary citizen of the Canadian city of Winnipeg." The historian continues: "In 1983 he was invited to the Capitol and the White House, where George Bush and Ronald Reagan received the 'last premier of a free Ukrainian state,'" i.e., which had existed under the control of the Third Reich. "On Jul. 11 1982," recalls Rossoliński-Liebe, "during Captive Nations Week, the red-and-black flag of the OUN-B, introduced at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in 1941, flew over the United States Capitol.
"It symbolized freedom and democracy, not ethnic purity and genocidal fascism. Nobody understood that it was the same flag that had flown from the Lviv city hall and other buildings, under which Jewish civilians were mistreated and killed in July 1941..."
Given the history of Ukrainian fascism and its truly sordid contemporary significance, the apologetics in which the historians are engaged is as contemptible as it is cowardly. The Russian government is engaged in its own propaganda-style falsification of history, which must be exposed. Putin—a bitter opponent of the internationalism of the October Revolution—counterpoises Russian nationalism to Ukrainian nationalism. The competing nationalist narratives must be exposed—in the interests of uniting Russian and Ukrainian workers in a common struggle against the US-NATO imperialists, their fascist allies within Ukraine, and corrupt regime of capitalist restoration in Russia.
David North has played a leading role in the international socialist movement for 45 years. He is presently the chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and the national chairperson of the Socialist Equality Party (United States).
The study of history is in decline in Britain: A Reply
A recent article by this author called The study of history is in decline in Britain is a very right-wing evaluation of the state of historical study in this country. The author correctly notes that England is moving through one of its most difficult historical moments. Bagehot bemoans the fact that England “ is losing its skill at interpreting the past”.
I do not agree with Bagehot’s evaluation, which looks likes a ruse to cover the Economist’s increasingly right-wing position over Brexit. While warning against right-wing populism, the Economist’s real fear is that the crisis will provoke a response in the working class. It is also important to challenge his pessimism. A more optimistic evaluation of the state of historical study comes from the mind and pen of Margaret Macmillan in her excellent book The Uses and Abuses of History. For Macmillan the historian's role no matter where they are “ must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity”.
The article begins with a political summation of this situation, stating”Whatever you think about recent events in Britain, you cannot deny that they qualify as historic. The country is trying to make a fundamental change in its relationship with the continent. The Conservative Party is in danger of splitting asunder and handing power to a far-left Labour Party. All this is taking place against the backdrop of a fracturing of the Western alliance and a resurgence of authoritarian populism”.
It is true that two and a half years after the 2016 referendum vote to leave the European Union (EU), the British ruling elite “is mired in crisis". However, I prefer a more Marxist presentation of what is going on as Chris Marsden points out “The dominant pro-Remain faction is desperately manoeuvring to either overturn the result or at least secure a deal preserving tariff-free access to the Single European Market on which it depends for 40 per cent of trade and London’s role as a centre of financial speculation. The pro-Brexit faction, led by right-wing Tories and the sectarian thugs of the Democratic Unionist Party, resists all entreaties to compromise. They believe the EU can be forced to accept the UK’s terms through an alliance with the Trump administration in Washington. Such an arrangement would free Britain to strike unilateral trade deals internationally and refashion Britain as a Singapore-style free trade zone in Europe based on crushing levels of exploitation. The working class has no interest in backing either right-wing faction.[1]
Bagehot's somewhat simplistic and right-wing evaluation of the political situation allows the writer to call into question any other study of history that does not deal with the elites of any given century. Bagehot is of the firm opinion that the study of history should be by the elites for the elites. As he states “ A scholarship to read history at one of the ancient universities was both a rite of passage for established members of the elite and a ticket into the elite for clever provincial boys, as Alan Bennett documented so touchingly in his play “The History Boys”. Prominent historians such as A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper were public figures who spoke to the nation about both historical and contemporary events”.
Bagehot makes another point that “ the study of history has shrivelled” and the number reading it at university has declined by about a tenth in the past decade”. Even if you take the figures cited by Bagehot at face value and some have not you have to ask yourself what is the reason. It is not that there is a decline in the interest in history; it is because of the severe difficulty of getting a decent job with a history degree. As Brodie Waddell on his blog[2] states the chance of getting a job in academia with a PhD has become extraordinarily hard. Once in, things are not much better as universities have in many ways become intellectual prisons.
There is one point that I agree with, and that is Bagehot’s complaint about the over specialisation and that “the historical profession has turned in on itself. Historians spend their lives learning more and more about less and less, producing narrow PhDs and turning them into monographs and academic articles, in the hamster-wheel pursuit of tenure and promotion. The need to fill endless forms to access government funding adds the nightmare of official bureaucracy to the nightmare of hyper-specialisation”.
Much as I would like to blame the government as Bagehot does there is a much more political reason for this slide into obscure historical study. Bagehot would not agree, but this specialisation has occurred because of the turn away from “Grand Narratives” in the study of history. One of the most critical “Grand Narrative” has been the study of history using a historical materialist method or as it is sometimes called the Marxist method. One of the by-products in the decade's prolonged attack on Marxism has been to move away from any historical study that smacks Marxism.
Led by a large number of revisionist historians the attack on any Marxist conception has almost become a new genre. Like Bagehot, these revisionists bemoan “History from below” with its studies of the "the marginal", "the poor" & " every day". They believe that history study should be about the haves and not the have nots.
[1] The Brexit crisis and the struggle for socialism-By
Chris Marsden -23 January 2019-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/01/23/brex-j23.html
[2] https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/
On Empathy and its usage in History
That Empathy has suddenly become a hot topic of discussion
with books like the recent The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal, Souvenir Press
being seriously touted as a viable means of understanding the past is a
retrograde step.
Thankfully the use of Empathy has never really had much of a
stronghold on historians in the past certainly before the 1970s. However, today
it has started to get a hearing it does not deserve.
That is not to say that historians cannot have empathy the
great historian G.E.M. de Ste Croix according to Ann Talbot had a lifelong
empathy with the oppressed.
Who the historian is empathetic to does usually reveal their
political bias as it should be. As E.H. Carr once said “if, as Collingwood
says, the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of
his dramatis personae, so the reader in his turn must re-enact what goes on in
the mind of the historian. Study the historian before you begin to study the
facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the
intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great
scholar Jones of St. Jude's, goes round to a friend at St. Jude's to ask what
sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work
of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either
you are tone deaf, or your historian is a dull dog”. [1]
The use of empathy has been used in schools the 1980s in
schools as a means of teaching children empathy for the study of history.[2]
The use of empathy in schools and now in wider academia and society as a
semi-viable means of historical study is a by-product of the dominance of
postmodernist theories in universities and society in general. The academic
architects of postmodernism and identity politics occupy well-paid positions in
academia. As a social layer, the theoreticians of postmodernism are some of the
wealthiest in society. Their political and philosophical views express their
social interests.
The use of empathy as a method of historical inquiry also
owes a lot to the growth of the new Social History school of-of Historiography
which appeared in the early 1970s. According to some historians, it was perhaps
the last major historiography of the 20th century to try and explain a complex
historical phenomenon. Before The 1970s, Social History had mostly been limited
to a study of everyday life. During the last thirty odd years, the subject has
come to prominence because some aspects of it have become the bête noir of some
revisionist historians. The most positive side of the new history is that it
brought into the public domain the lives of working people or the poor who had
been mainly ignored by historians. On the downside this, new history became
divorced from any form of economic or materialist explanation of history. The
new social history is not that different from its predecessor “old social
history”. Described as a “hodgepodge” of disciplines and unlike any other
historiography. The English historian G. M. Trevelyan saw it as the link between
economic and political history; he stated, "Without social history,
economic history is barren and political history unintelligible."
One of the avenues influential in promoting empathy as a
viable historical method of studying the past is the History Today magazine
which has a habit of opening up its pages to several historians who have
exhibited sympathetic viewpoints towards postmodernist theories. Its recent
issue is no exception. Four historians were given space on the issue of empathy
in History.
Helen Parr, Professor of History at Keele University and
author of Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper (Allen Lane, 2018) began the
assault with an article called “Empathy can help us understand an uncomfortable
culture. She writes “In November 1981, some paratroopers in recruit training
gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in an Aldershot barracks. The girl met one of the
soldiers in a local pub, who took her to his dormitory. There a group of
drunken paratroopers tied her to a bed with elasticated cord, and five or six
of them raped her. They kicked her, urinated on her and stole her underwear as
a trophy. Two years later – after some of the soldiers had fought in the
Falklands – six men were convicted at Winchester Crown Court of rape, indecent
assault and common assault. Two of them pleaded guilty. The longest sentence
was five years. Empathy – identifying with the paratroopers in that barrack room
– can help us to understand this uncomfortable culture and expose the recruits’
vulnerabilities: the unforgiving harshness of some of their early lives, the
intense codes of an elite club where loyalty was prized above all and the ways
training forged their identities”[3].
To defend herself from accusations of being sympathetic to
these psychopaths she states “Understanding this does not exonerate their crime
nor suggest more sympathy with them than with their victim”.
This is an unnecessary approach. Given the long history of
violence perpetrated by British soldiers over a long period of history an
examination of this history would give a much deeper insight into why this
crime took place. On this occasion, this historian has to take sides. The first
action is not to empathise but to oppose or to be more precise to acquaint
these fascist mined paratroopers heads with the pavement.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this type of empathising
has been directed towards a study of Nazi Fascism. In an essay Some Reflections on Empathy in
History Source: Teaching History, No. 55
(April 1989), pp. 13-18 John Cairns writes Sympathy or Empathy? Sympathy is
distinguishable from empathy, for in sympathy we are paralleling ourself and
someone else. For instance, when we sympathise with a bereaved person, we are
telling that individual about our feelings, and offering a symbol of our
regard. Whereas when we empathise, we are doing more than this: we are trying
to enter into the mind of another person and seeking to try out what we
consider to be his or her thought and motivations. It is possible, for example,
to empathise with Himmler, without having any sympathy for him. It would be
important for a student to see the contradictory aspects of Himmler in order to
gain something of his perspective on events. Consider how he sought approval
for visiting the sick and showing compassion for others. The same person who
consigned thousands to death by a signature, a clerk in a military uniform, was
thoroughly squeamish when witnessing an execution he had ordered. Here was a
sensitive man enslaved to Hitler's megalomaniac”.
This nonsense is even more dangerous postmodernist rubbish
than Parrs. Cairn’s psychological approach has its roots in the Frankfurt
school of anti-Marxism. Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich et al.
“The theoreticians of the Frankfurt School expressed the outlook of sections of
the German petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, the main representatives of the
Frankfurt School showed no interest in, let alone active political support for,
Trotsky’s struggle against the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. This is a
political fact that is, without question, of great importance in understanding
the evolution of the Frankfurt School. However, it would be wrong to neglect
consideration of its theoretical-philosophical roots. An examination of the
theoretical influences that found expression in the Frankfurt School is
necessary, not only to understand this intellectual tendency and its many
offshoots but also to identify its essential difference from the Marxism of
Bolshevism and the October Revolution”.[4]
In her article entitled The concept that history is
something distant is a dangerous one
Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women
Killed by Jack the Ripper (Doubleday, 2019) make this point “A certain level of emotional detachment is
necessary when examining any historical subject. No historian wants to be
accused of failing to apply a critical eye and making hasty, inappropriate judgements.
However, it is also possible that complete dispassion can prevent us from
recognising the subtler human issues at play. In most cases,it is the smaller
human stories that influence, the larger trends: the personal frustrations and
private sufferings, often of people who have been written out of the record,
that bring down governments, or initiate sweeping social and political change”.
While using the empathetic method for the historical study
is fine for retrieving figures from history that have been forgotten such as
the victims of Jack the Ripper when a more complex subject matter comes up such
as the Russian revolution or the Holocaust the use of empathy is next to
useless.
Why because as the great Karl Marx would say “In the social
production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are
indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which
correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive
forces. The total of these relations of production constitutes the economic
structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the
material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing
relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing
— with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into
their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of
the economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less
rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should
always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions
of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science,
and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short,
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it
out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of
himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own
consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather
from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between
the productive social forces and the relations of production".
Using the method of historical materialism, it is possible
to be empathetic but also have a connection with the past that reveals the real
voices. Not in a subjective but an objective way. The study of the past becomes
scientifically grounded. Does this stop the historian feeling empathy towards
their subject as Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at
the Queen Mary University of London writes “It is natural that we should feel
empathy with some in the past and abhor the actions of others? I have not lost
sympathy for those interrogated by the Inquisition on suspicion of heresy, as
in Languedoc or Bavaria in the 1300s, nor has my disgust diminished at the
actions of magistrates and judges in the witchcraft trials in Bamberg or Salem
in The 1600s. It is a good thing that we feel for the tortured, the abused, the
marginalised; victims who can be found both among the elite and the poor. Such
empathy, after all, inspired the new histories of women, African-Americans,
colonised people, working people, the sick and the disabled since the mid-20th
century, leading to lasting changes in history and its possibilities.
The problem with these new histories based on the empathy
method is that far from giving us a more scientific understanding of the past
it is leading the study of history into a blind alley of gender studies, race
studies and ever more obscure specialisation.
The third article in History Today by Patricia Fara,
Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge has an air of irrationality and
hostility to reason about it she writes “Hiding something unpleasant from view
is less effective than exploring its implications. How tempting it is to adopt
a stance of intellectual and moral superiority towards the past. However,
although human beings have accumulated vast numbers of facts, there is no
guarantee that we have become more clever or more virtuous”. People have
treated the world and its inhabitants badly – they still do. However, the route
to improvement lies through exposure and discussion, not concealment and
denial.
While exposure and discussion are necessary, they cannot by
themselves explain complex historical phenomena. If something is being hidden
in all these articles, it is the mention of class or being more precise social
forces. As EH Carr wrote 'The historian undertakes a twofold operation: to
analyse the past in the light of the present and the future which is growing
out of it and to cast the beam of the past over the issues which dominate
current and future.' It is, he said, the function of the historian not only to
analyse what he or she finds significant in the past, but also 'to isolate and
illuminate the fundamental changes at work in the society in which we live',
which will entail a view 'of the processes by which the problems set to the
present generation by these changes can be resolved'. People are a product of
history, their judgements and actions conditioned by the past and the historian
should work to make them aware of this, but also to make them aware of the
issues and problems of their own time; to break the chain that binds them to
the past and present, and so enable them to influence the future”.[5]
To conclude whether the historian is empathetic towards his
or her subject is entirely up to them. A historian should be passionate towards
the study of history and write from the heart as well as the head, but this
must be tempered with an understanding that history should be studied as a
science and not the emotions of the historian. When a historian finishes a
book, it should not have tear stains on it.
[1] What is History?
(1961)
[2] See Empathy and History - Ann Low-Beer Source: Teaching
History, No. 55 (April 1989), pp. 8-12
[3]
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/head-head/empathy-aid-or-hindrance-historians
[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/19/leip-m19.html
[5] E H Carr, The New Society, op cit, chapter 1.
Response to BBC History Magazine's Ordinary People Tweet
David Musgrove content director of BBC History Magazine and
History Extra has responded to criticism of a tweet issued by the BBC History
Magazine twitter account. The tweet was "Do we need to consider the lives
of 'ordinary' people as much as monarchs or leaders when studying
#history"?.
Musgrove defensively tied to explain this mildly shocking
statement by saying "Hands-up, this was a somewhat clumsy attempt by us to
engage with a conversation started on Twitter by the historian Hallie Rubenhold
that suggested there is too much focus in public and popular history on great
figures (principally men), and by extension the great events they were involved
in (wars, acts of parliament etc.) – to the detriment of the presentation of
the lives and times of the less exalted people of the past".However,
because of our initial poorly-phrased tweet, we threw ourselves into the fire
of Twitter opinion with many historians wryly, drily, or angrily observing that
we appeared to have overlooked many decades of deep and detailed work into
social history".
Musgrove while conceding the tweet was wrong went on to
defend the magazine's stance of excluding the working class from its history
magazine and blames his working-class readership for their supposed disinterest
saying"Right now though, I'm afraid, it's a much harder task to get the
passing reader to pick up a magazine that shouts about the life of a person who
has not come into your consciousness at all. I suppose, also, there is the
question of consequence; however fascinating the life of an 'ordinary person'
from the past might have been if that person's actions didn't have an impact on
wider developments in history, the passing reader seems to be less inclined to
want to invest time and money in a magazine in order to find out about
them".
While I am all for the study of working-class people because
hopefully, that is what historians like Hallie Rubenhold mean by "ordinary
people" however I am against the clumsy and unscientific usage of the
term.
Many historians have used the term mainly to blame the
working class for various bad things that have happened in history. This term
was heavily popularised by the historian Daniel Goldhagen in his wretched book
Hitler's Willing Executioners. His usage of the term "ordinary
Germans" was criticised by the Marxist writer David North who wrote
"The methodological flaw of Professor Goldhagen's book
is indicated in its title: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and
the Holocaust. Let us stop right there: What is meant by "ordinary
Germans?" For those of you who would like a textbook example of an
"abstract identity," this is it. This is a category that is so broad,
it is capable of including virtually everyone, except, presumably, Germans of
Jewish parentage. What, after all, makes any particular German an
"ordinary" one? Is it a large girth and a fondness for knockwurst and
sauerbraten? Is it blond hair, blue eyes and a penchant for sunbathing in the
nude? Is it a talent for abstruse philosophising and a passion for 300-pound
Wagnerian sopranos? A concept built upon such foolish and arbitrary stereotypes
cannot be of any scientific value in the cognition of objective
reality".[1]
Hallie Rubenhold is a gifted and respected historian her
book[2] is selling like hotcakes and has generated a large amount of interest.
Unfortunately, this interest far outweighs the importance of the work.
Rubenhold recently said that "I do feel that what our
culture recognises as 'history' needs some recalibrating. For too long, its
focus has been 'the great deeds of great men' - monarchs, Generals,
politicians, wars, Acts passed by governments. By these standards, the lives of
ordinary people are disregarded”[3].
If Rubenhold is talking about writing about the working
class, then she should say so why to continue with this "abstract
identity". Another abstract identity favoured by Rubenhold is
"peoples history" or "history from below". Like ordinary
people, this phrase removes any class content from the subject being discussed
this is a little ironic given that "peoples history" was a type of
history produced by the Communist Parties around the world to justify their
class collaboration with their respective bourgeois regimes.
As the Marxist writer, Ann Talbot notes "the Communist
Party sponsored a form of "People's History", which is typified by
A.L. Morton's People's History of England in which the class character of
earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding
them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This
historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their
hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled
alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis
countries. People's history was an attempt to give some historical foundation
to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to
supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of
political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a
democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine
revolutionaries, including Trotsky”.[4]
[1] A critical review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing
Executioners- David North- www.wsws.org/en/articles/1997/04/holo-a17.html
[2] The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack
the Ripper- Houghton Mifflin
[3] https://twitter.com/HallieRubenhold/status/1106166560547356672
[4] "These the times ... this the man": an
appraisal of historian Christopher Hill Ann Talbot
-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
Lenin, Machiavelli and History Today Magazine
“Some medieval courts not only condemned their worst
opponents to death, but they also prescribed a series of extremely cruel and
bloody forms of execution to be carried out one after the other. The thirst for
revenge and urge to deter others mixed with the fear that those subjected to
torture could return and take revenge. The Russian Revolution and its
best-known leader, Vladimir Illyich Lenin, have suffered a similar fate over
the past 90 years. Up to this day, propagandistic efforts have not ceased to
strike dead this most important revolution of the twentieth century”.
While this quote from Peter Schwarz is taken from his
article on the German Magazine Der Spiegel[1] the same could be said of the
History Today Magazine. It would appear that not a month goes by without an
article attacking in some form Marxist conceptions or leading Marxist figures.
It would appear that History Today has a particular grievance against Vladimir
Lenin.
A simple search of the History Today archive would bring to
the attention of the reader over thirty articles, and one must say very few of
these are worth the paper they are printed on. The latest one in the November issue is no exception. Its title
Lenin: The Machiavellian Marxist by Graeme Garrard gives its intentions away.
It also follows a similar pattern; it is almost like History Today has a
template for these kind of articles.
One problem that arises with these type of articles is the
choice of writer. Graeme Garrard who is a reader at Cardiff University and is
an established historian but like many who write on revolutionary politics has
little or no grasp of what life in a revolutionary party today or yesterday was
like. It was not always like this.
While Lenin studies are not in a very good place at the
moment as the Marxist writer David North points out the situation in Trotsky
studies is worse and has “deteriorated in the 1990s. American and British
scholarship produced nothing substantial in this field during the entire
decade. The only published work that perhaps stands out as an exception, though
a minor one, is a single volume of essays, produced by the Edinburgh University
Press in 1992 under the title The Trotsky Reappraisal. During this decade, a
disturbing trend emerged in Britain, which consisted of recycling and legitimising
old anti-Trotsky slanders. This trend was exemplified by the so-called Journal
of Trotsky Studies, which was produced at the University of Glasgow. The
favourite theme of this journal was that Trotsky’s writings were full of
self-serving distortions”.[2]
In many ways, Garrads is characteristic of the approach to
historical and political issues taken by other writers. Comparing the
revolutionary figures such as Lenin and Trotsky to religious fanatics is not
new.
Another distortion peddled is that the October revolution
was coup. First, the establishment of the first worker's state was not a coup
carried out by a small group of supporters of Lenin. “The October revolution
was the product of the struggle of millions of workers, impoverished peasants
and war-weary soldiers, who joined the Bolsheviks because they regarded the
party as the most consistent defender of their interests.”
A further point which again is not new is that Karl Marx and
Vladimir Lenin were only able to live as revolutionaries off the backs of
Russian Peasants and English workers. This is a cheap and very right-wing
approach to historical questions. , Lenin and Marx lived under capitalism, not
socialism.
Garrards use of only one other historian is a little
strange. Ullam is a gifted historian but has certain baggage regarding the
Russian revolution, and Garrard should have drawn on other sources.
The reference Garrard makes to Lenin being Machiavellian is
absurd and would take too long to expose the stupidity of such a comment. Again
he is not alone in making this remark, and the company he keeps is not very
pleasant.
The last point the author makes is perhaps the most
perplexing. Much of the article is given over to what happens to the state
under Socialism. Lenin's and Trotsky position was clear as day it would wither
away mankind would live under a society based on need, not profit. His last
sentence is strange given that what happened to the Soviet Union after Lenin
died is common knowledge. Why did Garrard not mention the betrayal of the
Russian revolution by Stalinism?
Why are these articles being written? After all, we have had
the “Death of Marxism, “The End of History”, why to bother with figures such as
Lenin, Marx, Trotsky. The reason being is that many workers and young people
are looking for a socialist alternative. Many are now turning to a systematic
study of the October Revolution.
They are being met with a
web of lies and distortions left by bourgeois and Stalinist propaganda.
It explains why 90 years on History Today continues to vilify the Russian
Revolution and its revolutionaries
[1]Der Spiegel churns out old lies on the October Revolution-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/12/spie-d15.html
[2] Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of
Classical Marxism
By David North-1 December 2008
On Professor David Starkey
In a recent article carried in the Daily Telegraph entitled
“ Historians need to have loved and lost to understand the past” the right-wing
Thatcherite historian David Starkey intimated that the best historians are
older as you need to have loved and lost to understand the past. Starkey says
“What I have done is used my own experience of mourning and joy,” he said. “You
take the dry facts of history, and with memories in your own life, you realise
how you should understand them.”
Starkey’ was reminiscing about the loss of his long-term
partner three years ago. Grief can do strange things to the mind. I have lost
my father recently, and the loss can lead you to reevaluate many things;
however, it did not change my understanding of history, nor has it lead to a
better understanding of the past. If you did not have that understanding in the
first place, then no amount of loss can compensate.
Starkey believes that loss can better understand figures
like King Henry VIII. Since the Tudor period is Starkey’s expertise and not
mine, I am not about to cross swords with a world-renowned historian on that
subject. I will leave that to others far more qualified what I will say is that
Starkey is no stranger to controversy and almost seems to thrive on the oxygen
of publicity brings.
There are many dangers with Starkey’s crude shotgun approach
to historical and political questions that could lead to a lack of
understanding of the real issues involved. Starkey is no stranger to
controversy. Many times Starkey’s political views have undermined his
evaluation of complex historical events.
It should be said that I am not against political views
shaping historical understanding, but when those views are the expression of
pure ideology, then we start to have problems. Starkey is not subtle about his
politics. He has been accused of being an “aggressive racist” and “sexist”
following this quote on a Newsnight programme “The whites have become black; a
particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become
the fashion.”
The same historian went on to say that the proto-fascist
Tory politician Enoch Powell was correct when he warned in the 1960s that
immigration would lead to civil unrest.
Starkey went on that working-class youth “have become
black,” taken over by a “black” culture that has “intruded in England,” which
is “why so many of us have this sense literally of a foreign country.” As one writer said “though Starkey
characteristically uses racial terms to denote the targets of his hatred, he is
using the term “black” to denounce all working-class youth”.[1]
While Starkey’s political bias is easily recognisable, one
question comes to mind why is such an extremely right-wing historian given such
a high profile? Starkey has presented numerous television history programmes.
He lectures at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. I do not
know of any left-wing historian given the same opportunities to present their
views to such a large audience
It has become comfortable for universities to tolerate very
conservative historians and allowed to express their right-wing views with
virtual impunity while any views representing a left-wing challenge to the
current status quo are marginalised or ostracised.
Universities play such an essential role in imparting
knowledge about the world we live it is little surprising that given the
dominance of an economic system hell-bent on putting profit before people it is
little wonder that universities have become little more than corporate
appendages.
This, of course, goes hand in hand with an academic assault
on Marxism. Young people cannot expect to acquire the necessary knowledge from
the capitalist media because it knows full well that experience will be used
for its overthrow.
But what about universities asks the Marxist writer David
North, “with their many learned professors? Unfortunately, the intellectual
environment has been for many decades deeply hostile to genuine socialist
theory and politics. Marxist theory—rooted in philosophical materialism—was
long ago banished from the major universities.
“Academic discourse is dominated by the Freudian
pseudo-science and idealist subjectivism of the Frankfurt School and the
irrationalist gibberish of post-modernism. Professors inform their students
that the “Grand Narrative” of Marxism is without relevance in the modern world.
What they mean is that the materialist conception of history, which established
the central and decisive revolutionary role of the working class in a
capitalist society, cannot and should not be the basis of leftwing
politics”.[2]
This situation cannot last forever. One small step is to
challenge at every level the right-wing rantings of professional right-wing
historians at every opportunity.
Niall Ferguson: A Walking Provocation
The fact that the right-wing Professor Niall Ferguson has
been caught leading a campaign to attack a left-wing student he disagreed with
should come as no surprise.
Ferguson has a record of pursuing a right-wing agenda both
inside and outside academia. He is well known for his defence of British
Colonialism or colonialism anywhere for that matter
While a lot has been made over the scandal what is being
missed is the extent that Ferguson’s political activities are a defence of the
process of commercialisation of universities and that anyone who comes into
conflict with this state of affairs becomes the target of a witchhunt.
The Standford based historian was joined in his witchhunt by
other members of the Cardinal
Conversations, which is a Stanford program run by the conservative Hoover
Institution. This group aims to collect the most right-wing people possible and
give them a legitimate hearing inside the university.
Standford’s link to the right-wing think tank Hoover
Foundation is well known. It has a budget of $50 million and an endowment of
more than $450 million.
As one writer put it
“There is no left-wing equivalent — a sizeable ideological think tank
that intimately connected to a university — at any school in the United States.
Standford regularly invites, a veritable who’s who of
right-wing writers and theorists, including race-and-IQ theorist Charles
Murray, tech mogul Peter Thiel, and Christina Hoff Sommers, a prominent critic
of modern feminism”.
Ferguson who appeared to be the leader of the group that
believed the left wing student Michael Ocon was a danger to the group.
In an email to two other members of the Stanford
Republicans, John Rice-Cameron and Max Minshull, he wrote that “some opposition
research on Mr O worthwhile.” Minshull stated he would “get on” the
dirt-digging.
More comments from this group are of a sinister and
provocative nature. They would not look out of place in a Donald Trump Tweet.
Rice-Cameron wrote in one email that “slowly, we will
continue to crush the Left’s will to resist, as they will crack under
pressure.”
Ferguson wrote in another note, “now we turn to the more
subtle game of grinding them down on the committee,” adding that “the price of
liberty is eternal vigilance.”
While not on the same scale there are striking similarities
to the Watergate Scandal in particular how Nixon mobilised the full apparatus
of the state against the Democrats.
As one writer correctly stated “The whole saga is bizarre —
and revealing. It illustrates a profound double game underpinning much of the
so-called “free speech” controversy: a controversy that often isn’t really
about freedom and is more concerned with power than with speech”.
While many commentators have concentrated on the danger to
free speech within the universities, there has been no attempt to link the
right-wing group of academics with the growing commercialisation of
universities.
It is becoming clear that far from universities being places
of study and research for the common good many are becoming nothing more than
appendages to transnational corporations. The fact that universities such as
Oxford or Cambridge have vast cash reserves bear witness to this. According to
the Guardian newspaper, 36 Oxford colleges have 'consolidated net assets' of
£5.9 billion, while the University holds a further £3.2 billion.
This process of Privatisation of education has been followed
by writer and historian Stefan Collini writing in 20011 Collini criticised both
Labour and Conservatives for being complicit in this process.
“Much of our contemporary discourse about universities still
draws on, or unwittingly presumes, that pattern of assumptions: the idea that
the university is a partly protected space in which the search for deeper and
wider understanding takes precedence over all more immediate goals; the belief
that, in addition to preparing the young for future employment, the aim of
developing analytical and creative human capacities is a worthwhile social
purpose; the conviction that the existence of centres of disinterested inquiry
and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are
self-evident public goods; and so on.
While that conception of a university and its purposes is
still very much alive and may, I suspect, still be the one held by a great many
‘ordinary’ citizens, we may be nearing the point, at least in Britain, where it
is starting to give way to the equivalent of MacIntyre’s barren utilitarianism.
If ‘prosperity’ is the overriding value in market democracies, then
universities must be repurposed as ‘engines of growth’. The value of research
has then to be understood in terms of its contribution to economic innovation,
and the value of teaching in terms of preparing people for particular forms of
employment. There are tensions and inconsistencies within this newer
conception, just as there are in the larger framework of neoliberalism:
neoliberal thinking promotes ‘free competition’ in international markets, while
the rhetoric of national advantage in the ‘global struggle’ often echoes
mercantilist assumptions. But, gradually, what we still call universities are
coming to be reshaped as centres of applied expertise and vocational training
that are subordinate to a society’s ‘economic strategy”.[1]
This is not the first or the last time Ferguson has mounted
what appears to be a considerable provocation aimed at inciting a response from
the left to launch a witchhunt against anybody who challenges his right-wing
agenda.
In her three-part series called What price an American
empire? Reviewing Ferguson’s book
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Marxist writer Ann Talbot exposes Ferguson’s political and
historical agenda.
“All British
historians, E.H. Carr once said, are Whigs, even the Tories—but not in Niall
Ferguson’s case. He is a Tory formed in the Thatcherite mould, who cut his
teeth writing for Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph while he was a research
student in Germany.
[1] Who are the spongers now?-Stefan Collini https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n02/stefan-collini/who-are-the-spongers-now
Lenin, Machiavelli and History Today Magazine
“Some medieval courts not only condemned their worst
opponents to death, but they also prescribed a series of extremely cruel and
bloody forms of execution to be carried out one after the other. The thirst for
revenge and urge to deter others mixed with the fear that those subjected to
torture could return and take revenge. The Russian Revolution and its
best-known leader, Vladimir Illyich Lenin, have suffered a similar fate over
the past 90 years. Up to this day, propagandistic efforts have not ceased to
strike dead this most important revolution of the twentieth century”.
While this quote from Peter Schwarz is taken from his
article on the German Magazine Der Spiegel[1] the same could be said of the
History Today Magazine. It would appear that not a month goes by without an
article attacking in some form Marxist conceptions or leading Marxist figures.
It would appear that History Today has a particular grievance against Vladimir
Lenin.
A simple search of the History Today archive would bring to
the attention of the reader over thirty articles, and one must say very few of
these are worth the paper they are printed on. The latest one in the November issue is no exception. Its title
Lenin: The Machiavellian Marxist by Graeme Garrard gives its intentions away.
It also follows a similar pattern; it is almost like History Today has a
template for these kind of articles.
One problem that arises with these type of articles is the
choice of writer. Graeme Garrard who is a reader at Cardiff University and is
an established historian but like many who write on revolutionary politics has
little or no grasp of what life in a revolutionary party today or yesterday was
like. It was not always like this.
While Lenin studies are not in a very good place at the
moment as the Marxist writer David North points out the situation in Trotsky
studies is worse and has “deteriorated in the 1990s. American and British
scholarship produced nothing substantial in this field during the entire
decade. The only published work that perhaps stands out as an exception, though
a minor one, is a single volume of essays, produced by the Edinburgh University
Press in 1992 under the title The Trotsky Reappraisal. During this decade, a
disturbing trend emerged in Britain, which consisted of recycling and
legitimising old anti-Trotsky slanders. This trend was exemplified by the
so-called Journal of Trotsky Studies, which was produced at the University of
Glasgow. The favourite theme of this journal was that Trotsky’s writings were
full of self-serving distortions”.[2]
In many ways, Garrads is characteristic of the approach to
historical and political issues taken by other writers. Comparing the
revolutionary figures such as Lenin and Trotsky to religious fanatics is not
new.
Another distortion peddled is that the October revolution
was coup. First, the establishment of the first worker's state was not a coup
carried out by a small group of supporters of Lenin. “The October revolution
was the product of the struggle of millions of workers, impoverished peasants
and war-weary soldiers, who joined the Bolsheviks because they regarded the
party as the most consistent defender of their interests.”
A further point which again is not new is that Karl Marx and
Vladimir Lenin were only able to live as revolutionaries off the backs of
Russian Peasants and English workers. This is a cheap and very right-wing
approach to historical questions. , Lenin and Marx lived under capitalism, not
socialism.
Garrards use of only one other historian is a little
strange. Ullam is a gifted historian but has certain baggage regarding the
Russian revolution, and Garrard should have drawn on other sources.
The reference Garrard makes to Lenin being Machiavellian is
absurd and would take too long to expose the stupidity of such a comment. Again
he is not alone in making this remark, and the company he keeps is not very
pleasant.
The last point the author makes is perhaps the most
perplexing. Much of the article is given over to what happens to the state
under Socialism. Lenin's and Trotsky position was clear as day it would wither
away mankind would live under a society based on need, not profit. His last
sentence is strange given that what happened to the Soviet Union after Lenin
died is common knowledge. Why did Garrard not mention the betrayal of the
Russian revolution by Stalinism?
Why are these articles being written? After all, we have had
the “Death of Marxism, “The End of History”, why to bother with figures such as
Lenin, Marx, Trotsky. The reason being is that many workers and young people
are looking for a socialist alternative. Many are now turning to a systematic
study of the October Revolution.
They are being met with a
web of lies and distortions left by bourgeois and Stalinist propaganda.
It explains why 90 years on History Today continues to vilify the Russian
Revolution and its revolutionaries
[1]Der Spiegel churns out old lies on the October
Revolution- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/12/spie-d15.html
[2] Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of
Classical Marxism
By David North
1 December 2008
On Professor David Starkey
In a recent article carried in the Daily Telegraph entitled
“ Historians need to have loved and lost to understand the past” the right-wing
Thatcherite historian David Starkey intimated that the best historians are
older as you need to have loved and lost to understand the past. Starkey says
“What I have done is used my own experience of mourning and joy,” he said. “You
take the dry facts of history, and with memories in your own life, you realise
how you should understand them.”
Starkey’ was reminiscing about the loss of his long-term
partner three years ago. Grief can do strange things to the mind. I have lost
my father recently, and the loss can lead you to reevaluate many things;
however, it did not change my understanding of history, nor has it lead to a
better understanding of the past. If you did not have that understanding in the
first place, then no amount of loss can compensate.
Starkey believes that loss can better understand figures
like King Henry VIII. Since the Tudor period is Starkey’s expertise and not
mine, I am not about to cross swords with a world-renowned historian on that
subject. I will leave that to others far more qualified what I will say is that
Starkey is no stranger to controversy and almost seems to thrive on the oxygen
of publicity brings.
There are many dangers with Starkey’s crude shotgun approach
to historical and political questions that could lead to a lack of
understanding of the real issues involved. Starkey is no stranger to
controversy. Many times Starkey’s political views have undermined his
evaluation of complex historical events.
It should be said that I am not against political views
shaping historical understanding, but when those views are the expression of
pure ideology, then we start to have problems. Starkey is not subtle about his
politics. He has been accused of being an “aggressive racist” and “sexist”
following this quote on a Newsnight programme “The whites have become black; a
particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become
the fashion.”
The same historian went on to say that the proto-fascist
Tory politician Enoch Powell was correct when he warned in the 1960s that
immigration would lead to civil unrest.
Starkey went on that working-class youth “have become
black,” taken over by a “black” culture that has “intruded in England,” which
is “why so many of us have this sense literally of a foreign country.” As one writer said “though Starkey
characteristically uses racial terms to denote the targets of his hatred, he is
using the term “black” to denounce all working-class youth”.[1]
While Starkey’s political bias is easily recognisable, one
question comes to mind why is such an extremely right-wing historian given such
a high profile? Starkey has presented numerous television history programmes.
He lectures at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. I do not
know of any left-wing historian given the same opportunities to present their
views to such a large audience
It has become comfortable for universities to tolerate very
conservative historians and allowed to express their right-wing views with
virtual impunity while any views representing a left-wing challenge to the
current status quo are marginalised or ostracised.
Universities play such an essential role in imparting knowledge
about the world we live it is little surprising that given the dominance of an
economic system hell-bent on putting profit before people it is little wonder
that universities have become little more than corporate appendages.
This, of course, goes hand in hand with an academic assault
on Marxism. Young people cannot expect to acquire the necessary knowledge from
the capitalist media because it knows full well that experience will be used
for its overthrow.
But what about universities asks the Marxist writer David
North, “with their many learned professors? Unfortunately, the intellectual
environment has been for many decades deeply hostile to genuine socialist
theory and politics. Marxist theory—rooted in philosophical materialism—was
long ago banished from the major universities.
“Academic discourse is dominated by the Freudian
pseudo-science and idealist subjectivism of the Frankfurt School and the
irrationalist gibberish of post-modernism. Professors inform their students
that the “Grand Narrative” of Marxism is without relevance in the modern world.
What they mean is that the materialist conception of history, which established
the central and decisive revolutionary role of the working class in a
capitalist society, cannot and should not be the basis of leftwing
politics”.[2]
This situation cannot last forever. One small step is to
challenge at every level the right-wing rantings of professional right-wing
historians at every opportunity.
[1] The stench of a police
state-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/08/pers-a17.html
[2]
https://preview.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/09/codn-o09.html
Niall Ferguson: A Walking Provocation
The fact that the right-wing Professor Niall Ferguson has
been caught leading a campaign to attack a left-wing student he disagreed with
should come as no surprise.
Ferguson has a record of pursuing a right-wing agenda both
inside and outside academia. He is well known for his defence of British
Colonialism or colonialism anywhere for that matter
While a lot has been made over the scandal what is being
missed is the extent that Ferguson’s political activities are a defence of the
process of commercialisation of universities and that anyone who comes into
conflict with this state of affairs becomes the target of a witchhunt.
The Standford based historian was joined in his witchhunt by
other members of the Cardinal
Conversations, which is a Stanford program run by the conservative Hoover
Institution. This group aims to collect the most right-wing people possible and
give them a legitimate hearing inside the university.
Standford’s link to the right-wing think tank Hoover
Foundation is well known. It has a budget of $50 million and an endowment of
more than $450 million.
As one writer put it
“There is no left-wing equivalent — a sizeable ideological think tank
that intimately connected to a university — at any school in the United States.
Standford regularly invites, a veritable who’s who of
right-wing writers and theorists, including race-and-IQ theorist Charles
Murray, tech mogul Peter Thiel, and Christina Hoff Sommers, a prominent critic
of modern feminism”.
Ferguson who appeared to be the leader of the group that
believed the left wing student Michael Ocon was a danger to the group.
In an email to two other members of the Stanford
Republicans, John Rice-Cameron and Max Minshull, he wrote that “some opposition
research on Mr O worthwhile.” Minshull stated he would “get on” the
dirt-digging.
More comments from this group are of a sinister and
provocative nature. They would not look out of place in a Donald Trump Tweet.
Rice-Cameron wrote in one email that “slowly, we will
continue to crush the Left’s will to resist, as they will crack under
pressure.”
Ferguson wrote in another note, “now we turn to the more
subtle game of grinding them down on the committee,” adding that “the price of
liberty is eternal vigilance.”
While not on the same scale there are striking similarities
to the Watergate Scandal in particular how Nixon mobilised the full apparatus
of the state against the Democrats.
As one writer correctly stated “The whole saga is bizarre —
and revealing. It illustrates a profound double game underpinning much of the
so-called “free speech” controversy: a controversy that often isn’t really
about freedom and is more concerned with power than with speech”.
While many commentators have concentrated on the danger to
free speech within the universities, there has been no attempt to link the
right-wing group of academics with the growing commercialisation of
universities.
It is becoming clear that far from universities being places
of study and research for the common good many are becoming nothing more than
appendages to transnational corporations. The fact that universities such as
Oxford or Cambridge have vast cash reserves bear witness to this. According to
the Guardian newspaper, 36 Oxford colleges have 'consolidated net assets' of
£5.9 billion, while the University holds a further £3.2 billion.
This process of Privatisation of education has been followed
by writer and historian Stefan Collini writing in 20011 Collini criticised both
Labour and Conservatives for being complicit in this process.
“Much of our contemporary discourse about universities still
draws on, or unwittingly presumes, that pattern of assumptions: the idea that
the university is a partly protected space in which the search for deeper and
wider understanding takes precedence over all more immediate goals; the belief
that, in addition to preparing the young for future employment, the aim of
developing analytical and creative human capacities is a worthwhile social
purpose; the conviction that the existence of centres of disinterested inquiry
and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are
self-evident public goods; and so on.
While that conception of a university and its purposes is
still very much alive and may, I suspect, still be the one held by a great many
‘ordinary’ citizens, we may be nearing the point, at least in Britain, where it
is starting to give way to the equivalent of MacIntyre’s barren utilitarianism.
If ‘prosperity’ is the overriding value in market democracies, then
universities must be repurposed as ‘engines of growth’. The value of research has
then to be understood in terms of its contribution to economic innovation, and
the value of teaching in terms of preparing people for particular forms of
employment. There are tensions and inconsistencies within this newer
conception, just as there are in the larger framework of neoliberalism:
neoliberal thinking promotes ‘free competition’ in international markets, while
the rhetoric of national advantage in the ‘global struggle’ often echoes
mercantilist assumptions. But, gradually, what we still call universities are
coming to be reshaped as centres of applied expertise and vocational training
that are subordinate to a society’s ‘economic strategy”.[1]
This is not the first or the last time Ferguson has mounted
what appears to be a considerable provocation aimed at inciting a response from
the left to launch a witchhunt against anybody who challenges his right-wing
agenda.
In her three-part series called What price an American
empire? Reviewing Ferguson’s book
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Marxist writer Ann Talbot exposes Ferguson’s political and
historical agenda.
“All British
historians, E.H. Carr once said, are Whigs, even the Tories—but not in Niall
Ferguson’s case. He is a Tory formed in the Thatcherite mould, who cut his
teeth writing for Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph while he was a research
student in Germany.
[1] Who are the spongers now?-Stefan Collini
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n02/stefan-collini/who-are-the-spongers-now
A Reply to Suzannah Lipscomb’s article Face to Face with
History.
Suzannah Lipscomb's article in history Today[1] is an
interesting read. She states that historical novels can bring us closer
historical truth than academic writing. "If we can trust writers of
historical fiction to situate their stories within a framework of accuracy, we
can allow their novels to deliver our heart's desire: a séance with the past, a
face to face encounter with the people of history, that we perhaps find lacking
in history books"[2].
While a good historical fiction is a pleasure to read and
can shed some light on past events, academic historical research and writing
should take precedence. I agree with Lipscomb that a historical novelist should
strive to be accurate and authentic. It is also acceptable that an author
should have an individual artistic license; after all, it is fiction we are
talking about and should be treated as such. But artistic license must be
situated within the bounds of historical accuracy and truth.
Bad fiction writing can be a very damaging thing. Perhaps
these books should be made to carry a public health warning. Bad fiction can
severely damage your intellect.But not all fiction is bad, and not all academic
history is right. A good historical novel such as David Caute's Comrade Jacob
is enjoyable and can be an excellent way of attracting readers to history.The
best historical fiction can shed new light on an already much written about the
period. As Paul Lay speaking about the book the Daughter of Time by Josephine
Yey states "The historical novel, when it is this good, this thoroughly
researched, has become a means of legitimate historical inquiry".
Writing any kind of history is indeed fraught with danger.
But the struggle for objective truth no matter how hard should be part of the
fundamental DNA of any historian or historical fiction writer. Lipscomb is
right to warn of historians playing fast and loose with the facts. A historical
fiction writer should approach their sources with the full rigour of an
academic historian.
Lipscomb believes there is a significant amount of bad
historical fiction and academic writing. Her article does not examine or
account for the growth of bad historical fiction novels or the growth of
appalling academic writing and in some cases, outright historical
falsification.
Two interrelated trends have brought this about. The growing
commercialisation of history is having a serious and adverse impact on history
writing. The amount of money that universities are getting from wealthy
individuals or corporations is bound to lead to a certain amount of academic
prostitution.
Coupled with this has been the growth of postmodernism which
has not only manifested itself in academic circles but is found in historical
fiction writing.The utter dross that is being produced in the name of
historical fiction and the disinterest for any kind of "grand
narratives" is a by-product of the postmodernists. Domination of
universities. One of its leading members is Jean-François Lyotard and his 1979
book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Lyotard adopted an
"incredulity toward metanarratives," and said, "The narrative
function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great
voyages, its great goal".[3]
The chief characteristic of the postmodernist is the use of
debatable philosophy, to blur over the difference between truth and lies, and
in doing so, commit a falsification of history. The practice of lying about
history has been taken to a new level by the various schools of postmodernism.
It would not be an overstatement to say that the impact of this school of
history has been as one writer put "nothing short of
catastrophic."Lipscomb is very generous in her praise of Mantel's work and
rightly so. Mantel is one of the most gifted writers around and works hard in
the archives and knows her way around the historiography of her given subjects.
Lipscomb seems to lose a little clarity and academic
objectivity in her assessment of Mantel. Mantel's portrayal of Thomas Cromwell
is, of course, a revision of the previous historiography. It should also be
noted that Mantel's portray of Thomas Cromwell pays a little too much debt to
the arch-revisionist historian. G R Elton. Elton like Mantel says little about
Thomas More's writing on utopia.4]
According to Professor Mark Horowitz "Elton decidedly
positions himself as the master of the manuscripts, in this case, contemporary
documents and administrative records from the statutes and the journals of the
House of Commons. He comes close to chastising those historians pursuing the
history of ideas – he is not a fan – believing that all is for naught unless
such ideas can be traced to actions beyond the mental exercise. Indeed, he has
little time for More's Utopia because no proposals were put forth to better the
commonwealth, only 'remedies in the fictional realm of the unattainable.'
Elton's goal is to demonstrate the translation of 'aspiration into achievement'
and how 'thought yielded results indeed'. This, of course, provides a theme and
path for his discussion of Thomas Cromwell as the exemplar of a Tudor action
hero of sorts, and he takes his readers on a legislative journey portraying a
practical minister's transition into a proficient planner stoked by the
reformist fervour of the day".
It is, therefore, critical to know what is buzzing in a
historian or fiction writers head. Mantel clearly as Lipscomb points out does
make Cromwell more likeable than history records.So the reader should at least
understand the motives or bias of any writer of fiction or nonfiction. Mantel,
after all, is heavily critical of the Catholic church. The Catholic Church, she
states "is not an institution for respectable people"[5].
While it should be taken for granted that a historian to
attempt to recreate the past must have "empathy and imagination," the
historian or fiction writer must study the history with a doggedness and
intellectual objectivity. A historian must be disciplined enough not to allow
his imagination to run riot. The presentation of facts is not without
controversy. It should be noted that "facts" themselves are products
of the ideological, social, cultural and political currents of the time.
The historian E.H. Carr was a great believer that the
historian had a "dialogue between the past and the present." While it
was the duty of every good historian to present this conversation in a readable
form to the history reading public he or she had to be extremely careful and
not to fall into the trap of treating his topics of research as if they were
organically linked to the present day. It would be entirely wrong to treat
figures such as Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte as contemporaries. It
should not need to be said that they lived in completely different times to
people from the 21st century.
To conclude the French historian of feudal society Marc
Bloch said it best when he wrote The Historian's Craft " In a word, a
historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time.
This applies to every evolutionary stage, our own, and all others. As the old
Arab proverb has it: 'Men resemble their times more than they do their
fathers".
[1]
http://www.historytoday.com/suzannah-lipscomb/face-face-history#sthash.Iph979ja.dpuf
[2]
http://www.historytoday.com/suzannah-lipscomb/face-face-history#sthash.Iph979ja.dpuf
[3] The return of the "grand narrative" 1 June
2016-http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/06/01/pers-j01.html
[4] Wolf Hall-Hilary Mantel-London, Harper Collins, 2009,
ISBN: 9780007230181 ; 672pp.; Price: £5.99
[5]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9262955/Hilary-Mantel-Catholic-Church-is-not-for-respectable-people.html
The Struggle for Historical Truth
Historians do not work in a vacuum. Each one presents
whether consciously or unconsciously a perspective, ideology or at least a
moral attitude towards the history they study or put another way "When you
read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect
none, either you are tone-deaf, or your historian is a dull dog".[1] Does
this moral or ideological entanglement with history rule out the possibility of
a struggle for "true objectivity" or historical truth I do not
believe so?
An objective attitude towards history has been closely
associated with the Marxist movement. It is in the basic DNA of a Marxist
Historian to present their work with the understanding that he or she must at
all times tell the truth or more importantly understand that their study of
history is the reenactment of an "objective process".
Following on from this, can we then treat the study of
history as a science with its laws? It is very difficult to argue if not
impossible to say that it is a pure science in the sense of the type of laws
uncovered by physicists, chemists and mathematicians. Having said that any
professional or amateur historian worth his or her salt should work in the
archives or library with the same devotion and accuracy as a chemist or
biologists working in the laboratories.
A historian who understands that history has its laws and
carries out a systematic and honest study of these laws can not only give us a
deeper understanding of past events but can in some way anticipate future
historical events. The use of
counterfactual history is a very useful historical genre. Again it should go
without saying that the historian must approach their research in archives with
honesty and integrity.
While it should be taken for granted that a historian in
order to attempt to recreate the past must have "empathy and
imagination", the historian must study the past with a doggedness and
intellectual objectivity. Historians are not machines. A famous criticism of
the historian Christopher Hill was that he was a Rolodex historian in other
words picking pieces of history that fitted his ideology.
I do not believe this was an accurate charge against Hill,
but a historian must be disciplined enough not to allow his imagination to run
riot. The presentation of facts is not without controversy. It should be noted
that "facts" themselves are products of the ideological, social,
cultural and political currents of the time.
In seeking a more objective understanding of history, the
historian must be disciplined. He or she no matter how talented do not know
everything there is to know about their area of expertise. It is not possible
to know every fact. The point I am making is that the historian must present an
honest piece of work and not let this frustration lead to a short cut in their
work or more dangerously lead to outright falsification of history. By doing
this, the historian will have a greater understanding of their role in the
presentation of facts.
The historian Edward H Carr was a great believer that the
historian had a "dialogue between the past and the present". While it
was the duty of every good historian to present this dialogue in a readable
form, he or she had to be extremely careful and not to fall into the trap of
treating their topics of research as if they were organically linked to the
present day. It would be completely wrong to treat figures such as Oliver
Cromwell or Napoleon Bonaparte as contemporaries. It should not need to be said
that they lived in completely different times to people from the 21st century.
The French historian of feudal society, Marc Bloch, who
wrote the book, The Historian's Craft noted "In a word, a historical
phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true
of every evolutionary stage, our own, and all others. As the old Arab proverb
has it: 'Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.'
It is one thing to seek to be more objective; it is perhaps
another thing to achieve it. In the 20th century, a significant number of
historians who have sometimes been mislabeled Marxist had sought to interpret
Marxist theory and apply it when studying the past. The historian that has
perhaps been most identified with the application of the Marxist method to the
study of history certainly as regards the former Soviet Union is Edward Hallett
Carr ((1892 –1982). Carr was not a Marxist, although he certainly was not a
Stalinist. Carr, while being a
determinist, sought to present a more objective presentation of history. Philosophically
he was closer to Hegel than he was to Karl Marx. He was heavily influenced by
the English Hegelian philosopher and historian R G Collingwood.
The historian, R.G. Collingwood, said, "the historian
must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis
personae".[2] Carr's groundbreaking book What is History was heavily
influenced by Collinwood. That a historian should spend so much time
propagating the need for a philosophy of history was not a thing that many
English historians had felt the need for. It is a bit strange because the book
sold in the hundreds of thousands all over the world.
Carr's book, on the whole, was warmly received amongst the
general reading public amongst historians it was another matter it led to a
very public and polarized debate. The British historian Richard J. Evans
correctly points out that the book provoked a revolutionary change in British
historiography. Even amongst its critics, the book was cited by the Australian
historian Keith Windschuttle, as one of the "most influential books
written about historiography, and that very few historians working in the English
language since the 1960s had not read it".
Carr believed that the first obligation of a historian was,
to tell the truth. By this, I do not mean that the historian must swear on the
bible, but he has a duty not to falsify evidence to fit in with his ideology.
When a historian deliberately falsifies history to fit in with his or her
ideology, then other historians and political writers must expose it. A recent
example of this falsification can be seen in Robert Service's biography of Leon
Trotsky. Service's book was a collection of distortion, lies and half-truths.
Character assassination was dressed up as a biography.[3]
Service would have done well to head the advice of one of
the better American historians of the Russian Revolution, Leopold Haimson (1927–2010),
when he said "The original source of the significance of any truly
original and important historical work is to be traced—first and foremost—to
its author's original selection of primary sources on which he elects to focus
attention in his research. To this, I would add that its essential value will
ultimately depend on the degree of precision and insight with which these
sources are penetrated and analyzed". I doubt Service has read this
book.[4]
Not all historians agree with the premise that historical
study would be better served with a more objective understanding of its
historical laws. It would not be an
overstatement to say that in defending a more objective attitude towards the
study of history, Carr ploughed a very lonely furrow. His book What is History
was a response to an attack by Isaiah Berlin.[5] Berlin accused Carr of being a
determinist for ruling out the possibility of the accidental or counterfactual
history. Berlin correctly chastised Carr for this historical blind spot, but his
attack on Carr was more to do with his perceived view that Carr was a Marxist.
Berlin, after all, had a reputation for going after any
historian who was left-wing whether or not they were a Marxist. His
"historikerstreit" with the historian Isaac Deutscher is one such
example of what was a nasty vendetta.
So in researching this essay, it has not been difficult to
find historians who in some way, disagree with the premise of historical truth
or objectivity. The last three decades have seen an escalation of attacks on
the concept of historical objectivity.While the historian G E Elton was seen as
a critic of Carr he upheld the view that the historian and his study of history
should be separate from the present or put another way – the historian "should
not be 'at the centre of the historical reconstruction' and should' escape from
his prejudices and preconceptions".
His 1967 book The Practice of History Elton attacks Carr for
being "whimsical" with his divorce of "historical facts"
and the "facts of the past". He stated Carr had "...an
extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the
historian studying it"[6] Hugh Trevor-Roper is another historian who
attacked Carr's philosophy of history.
Roper like Berlin had a habit of attacking left-wing historians so it
would probably best to take his criticisms of Carr with a hefty pinch of salt
He was heavily critical of Carr's dismissal of the
"might-have-beens of history". He believed that Carr had a lack of
interest in examining historical causation. He also accused Carr of not looking
at all sides in the debate. He believed that Carr's "winner takes all
approach' to history was the mark of a "bad historian". While it is
important to look back at what historians have said in the past about a
subject, it is equally important not to dwell too long to the detriment of what
has been written recently or at least in the last few decades.
Certainly, the most damaging attack on the concept of
historical truth has come from what I term the post-modernist school of
historiography. It would not be an understatement to say that post-modernist
historians have been extremely hostile in academia to the concept of historical
truth. The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of post-modernism as the
dominant force in university life. This philosophical and historical outlook
has replaced what passed for Marxism inside universities all over the world.
The chief characteristic of the post-modernists is the use
of debatable philosophy, to blur over the difference between truth and lies,
and in doing so, commit a falsification of history. The practice of lying about
history has been taken to a new level by the various schools of post-modernism.
It would not be an overstatement to say that the impact of this school of
history has been as David North put it "nothing short of
catastrophic".
There is, of course, a connection between the falsification
of history and the attack on the struggle for objective truth. One of the most
outlandish post-modernist thinkers and an opponent of objective truth is the
German Professor Jorg Baberowski b (1961)[7]. A student of Michel Foucault,
Baberowski describes his method of work in his book the (The Meaning of
History)
"In reality, the historian has nothing to do with the
past, but only with its interpretation. He cannot separate what he calls
reality from the utterances of people who lived in the past. For there exists
no reality apart from the consciousness that produces it. We must liberate
ourselves from the conception that we can understand, through the
reconstruction of events transmitted to us through documents, what the Russian
Revolution was. There is no reality without its representation. To be a
historian means, to use the words of Roger Chartier, to examine the realm of
representations".
This is pretty dangerous stuff from Baberowski. If this
methodology becomes the norm in a historical study, it denotes an anything-goes
approach that does not require the historian to tell the truth. For that
matter, it also means that reality does not exist outside the historian's head.
Therefore, history has no objective basis. He sees history only in terms of his
subjectivity. Why bother with a history that tries to show the economic,
political or social conditions at the time.
He continues "A history is true if it serves the
premises set up by the historian." It is clear from this statement that he
believes that it is all right for a historian to falsify his work in order to
best serve the reader of history. This lying about history can bring about a
fundamental and dangerous change in the way history is served to the public.
The most extreme example of this fraudulent narratives is the lying about the
crimes of Nazi Germany. It is no
accident that Baberowski is a leading figure in the attempt to rehabilitate
Hitler.
The study of history is a battleground. "The tradition
of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the
living," wrote Marx. According to Baberowski, we cannot learn anything
from history. He pours disdain on any approach that seeks to understand the
future. A more objective approach is
just a dream. This leading spokesman on the "subjectivist school"
states "The fact that we could learn from history is an illusion of days
gone by… The claim (of the historian) to show how things were having been
proved in reality to be an illusion. What the historian confronts in the
sources is not the past… the past is a construction. Truth is what I and others hold to be true
and confirm to each other as truth.... Therefore, we must accept that there are
multiple realities; that it depends on who talks to whom about what and with
what arguments".[8]
To conclude If we accept this premise that truth is not
objective but relative, it sets a very disturbing precedent. Aside from the
moral and intellectual damage, this may do to the individual historian, this
kind of false philosophy will poison the well that future young historians and
people interested in history have to drink out of.
The logic of this philosophy of history is that truth is
whatever goes on in someone's head.
Smoking is good for you, and hard drugs are not dangerous, Hitler is
misunderstood and was a good guy. No person who wants to function and live
effectively in the world cannot do without some sense of truth's objective
correspondence to reality. I believe that Objective truth is possible but not
without a struggle. The first stage in that struggle is, to tell the truth
about history.
[1] What is History E H Carr?
[2] Reading Architectural History-By Dana Arnold
[3] The American Historical Review discredits Robert
Service's biography of Leon Trotsky
[4] Socialism and historical truth-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/03/17/lect-m17.html
[5] Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War
Heretic Paperback 2015
by David Caute
[6] The Practice of History, Sir Geoffrey Elton
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Baberowski
[8]Jörg Baberowski, The Meaning of History, Munich 2005,
